KURDISH GENOCIDE
by Aram Azez
OpEdNews, PA
April 2 2007
The Systematic Genocide of the Kurds and the Unethical International
Scheme
During his 35-year tenure, Saddam Hussein and his regime turned
Kurdistan, Iraq, and the region into hell. Imposing two unjustifiable
wars on neighboring Iran and Kuwait, Saddam and his regime took the
country through numerous catastrophes, atrocities and murdering of
countless Iraqis. However, world experts believe the gravest and
the best documented crimes of the defunct Iraqi regime were those
conducted during the Anfal genocide against the Kurdish people. The
Iraqi military campaign code name "Anfal" (spoilers of war) in 1988
was the gratuitous and obvious systematic genocide by all means but
there was no international recognition. The Iraqi state recorded and
kept detailed documents and videotapes of their crimes, which included
executions, torture sessions, mass killing and forcibly relocating
the Kurdish people, some dating back to1970s.
Right after the collapse of the Kurdish revolution led by then
Kurdistan Democrat Party leader Mustafa Barzani in the mid-1970s,
a systematic wave of Anfal operation was planed: forceful evacuation
of some quarter of a million Kurds from Iraq’s borders with Iran and
Turkey. Then, the regime destroyed all of the evacuated villages
to create barrier sanitary along these ‘sensitive frontiers’
where the Kurdish resistances have had always taken arms against
their oppressors. Most of the displaced Kurds from these areas were
transferred into compulsory camps and crude new settlements located
on the main highways, surrounded by army, monitored and controlled by
Iraqi secret agencies. Similar producers, or even worst were expected
in the years ahead.
However, renewed Kurdish arms resistance in late 1970s and the
Iraq-Iran war in early 1980s, interrupted the Ba’ath Party’s Anfal
plans, at least for several years. Yet the defunct Iraqi regime
attempted to resume the Anfal diagram in 1983, when Iraqi troops
surrounded one of the complexes where thousands of the Barzani clan
families were resettled, and within hours kidnapped 8000 males from
the camp aged twelve to seventy! Their fates for the public were
known only as "despaired Barzanis."
In the mid-1970s and the early1980s the procedures used against the
Kurdish border villagers and Barzanis, were the techniques that would
be used on a grander scale for continuing the Anfal campaign.
Undoubtedly, the absence of international objections encouraged
Saddam’s regime to believe that they could get away with an even
larger method without any hostile response. Actually, in this respect
the Iraqi regime seemed to have been accurate in its computation and
judgment of the international functioning, which was a green light
for Saddam to go ahead with the Anfal preparation!
Therefore, the Anfal Genocide’s full scale was a concerted series of
nine military operations which began on February 26, 1988, conducted
in several distinctive Kurdish geographic areas, and by September
6, 1988, reached its climax. By then, the now defunct Iraqi regime
had shattered 4500 of some 5000 Kurdish villages, and evidently used
chemical weapons to attack at least 250 villages and towns, the worst
of which was the gassing of March 16, 1988, on Halabja, a town where
more than 5,500 civilians died and some 11,000 others injured.
These chemical attacks paved the way for the Iraqi army to replace
an estimated two million of villagers in 1988. Hundreds of thousands
of these civilians were gather at first stage camps, and then driven
away in convoys of sealed military vehicles to southern Iraq. But
eventually more than180, 000 of them were massacred by the Iraqi
secret firing squads, who were waiting for the victims to arrive at
the edge of pre-dug mass graves. The ones that escaped the death
squads were buried alive and any information about the victims’
destinies to their relatives or to the public was denied for years.
However, during the 1991 Kurdish up rising which followed the first
Gulf War, the Kurds captured millions of paper records and videotapes
which were produced by security, secret intelligence, military,
Baath party and other Iraq state official agencies. 18 tons of these
evidences were eventually relocated to the US National Archives for
‘safe keeping.’ As a result of the second Gulf War, further documents
and evidences about the Anfal Genocide was discovered.
According to the NIDS, its organization holds approximately 2.4
million pages of official Iraqi documents most of which relates to
the Anfal atrocities.
In the aftermath of toppling of Saddam’s regime in 2003, Kurdish
authorities sent special teams to search for potential Anfal victims’
mass graves, especially the Barzanis in South Iraq. According to these
teams, the vast majority of the Kurdish victims’ remains were recovered
in three mass grave sites around Iraq’s Rumadi, Hather and Samawa
cities where 1400 of the Barzanis’ remains were relocated, but due
to security concerns the remains could not be returned to Kurdistan.
