HAMZA ABBAS remembers clearly the time he heard the voice of the first President Bush. It was on February 15, 1991, in the final days of the Gulf War, with the almost-defeated Iraq ripe for rebellion, that Bush the elder appealed to the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people “to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside”.

In the city of Hillah, near the ancient site of Babylon, the call was met with delight by Shia Muslims like Mr Abbas who had suffered persecution under Saddam’s regime.

“I heard it with my own ears on the radio and it made me so happy,” he recalled. “We had been waiting for a chance to topple Saddam and now we thought it had come. So when the American forces took Kuwait, we started our uprising, thinking they would help us.”

The help never came. A little more than a week after the rebellion began, the Americans stood by as Saddam’s regrouping forces gathered their strength and set about putting down the rebellion with unforgiving force.

First they used tanks and helicopters to drive the armed rebels from the cities. Then with the rebellion crushed, they set about punishing the whole community, ensuring they would never again dare to challenge the authority of the regime. Over a period of a month, thousands of Shias, civilians and rebels, were brought to this desolate spot, their hands bound and their heads blindfolded before being pushed into ditches and shot.

For the past several days, thousands have flocked to this site, searching for relatives who disappeared during that terrifying month, many marched away from their houses by armed members of the Baath party. Mr Abbas was one of them, searching for his brother, Ghalib, who never returned home from a visit to the market in the days after the uprising was crushed.

After three days of fruitless searching through more than 3,000 bodies disinterred from this mass grave, his shock and grief at its discovery, like that of so many others here, has turned to bitterness and anger. Not just against Saddam, under whom this purge took place, but against the man they say betrayed them 12 years ago. “We are thankful for the young Bush who liberated us from Saddam,” Mr Abbas said. “But his father is an accomplice in this massacre along with Saddam. We trusted him to help us but he betrayed us. Where was he when our relatives were being killed?”

Those scouring the piles of bones and scraps of clothing yesterday had their own theory, one supported by many insiders from the former Bush Administration. “The Americans were afraid of the Shias taking control of Iraq, that’s why they abandoned us,” Ali al-Badi said as he searched for the remains of his lost father. “They thought we were extremists backed by Iran and that we would fight them. But look, the Americans are here now and are we fighting them? No. All we wanted was our freedom.”

Most Shias say that the Americans have much to prove if they are to win their trust again. Prime among their demands are that having stood back while this massacre took place, they now make efforts to track down those responsible and bring them to justice as they did in conflicts such as Bosnia and Kosovo.

Sayeed Jabbar, the village headman who led the authorities to the grave site after the fall of the old regime, needs no experts to tell him that what happened here was a crime of horrifying magnitude. Day after day he watched as armed men bussed in hundreds of men each day, blindfolded and handcuffed, who were pushed into ditches and shot before being buried under shovelfuls of earth. “Many were not even anything to do with the uprising,” he said.

“Saddam was offering 1,000 dinars for each person that was arrested and brought here so party members would just go to houses and take people who they knew were innocent, just for the money.” Having notified the authorities of what happened here, he is now unhappy at the lack of help offered by the Americans to preserve forensic evidence that could one day be used to bring the perpetrators to justice. With every body unearthed, another piece of evidence proving the crime is lost, leaving only the testimony of witnesses, a poor substitute in a court of law. By the graveside, two brothers laid out the remains of a third, cutting the cloth blindfold and handcuffs from the bones before wrapping the remains and carrying them off.

Peter Bouckaert, of Human Rights Watch, said: “This is writing the defence’s brief for the Saddam Hussein regime. This is a war crime, these people were executed. But where is the forensic evidence now? They can just say these people died in combat.”

American marine commanders at the site argued that once local people began digging up their relatives’ remains, they could not intervene even to preserve evidence. “We would have had a riot on our hands,” Lieutenant-Colonel David Rababy said.

The human rights workers trying to document what happened reject that explanation. Mr Bouckaert said: “For all the endless talk by the Bush Administration about Saddam’s horrendous crimes, if they were really serious about prosecuting these people they would have forensic experts here today. This is another betrayal of the Iraqi people.”

Many Shias say they have grown used to such betrayals. “The Americans didn’t help us then, why should they help us now?” ali-Badi said. “These people here died because of Bush the father. Do you think Bush the son will help us find justice? No. So let them go, let us dig, let us take our dead home in peace.”

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