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For the families of the 300,000 people missing in Iraq, their loved ones' fates might well be sealed in the scores of mass graves sprinkled across the Iraqi countryside.
Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, some Iraqis have scrabbled through the dirt for an identification card, a tattered shirt or an old shoe that might provide a link to their loved ones.
Many identifications are made on the flimsiest of grounds, says Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch in New York, who saw a man carry away remains, swearing they belonged to his brother because he found a pack of his brand of cigarettes in a pocket.
International organizations are beginning to assess the situation and hope to collect evidence that could prosecute the Iraqi regime, which slaughtered hundreds of thousands of its citizens. They also want to identify the remains of those who were killed.
"We can prosecute without forensic evidence. It is more difficult, but it's not impossible," Bouckaert says. "But what we won't be able to do is reunite families with a missing person."
However, says Bouckaert, who has spent two months in Iraq documenting mass graves, if exhumations and evidence collection are done properly, "we don't need to choose between the two."
Organizations such as Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the International Commission on Missing Persons are working with the Coalition Provisional Authority, charged with overseeing Iraq's reconstruction.
Many of the organizations are drawing up proposals for tackling the situation, and Bouckaert will soon meet with Pentagon officials.
"The situation is absolutely enormous," says Gordon Bacon, chief of staff of the International Commission on Missing Persons, ICMP, who visited Iraq last month.
His Bosnian organization has made a name for itself in scientific and humanitarian circles by undertaking the largest DNA identification project in the world.
"We've got a big problem we're working on here, but the problem in Iraq is tenfold minimum," he said.
The bloody wars of the 1990s left an estimated 30,000 missing in Bosnia and 10,000 elsewhere in the Balkans. Over the years, thousands of bodies have been unearthed from mass graves, but with scattered skeletal remains and moldering personal effects, identifications using traditional forensic techniques are impossible.
Families mourned the fate of their loved ones, while unidentified remains stacked up in morgues. But with the advent of the ICMP program in late 2001, more than 3,000 people have been identified using DNA analysis, compared to just a handful before. Bacon believes the program can work in Iraq.
Despite the differences in the countries' size, climate and culture, plenty of similarities remain. Like Bosnia, the remains date back for years and many are buried far from their homes.
In Iraq, the graves contain as many as 10,000 corpses, and are spread from Mosul and Kirkuk in the north to Basra in the south.
Some graves date to the early 1980s, although most victims were Kurds killed in 1988 or Shiites slain after a failed uprising after the 1991 Gulf War.
While Bouckaert won't say how many mass graves might scar Iraq, Human Rights Watch has documented several dozen. Most were identified by massacre survivors and by farmers and shepherds who were afraid to come forward while Hussein was in power.
In 1988, under the direction of Ali Hassan Al-Majid, also known as "Chemical Ali," about 100,000 Kurds were rounded up in the north and bused to the south for execution, Bouckaert says.
In the 1991 repression, local government leaders in places like Hilla, Karbala and Najaf directed the terror campaign. According to survivor accounts and forensic evidence, victims were often blindfolded, their hands bound behind their backs. They were bused to pits, pushed inside and machine gunned.
Some families desperate to determine their loved ones' fates have bulldozed mass graves, scattering the remains.
"In those cases, it's hard to find whole skeletons, so they're hard to identify, and there's no systematic attempt to gather and preserve evidence," Bouckaert says.
Coalition troops, who come under attack almost daily, have done little to secure and preserve the sites. But pressure is growing to address the mass graves.
"I think it should be done as soon as possible. It really cannot wait," said Monique Crettol of the International Committee of the Red Cross, who recently returned from an assessment in Iraq.
Crettol says the ICRC hopes to develop a system to compile information about those who are missing, and it has a unit that trains Iraqis in forensic techniques.
Hamid al-Bayati, head of the London office of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the largest Iraqi Shiite organization, says Iraqis are desperate for help in identifying bodies and collecting evidence.
Al-Bayati lost two family members after the 1991 uprising and can't find a trace of them.
Al-Bayati is a board member of INDICT, a British group that has pushed for an international tribunal since 1996. He has identified a dozen top officials responsible for the massacres.
Until international assistance comes, Iraqis founder. Al-Bayati says that on a recent trip to Iraq he saw a woman standing before several bodies laid out on the ground, asking for help to identify which were her family members.
To help, the State Department has championed the ICMP's possible involvement with a DNA analysis program in Iraq. The State Department contributes about half of ICMP's budget and Secretary of State Colin Powell supports expanding the program beyond the Balkans.
"Collecting forensic evidence and identifying the missing is important to have Iraq move forward in the interest of justice and reconciliation," said Jeff Jamison of the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.
For the program to work, up to 1-million relatives of the missing would have to donate a drop of blood, which would undergo DNA analysis at the ICMP's labs in Bosnia. Bone samples from victims would be analyzed and the results of both would be run through a computer in search of a match.
For Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch, last month's visit from the ICMP "was one of the most hopeful days I had in Iraq, after a lot of disappointment."
Without a systematic effort to identify the remains, he says, few people will walk away with a body they believe is their relative.
"The vast majority are going to end up in a great pile of bones," he said.