The teams’ searches were based on the defunct regime’s documents,
local civilians’ information; and the only five men and a twelve- year-
old boy who escaped and survived the mass killings. These survivors’
testimony at the Anfal genocide trail was significant evidence against
the defendants.
The former Iraqi regime members did not deny the Anfal Operations
in their public and medium announcements and during the trail of
those were responsible for the genocide. In one of his recorded
video speeches dated September 1983, Saddam gave the clearest hint
regarding the fate of the abducted Barzani men. "Those so-called
Barzanis, betrayed the country and betrayed the covenants, and we
meted out a stern punishment to them and we sent them to hell," he
said. During the Anfal trial, evidences of defendants’ crimes piled
against them. "Chemical Ali" also repeatedly told the court trying
him for genocide, he had ordered Kurdish villages cleared in the 1988
"Anfal" campaign which cost tens of thousands of innocent children,
women and men lives. No doubt, this couldn’t have been achieved
without regional and western bureaucrats’ support.
Even though Saddam got the justice he so deserved, yet if his
trial for genocide against the Kurdish people had continued, it
would have assured to shed light on a deeply unethical period in
both Islamic-world and western policies where the major countries,
including the United States, keep silent during the Anfal crimes
for strategic and economic interests. According to some former Iraqi
regime members, Saddam apparently wished-for making an issue of western
support during his trial, but his premature execution left no time for
such testimony. The former dictator’s trial could also have revealed
further concrete evidence of western involvement in the Anfal Genocide.
The former staff member of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
Peter W. Galbraith’s words also could have been useful evidence
against both former Iraqi defendants and their western advocate’s
involvement in the Anfal genocide. He visited Kurdistan at the
time and in the aftermath of the Anfal genocide against the Kurdish
people. Here is an example of what he has experienced. ..I stumbled
across it beginning in September 1987… I got permission to visit
Kurdistan. When Haywood Rankin from the US embassy in Baghdad and I
crossed from Arab to Kurdish territory, we were amazed that places
shown on our maps no longer existed. Later, we came across deserted
towns with bulldozers parked next to partially destroyed houses and
realized what was happening.
Mr. Galbraith also admits the US government’s significant role in
the defunct Iraqi regime’s crimes during the Anfal campaign: While
serving in the Reagan or Bush administrations, some of the principals
of the current war — including Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell —
played down the significance of Iraq’s use of poison gas, including,
in the case of Powell, against the Kurds. And months after the 1988
gas attacks on the Kurds, the current president’s father — with the
apparent support of his defense secretary, Richard Cheney — doubled
US financial assistance to Iraq. However, despite of all these best
documented crimes during the defunct Baath regime’s military campaigns
against the Kurds; the Anfal has neither internationally nor regionally
been recognized as genocide! Whereas, the International convention
(260A) of September 1948 regarding the prevention and punishment of
those who commit genocide, clearly indicates that the Anfal must be
accounted as genocide.
In regards to the similar atrocities, only two nations have been
persecuted more than the Kurds in modern history–the Armenians
by the Kemalist Turks and the Jews by Nazi Germans, but with their
political powers, Jewish genocide is internationally recognized and
the Armenians are struggling for international genocide recognition.
Yet the Kurdish case has been dismissed!
Now, 19 years later, the horrible images of Anfal campaign are
still vivid in the memories of the family members of the victims or
survivors, with no much hope for the their case to be officially
recognized as genocide; especially after Saddam’s premature
execution. Even though Saddam got the justice he so deserved, yet an
international recognition for the Anfal genocide, and an official
apology from the current Iraqi government could have been achieved
if the trial of the deposed dictator had continued! His premature
execution is evidence that there was fear of revealing foreign
involvements in the Anfal crimes, which was a systematic genocide of
the Kurdish people that the Baath party prepared from the mid-1970s
but reach its peak in 1988 when the Iraq regime massacred and gassed
more than 200, 000 innocent civilians. This has been a bloodstained
period for the Kurdish people.
Aram Azez is a Kurdish Political Journalist. He writes about
the Kurdish and Middle East Issues in both Kurdish and English
languages. Most of his articles are published in Kurdish-English
Newspapers and Websites(see for his articles
in English .) Currently he is editor-in chief of printed Kurdish
Newspaper, Newand .
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