Libyan plan to trace mass graves and missing people

As Libyans celebrate the fall of Muammar Gaddafi following his death last week, the country's transitional government has already set up a commission that it says will ensure the transparent and orderly exhumation and identification of bodies from mass graves.

"It will take a few months to work out the number of people missing," says Salim Al-Serjani, vice-president of the newly formed National Commission for Tracing and Identifying Missing Persons.

Speaking to New Scientist from Libya's capital Tripoli, he said that 4000 to 5000 people went missing during the 42 years of Gaddafi's dictatorship, on a crude estimate, and around 20,000 to 25,000 more are thought to have gone missing in the nine-month conflict that ended last week. "The old regime didn't like to give out any information, so it will take a while to know more exact figures," he said.

Outside help

Al-Serjani said that Libya's National Transitional Council has already been working with organisations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross to get Libyans trained to do exhumations properly. "We've already had people trained by outside experts on how to deal with mass graves to avoid misidentifications and collect and store ante-mortem data," he said. "We're training our team how to take and handle DNA samples from corpses, and how to take GPS readings for each new grave."

Al-Serjani also acknowledged the importance of leaving exhumations to experts and of not disturbing evidence vital for identification of remains, as urged last month by the Red Cross and the International Commission on Missing Persons in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was set up to investigate mass graves following the Balkan conflict of the 1990s. He said that the National Transitional Council has used radio bulletins and newspaper reports to urge former rebels not to disturb or despoil newly found graves.

Al-Serjani said that Libya's new commission for identifying missing persons would remain neutral on the subject of criminal prosecutions, leaving investigations of possible war crimes to international bodies such as Human Rights Watch. The reason: to ensure justice for the dead on all sides of the conflict. For example, the bodies of 53 executed Gaddafi supporters have been discovered in Sirte. "Regarding criminal justice and human rights, we're trying to be neutral," Al-Serjani says. "The idea is that we are completely transparent."

So far, the largest mass grave identified contains an estimated 1270 bodies close to the Abu Salim prison in Tripoli. Inmates protesting about prison conditions were massacred there in June 1996, according to Human Rights Watch. The Red Cross has helped in the orderly identification of 125 buried victims of the recent fighting from 12 locations around the country.

Souad Messaoudi, a spokeswoman in Tripoli for the International Committee of the Red Cross, told New Scientist that the organisation has set up a database to store reports of mass graves, missing people, arrests and detentions. She said that these would be made available to Libya's new missing persons commission.

Crime scenes

Outside observers, including the International Commission on Missing Persons, say it's important to record any information from mass graves that might later be useful as evidence in criminal investigations.

"Each site should be treated as if it's a crime scene, and you must presume there might be criminal investigations in the future," says Ian Hanson, a forensic archaeologist at Bournemouth University, UK, and a veteran adviser on the exhumation procedures that followed the Balkan and Iraq conflicts.

Hanson says that creation 15 years ago of the International Commission on Missing Persons in the Balkans was the first systematic effort to document evidence from mass graves properly and identify remains. So far, about 17,000 bodies have been identified of the estimated 30,000 who went missing during the Balkan conflict, mainly in Bosnia and Herzegovina . Around 20,000 bone samples and 80,000 blood samples have been taken since 1996, he says.

In Iraq, where Hanson says at least 300,000 went missing during the rule of Saddam Hussein, a law was introduced in 2006 to protect mass graves. At present, around 2000 to 4000 Iraqi cases are being resolved each year, and Hanson says it will be decades before all the country's "missing" are identified.

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