But the story didn’t end there. More than a decade later, following the TRC’s recommendation, the bones of those teenagers are being dug up in a thorny Winterveld cemetery north of Pretoria. “These are the unsung heroes of the struggle,” says Madeleine Fullard, who is directing the team looking for the bodies. “They were not guerrillas. They were abducted, held and tortured. They died the worst kind of deaths.”
Fullard is the head of South Africa’s Missing Persons Task Team, set up three years ago to complete the unfinished business of the TRC: to find and exhume the hundreds of people “disappeared” at the hands of the apartheid government and whose cases were heard by the TRC. The task team aims to offer mourners the truth about their loved ones’ final resting places. It has located dozens of graves over the past couple of years. And its advanced forensic work is attracting attention from elsewhere in Africa, where decades of conflict have left legions of unidentified bodies.
Within South Africa, however, the team’s work is raising uncomfortable questions. After the restoration of majority rule in 1994, when the country opted to set up the TRC to deal with apartheid-era crimes, it resolved to forgo mass Nuremberg-style prosecutions. Officials and their henchmen would be granted amnesty on two key conditions: that their crimes proved politically motivated, and that they came clean about the deeds. Those who lied or failed to fully disclose their criminal involvement could still be prosecuted.
Now some of what Fullard and her team are digging up is clashing with the official TRC histories and could undermine the amnesties granted a decade ago, setting in motion new prosecutions. That’s what happened when the task team took a closer look at the case of the “Pebco Three”: slain Eastern Cape activists whose ashes were supposedly washed down the Fish River in 1985. When investigators scoured the murder site last year, they found the severely burned skeletal remains—some of them in a septic tank. This proved that the victims had not in fact been dumped in the river as their killers had claimed.
Sifting through 6,600 gallons of raw sewage proved daunting for even the most hardened investigators. Claudia Bisso, one of several visiting forensic experts from Argentina, has worked in killing fields around the world, but the thought of Pebco still elicits a grimace: “I would rather pick Bosnia,” she says.
Distasteful as their work can be, Fullard’s team is persevering. So far they’ve successfully exhumed about 50 burial sites; about half that number of skeletal remains have been positively identified and returned to their relatives for reburial. This has some hoping for new prosecutions, though they’ve yet to commence. Meanwhile, the government is now building a major DNA lab to advance this work and its legacy. The $57 million research center will offer affordable world-class forensic expertise to other African countries and human-rights investigators. “There are probably far more individuals dying in conflicts in Africa [than elsewhere], yet there’s absolutely no infrastructure in place at all for human-rights work at a regional level,” says Neal Leat, a forensic scientist at the University of the Western Cape. Officials from Kenya, Burundi and Namibia—where mass graves were discovered last year—have already expressed interest in getting assistance from the new facility, in the hopes it will offer a much more accurate means of addressing their own murky pasts.
For now, however, the task team’s focus remains firmly on South Africa’s own disappeared. “Partly it’s trying to say, these people lived and mattered,” says Fullard. “Really, it’s about recurring racism even in the field of death—particularly in political conflict. It’s about recovering memory and gathering information.” Grisly work indeed. But necessary if this country is ever to fully account for the lingering traumas of apartheid.
title: “Digging Up The Dirt” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-04” author: “Steven Clay”
Now, standing upon a pile of dirt, he waved a “Star Trek”-like black box and shook his head slowly. “There ain’t nothing around here,” he said, unleashing a stream of tobacco juice onto the barren hardpack. “We drove 200 f–king miles for nothing.”
It was just another day in the so-far fruitless hunt for Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. While Washington and London squabble over the quality of intelligence behind President Bush’s and Prime Minister Blair’s claims that Saddam Hussein was developing banned weapons, the military units assigned to track them down are running out of places to look. Some are even being given time off or being reassigned to other duties, The Associated Press reported this week.
Those who have done the job can testify that it’s tedious work in a politically charged environment. Potts–accompanied by NEWSWEEK–had traveled to this debris-strewn pile of dirt after a tantalizing tip from a nervous informant. The Iraqi, pointing to a spot on a map, claimed Saddam Hussein’s military had buried mysterious metal containers in the desert there shortly after the 1991 gulf war. Two men in his village had gone to dig them up recently, said the informant, and within a week, one had died of a mysterious illness. The other man lay on his deathbed, shedding tufts of hair and throwing up. The Iraqi wanted $1 million to lead the Americans to the suspected chemical-weapons site. But when they rejected his request, he decided to unburden himself anyway.
