By Phyllis McIntosh
Special to the Washington File

Washington -- If Saddam Hussein and his associates are ever tried for war crimes, there is a mountain of evidence already organized, waiting to help convict them.

Some 18 tons of Iraqi secret police and intelligence agency files - 5 million pages in all - were seized by Kurdish rebels a decade ago and turned over to the United States. Painstaking analysis of the documents by international human rights groups and the U.S. government has revealed a long list of crimes against humanity committed by the regime, including executions, elimination of Kurdish villages, and use of chemical weapons against the Kurds and during the Iran-Iraq war.

The documents "provide a thorough overview of how the Iraqi police state maintained its grip on power," says Joost Hiltermann, who supervised initial review of the documents in 1992-94 for Human Rights Watch, an independent, nongovernmental organization. "They did include some `smoking gun' documents showing Iraqi government culpability for a great number of atrocities."

"It is highly usual that these documents have fallen into open hands at a time when the regime that produced them is still in power," notes Bruce Montgomery, archives curator at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where the documents are now stored.

The documents surfaced in March 1991, at the end of the Gulf War, when Kurdish rebels revolted against the Iraqi government and stormed police stations and government offices throughout the Kurdish region. They removed huge caches of files and hid them in the mountains before Iraqi troops returned to squelch the uprising.

Under an agreement with representatives of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Middle East Watch (now a part of Human Rights Watch), two Kurdish groups, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) turned over the documents to the U.S. military, which airlifted them to the United States. Under the arrangement, the Senate committee was to turn the documents into official records of the U.S. Congress and store them in the National Archives. Middle East Watch agreed to study the documents for human rights abuses and to prepare a case before the International Court of Justice charging the Saddam regime with genocide against the Kurds.

Once in the United States, the documents were read and catalogued by researchers from the Defense Intelligence Agency and Middle East Watch over the next two years. The papers, which included memoranda, correspondence, arrest warrants, background information on suspects, official decrees, and activity and investigation reports dating primarily from the 1980s, were mostly handwritten. Pages were sometimes held together with pins or filed in folders secured by shoestrings. Eventually the entire collection was digitized and stored electronically on CD-ROM to make it more accessible to researchers.

In 1994, Middle East Watch-Human Rights Watch issued a report entitled "Bureaucracy of Repression" that summarized findings from the documents. While no master plan to exterminate the Kurds emerged from the papers, the report said, "the evidence is sufficiently strong to prove a case of genocidal intent."

Most notable among the findings, it added, "is the unequivocal evidence we have been able to accumulate of Iraq's repeated use of chemical weapons against the Kurds." Researchers also unearthed "an impressive documentary record" of an Iraqi campaign to raze all Kurdish villages and deport their populations, as well as considerable evidence of executions and other illegal reprisals.

One important document from 1989 also outlined a "plan of Action for the Marshes," which called for poisoning the water, burning homes, and imposing an economic blockade in Iraq's southern Marsh areas.

Missing from the files is any direct reference to torture and rape of political detainees or the fate of the "disappeared." The most likely explanation, the report says, is that such documents "were considered so highly classified that they were never distributed to the branches in the north but kept under lock and key in central headquarters."

Not surprisingly, the regime has maintained throughout that all the documents are forgeries, a claim that experts consider preposterous, considering their sheer volume and the fact that only a small fraction contain specific evidence of crimes and violations of human rights. The "Bureaucracy of Repression" report concludes: "There is not a shred of evidence that any one of the documents in the possession of Middle East Watch was falsified, much less all four million of them."

The next leg of the journey for the Iraqi documents came in 1998, when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee decided to transfer the collection to the University of Colorado at Boulder, which already was amassing papers from a number of organizations for the university's Human Rights Initiative. Plans called for making information from the Iraqi documents and groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch available to the public via the Internet. But the university has since decided that it cannot support the project, and negotiations are underway to move the entire collection to another location.

Ownership of the Iraqi documents still rests with the Kurds, who would have to approve any further move. For the time being, the 18 tons of papers, 176 discs containing the electronic version, and assorted maps, photographs, and audio and videotapes, reside in 3,500 large boxes at an undisclosed location somewhere in Colorado.

Meanwhile, as Iraqi opposition groups consider how to expose and heal the wounds of their homeland, detailed analysis of information contained in the documents continues. Researchers with the originally based at Harvard University and now sponsored by the Iraq Foundation in Washington, D.C., are focused on two major sets of documents. One, called the North Iraq Dataset, contains 2.4 million documents, including those seized by the Kurdish rebels in 1991 and some papers acquired directly by one of IRDP's directors, Iraqi-born scholar Kanan Makiya. The second, known as the Kuwait Dataset, consists of a million documents captured by American forces as the Iraqis retreated at the end of the Gulf War.

Systematic work on the IRDP began about two years ago, says project manager, Dr. Robert G. Rabil. Since then, researchers have processed more than 350,000 documents, which can be accessed on the website, fas-www.harvard.edu/~irdp/. A team of nine researchers continues to process 5,000 documents a week, carefully sorting the "select and political" reports from the more mundane administrative ones. More than 100 "documents of value" have been translated into English and are available on the website. They offer a chilling glimpse into the horrors of the Saddam regime. For example,

A document dated August 1989 lists the names of 87 people who had been executed so far that year in one region, along with a summary of each case. "Crimes" included trespassing into forbidden zones, being an element of Iranian agents, and teaching Kurdish.

March 1991 instructions from Baghdad Security Headquarters on how to deal with opposition demonstrations direct officers to shoot at demonstrators with the aim of killing 95 percent of them and saving the rest for interrogation. Another instruction calls for the technical unit (euphemism for chemical weapons) to be kept in reserve.

A 1987 letter quotes Ali Hasan al-Majid, newly appointed head of security, military, and civil affairs for northern Iraq: "We do not object to the decapitation of traitors, but it would have been preferable had you first sent them to Security for interrogation."

A 1987 order from one Security Directorate to another calls for executing wounded civilians and razing their neighborhoods with tanks, bulldozers, and shovels.

The government personnel card of one Aziz Saleh Ahmed identifies him as a "fighter in the popular army" whose "activity" is "violation of women's honor." The man was a professional rapist.

Such incriminating evidence continues to inspire efforts to publicize Iraq's crimes against humanity and to bring the perpetrators to justice. Information from the seized documents figures prominently in the reports, "Iraq: A Population Silenced" published December 13 by the U.S. Department of State and "Saddam Hussein: Crimes and Human Rights Abuses," recently published by the British government's Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

INDICT, a London-based organization that receives some financial support from the U.S. Government under the Iraq Liberation Act, also is using the documents in its campaign to create an ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal to try Iraqi leaders for war crimes.

Western and Iraqi experts familiar with the documents believe their value cannot be overestimated. Bruce Montgomery, the curator in charge of the stored documents at the University of Colorado calls them perhaps the most significant papers to fall into open hands since Nazi files that were captured by the Allies after the fall of Berlin.

"They reveal a genocidal campaign of a rogue government in its own words," he says. "This is an extraordinary cache of materials that should be made as widely accessible as possible to the international community."

More information on Human Rights Watch, Iraq and the report "Bureaucracy of Repression" is available at www.hrw.org/

"Iraq: A Population Silenced" published December 13 by the U.S. Department of State and "Saddam Hussein: Crimes and Human Rights Abuses," recently published by the British government's Foreign and Commonwealth Office are both available on the Iraq Update website, www.usinfo.state.gov/regional/nea/iraq/.