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Re: The Search for POWs

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: April 11, 2003

"The search for the POWs

By H.D.S. Greenway, 4/11/2003

AS STATUES of Saddam Hussein were toppling in Baghdad and pockets of resistance were crumbling in the countryside, one of the US military's first priorities was to find and free the seven known American prisoners of war. The dramatic and morale-building rescue of Private Jessica Lynch struck a special chord in the public imagination. Soon it will be the turn of the other American POWs to be reunited with their families. It may take longer for Iraqi soldiers held by American forces to reach home, however, because it is yet unclear when the war can be declared officially over. First the allies need to find an Iraqi authority that can formally surrender.


There are POWs from other wars to be accounted for in Iraq. US forces are already investigating the fate of the only American serviceman missing in action from the last Gulf War: Lieutenant Commander Michael Speicher, the F-18 pilot who was shot down the day the war started in January 1991. His crash site was discovered by a band of hunters from Qatar in 1993, but the evidence is that Speicher ejected from his plane before it crashed. The Iraqis never released any information about him, and there is a chance he may be in captivity.

There are POWs from the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war who have yet to be released. In March, the Red Cross supervised the repatriation of 882 Iraqi prisoners of war from Iran who had been languishing in prison for 15 years. Iran admits to holding Iraqi POWs, but Iraq does not admit to holding Iranians. Perhaps now some light can be shed on the fate of those lost Iranian POWs who, if they have not been killed, are still being held somewhere in Iraq.

Perhaps, too, Kuwait will soon learn the fate of the hundreds of Kuwaitis who were kidnapped when Iraq took over their country 12 years ago. Although not prisoners of war, their return or an accounting of their fate was a condition of the 1991 cease-fire agreed to by Iraq but never fulfilled.

Among the longest-serving ''prisoners held because of conflict,'' as the Red Cross terms them, are the Moroccan soldiers held by the Polisario Front, which claims the Western Sahara occupied by Morocco. Some of them were captured more than 20 years ago. In February the Red Cross negotiated the release and repatriation of 100 aging and sick Moroccan soldiers, but more than 1,000 are still being held, according to the Red Cross. They are not technically prisoners of war because the Polisario Front is not a sovereign nation.

Holding prisoners for years after wars have ended is not uncommon. Many German soldiers caught at Stalingrad in 1943 were kept in Soviet prison camps until 1955, when the West German government negotiated their release. Soviet POWs were treated abominably by the Germans when they were captured, and in some cases worse by the Soviets when they were repatriated. The Soviets considered them disloyal for surrendering in the first place. For British and American prisoners, however, life expectancy was far greater in a German POW camp than it was under the Japanese.

The specter of American POWs being left behind as prisoners of the North Vietnamese rose to a fever pitch in the United States in the decades following the communist victory in 1975. In some states it is still mandated by law that a black POW/MIA flag be flown over public buildings. The fate of American POWs in Vietnam was the subject of extensive congressional hearings presided over by Senators John Kerry of Massachusetts and Bob Smith of New Hampshire. Senator John McCain was a member of the committee, lending to it the authenticity of his own POW experiences in Hanoi. The hearings revealed that, yes, in America's haste to get out of that unpopular war perhaps a handful of Americans were left behind, but there was no evidence that they remained alive.

One of the earliest accounts of POWs comes from Thucydides, who described the defeat of the Athenians in their attempt to capture the great Greek city of Syracuse on the island of Sicily in 413 BC. Some 7,000 Athenian prisoners of war were kept in miserable conditions in a stone quarry.

''Crowded in a narrow hole, without any roof to cover them, the heat of the sun and the stifling closeness of the air tormented them,'' Thucydides wrote. ''They had to do everything in the same place for want of room, and the bodies of those who died . . . were left heaped together. Intolerable stenches arose.''

Today, the Third Geneva Convention, drawn up after World War II and ratified by most nations, including Iraq and the United States, mandates the humane treatment of POWs. Washington took great umbrage over the filming of American prisoners because the convention forbids ''insults and public curiosity.'' But Iraqi prisoners were shown on American television and in newspapers and magazines, and the lack of POW status afforded to Taliban captives in Guantanamo leaves the United States open to criticism.

In the first Gulf War POWs were treated harshly by the Iraqis and subjected to even greater public humiliation. Their consolation was that their incarceration was short-lived, and hopefully this will be true for the prisoners of Gulf War II, both Americans and Iraqis.

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.

This story ran on page A23 of the Boston Globe on 4/11/2003.
© 2003 Globe Newspaper Company. "