Potts was on the scene a little more than 24 hours later. But after his radiation-detection equipment got no suspicious readings, he mused over the uncertainties of his mission. “Before I came over here, I figured for sure they’d probably use [unconventional weapons],” Potts acknowledged last week. “But now I’m really not too sure they had them. I know at one point they did produce them … Everything else I’m not too sure on.”
Coalition forces have been looking for unconventional weapons since the war began in March. Individual units had chemical officers assigned to run down specific tips and watch for situations that might put the soldiers in jeopardy. But the search really began in earnest in the days following Bush’s declaration that major hostilities had ceased. In mid-April, the last of the top-level teams arrived.
Lt. Col. Keith Harrington, a former Special Forces soldier, is the commander of one of those teams–Site Survey Team 5. Late last month, Harrington arrived by helicopter in the western Iraq town of Al Qaim, where Potts is stationed, to investigate one of 900 suspected sites on a master list held by the Pentagon.
Like Potts, Harrington had already had his share of frustration. On one inspection, Harrington and his men had picked up a reading for what appeared to be the lethal toxin ricin in a farmer’s chicken coop. When a team followed up, however, they determined that castor oil had set off a false reading. They also visited a former biological-weapons site and found it abandoned, except for the locals who had moved back onto the land and were beginning to farm it. In northwest Baghdad, they visited an underground facility and found it extensively looted. “It could have been a command and control structure, it could have been a place for nuclear blasts, it could have been anything,” Harrington told NEWSWEEK. “But there was nothing. It was completely cleaned out.” Another mission took them to a quarry area. They found six multiple-launch missile systems, but no weapons of mass destruction.
In Al Qaim, Harrington headed straight to the local phosphate plant for a surprise visit. This time, he was optimistic. The plant was exactly the type of site U.S. intelligence operatives expected to yield evidence of illegal weapons. Prior to the 1991 gulf war, they had confirmed that the plant was extracting uranium from soil, in addition to the phosphate it was shipping out as a crop fertilizer. Uranium yellowcake can be used to make uranium-235, the enriched isotope needed to manufacture nuclear weapons. U.S.-led forces bombed the uranium-processing facility in 1991, but they knew the phosphate plant was up and running again after the war. Analysts also noted a disproportionate number of Iraqi Army and Republican Guards in the area, suggesting they were protecting something important.
At the entrance to the phosphate plant, men in coveralls milled about, smoking and glaring at Harrington’s soldiers. One team entered the building to interview the managers. Harrington led another toward a vast field of dirt, strewn with hubcaps, empty barrels and rusting scrap metal. The field was dotted with yellow-tinted mounds of earth, a telltale sign of yellowcake production. But since another byproduct of phosphate fertilizer is sulfur–which is also yellow–the only way to be sure was to search for traces of radiation. “Check that pile there,” shouted Harrington. “It smells like sulfur,” a soldier responded. Then he shook his head. No suspicious reading.
Next, the team proceeded to a vast warehouse, the air reeking of ammonia. They marched through abandoned buildings and across another field. Finally they approached the former uranium-weapons site. Up a gravel hill, past cracked cement walls and leaking dusty sandbags, the team discovered a bombed-out piece of concrete with 16 blue 55-gallon drums lying out in the open. Chief Technician Nick Pounder, of Britain’s Royal Air Force, crept up to the barrels with a small radiation reader, and it began to crackle. “There you go,” Harrington declared triumphantly. “Looks like it’s yellowcake. It’s radioactive.”
On the ride back, the team was in high spirits. “If the [United Nations weapons inspectors] knows it’s here and the U.N. marked it, it’s nothing,” Harrington said of the yellowcake. “But I don’t see any U.N. markings. If the U.N. doesn’t know about this, and it turns out to be yellowcake, it could be a big deal.” “By the time you get home you’ll have another head [from the radiation],” joked Pounder. “Just like Blink the three-eyed fish from ‘The Simpsons’,” Harrington responded.
Back at the phosphate plant’s administrative headquarters, Harrington linked up with the second half of his team. Less than 0.5 percent of yellowcake can be used to make a nuclear bomb, explained the team’s technical expert, Maj. Ron Hann. But 16 drums is a large amount. “If it hadn’t been declared and it was yellowcake, it would be a significant find,” Hann confirms.
Soon, however, the U.N. confirmed that it knew about the find. Now Harrington’s optimism has waned; his team has been cut by more than 30 percent. “It doesn’t appear there are any more targets at this time,” he told The Associated Press this week. The focus of the weapons hunt will now shift from legwork to intelligence gathering by experts at the Pentagon. But neither the mission nor the political fallout are likely to be over anytime soon.
