Iraq's Missing Persons

We call on the international community to recognize the genocide that took place in Iraq during the reign of the former regime.

The UN defines genocide as the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group. As such, and in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent UN declarations and conventions, we urge those in positions of power to bring to justice all those responsible for war crimes an crimes against humanity committed against the Iraqi population.

The international Iraqs missing campaign works to help families of victims of mass graves and massacres that took place over a period of 35 years of dictatorship. Iraq's Missing is working towards gathering as many signatures to this petition worldwide as possible. This petition is going to be signed alongside the screening of Son of Babylon worldwide. The campaign is also calling for the recognition of this crime and considering it among mass killing crimes. This is not a call for revenge but so that justice and forgiveness find their way back to Iraq and so to ensure that such crimes would never reoccur anywhere else in the world.

We, who are signing this petition, urge strongly the international community to prosecute those responsible for these mass killings as war crimes and offer help to relatives of victims found in mass graves. The main actress, Shazada Hussein, in Son of Babylon was herself a victim of the atrocities of the former regime, as she lost her husband 22 years ago and still searching for him in mass grave sites being discovered all around Iraq today.

The Iraqi ministry of human rights estimates that more than a million persons went missing during a period of forty years. Until this moment, around 300 mass graves have been discovered and investigated accounting for 100,000 to 250,000 bodies in total. These numbers are still rising with continually opening new mass graves. These big numbers are going to overwhelm the limited resources available to international organisations working on the ground. Through this campaign we hope to raise awareness to the scale of the crime committed and demand help and support from international organisations to contribute in opening more mass graves and providing all the necessary help for body identifications to take place using the most advanced techniques. We hope that in highlighting this problem the responsible authorities will take effective action so that crimes, such as those committed in Iraq, will never be repeated again.