posted
The popular perception in the US is that Iraq is a country of uncivilized criminals and terrorists raised to hate America because common people hate freedom and liberty, “ragheads” and “sand niggers” who brought down the Twin Towers in New York City and attacked the Pentagon. US-based columnists have taken to calling Iraqis lazy and ungrateful. A few days ago, in a prime-time press conference, US President George Bush said the Iraqis must take control of their own destinies come June 30th...
Isn’t that how the fabrications, reliance on unreliable defectors, and other misconceptions about Iraq ’s WMD were propagated in the first place ? What of the Iraq-Al Qaeda link, which has since been debunked ? Was it not US media that reported every “official” word coming out of the Bush administration and various Washington think-tanks as gospel ? Why ?
Racism is the answer.
There is an arrogance in the West that everything Western is superior, exemplary and ideal for all cultures. In 2002, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Belusconi said that Islamic culture was inferior to the advanced Western civilization. This school of thought is prevalent throughout every sector of US society and has been nudged on by the various “hate-films” that Hollywood churns every year.
Arabs are portrayed as stupid, animalistic, ammoral, sex-starved, abusing, wife-battering terrorists who seek to kill themselves - and their children - so that they can languish with 72 virgins in heaven. That Arabs saved Western civilization by translating the Greek philosophies and complementing them, introducing algebra, geometry and astronomy to Europe is left out. That the first medical institute in world history was established in - wait for it - southern Iraq by the Muslims is also lost on the US public.
It is no surprise then when we hear that British commanders in Iraq were condemning the Americans’ heavy-handed and disproportionate military tactics in Iraq . According to The Telegraph's Sean Rayment, a British officer, “who agreed to the interview on the condition of anonymity, said that part of the problem was that American troops viewed Iraqis as 'untermenschen' - the Nazi expression for ‘sub-humans’.
“They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British are. Their attitude towards the Iraqis is tragic, it's awful.” The British officer accused the US Military of targeting “terrorists” even if they are located in densely-populated civilian areas: “They may well kill the terrorists in the barrage but they will also kill and maim innocent civilians. That has been their response on a number of occasions. It is trite, but American troops do shoot first and ask questions later. They are very concerned about taking casualties and have even trained their guns on British troops, which has led to some confrontations between soldiers,” The Telegraph reported.
By the way, if you weren’t around during the Nazi purging of Europe’s Jews, “untermenschen” is the popular term a certain Adolf Hitler used to express his disdain for what he termed the “inferior” Jews in Mein Kampf.
Consequently, if the US Military, which can be considered the military hand of the US government, considers Iraqis as inferior beings, it is then academic to extrapolate that US lawmakers view Iraqis as lesser peoples. Perhaps that helps explain why the Bush administration is so irked by news reports showing dead Iraqi women and children. Perhaps it helps explain why he accuses Arab media – including Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya – of being propagandists and liars. Perhaps it also explains why every Iraqi protestation in the last few years about lack of WMDs was shot down by US media and Iraqi officials were branded expert liars.
Perhaps, it also explains why “the axis of evil” slogan was so popular with Washington neocons. Inferior people are considered satanic and evil. After all, was this not how slavery was maintained and thrived in the continental US in the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries ? Were not the slaves considered by white (supremacist) landowners to be cursed by God, soulless and would never see the gates of heaven ?
posted
When our "friend" Saddam was gassing the Kurds Baghdad’s refusal to allow UN experts to inspect the presidential sites on which chemical and biological weapons were allegedly hidden was taken to justify a new bombing campaign on Iraq last month. Times have changed. Ten years ago, the systematic gassing of the Kurdish population of northern Iraq had far less impact on America. Only six months after the slaughter at Halabja, the White House lent Saddam Hussein another billion dollars. And in 1991, at the end of the Gulf war, US troops stood idly by while Saddam’s presidential guard ruthlessly suppressed the popular uprising by the Kurds for which the American president had himself called.
By Kendal Nezan
The town of Halabja, with 60,000 inhabitants, lies on the southern fringe of Iraqi Kurdistan, a few miles from the border with Iran (1). On 15 March 1988 it fell to the Peshmerga resistance fighters of Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, supported by Iranian revolutionary guards.
The next morning Iraqi bombers appeared out of a clear blue sky. The people of Halabja were used to the successive attacks and counter-attacks of the Iraq-Iran war that had ravaged the region since September 1980. They thought they were in for the usual reprisal raid. Those who had time huddled in makeshift shelters. The rest were taken by surprise. Wave after wave of Iraqi Migs and Mirages dropped chemical bombs on the unsuspecting inhabitants. The town was engulfed in a sickly stench like rotten apples. The bombing stopped at nightfall and it began to rain hard. Iraqi troops had already destroyed the local power station, so the survivors began to search the mud with torches for the dead bodies of their loved ones.
The scene that greeted them in the morning defied description. The streets were strewn with corpses. People had been killed instantaneously by chemicals in the midst of the ordinary acts of everyday life. Babies still sucked their mothers’ breasts. Children held their parents’ hands, frozen to the spot like a still from a motion picture. In the space of a few hours 5,000 people had died. The 3,200 who no longer had families were buried in a mass grave.
Pictures of the massacre taken by Iranian war correspondents were relayed throughout the world. Journalists flew in and the international press gave the unprecedented event considerable coverage. After all, the use of chemical weapons is banned by the Geneva Convention of 1925. Only Mussolini’s Italy had ever defied the ban, in its war against Abyssinia. And now a state was using chemical weapons against its own people.
In point of fact, Iraq had already used chemical weapons against the Kurds on 15 April 1987. It happened two weeks after Hassan Ali Al Majid, a cousin of Saddam Hussein, was appointed head of the Northern Bureau set up to deal with Kurdistan. On 29 March of that year the Revolutionary Command Council had issued Decree No. 160, granting him full powers to proceed with the final solution of the Kurdish problem. A problem which the Iraqi regime had failed to solve despite intensive Arabisation, transfers of population, the execution of “ringleaders”, and a war waged on and off since 1961.
The Iraqi proconsul now had the power of life and death over the Kurds. He decided to evacuate and destroy all the Kurdish villages, concentrate their inhabitants in camps along the main highways, and physically eliminate all groups considered hostile. Chemical weapons were to be used as part of this strategy in order to “clean out” strongholds of resistance and inaccessible mountain villages.
Hassan Al Majid’s chemical experiments began on 15 April. They were directed against thirty or so villages in the provinces of Suleimaniyeh and Erbil and proved devastatingly effective. Hundreds died. On 17 April, after a chemical attack that killed 400 people in the Balisan valley, 286 wounded survivors set out for Erbil in search of medical attention. They were stopped by the army and shot.
To convince his colleagues, Saddam Hussein in particular, that his methods were effective, Mr Al Majid ordered films to be made of the massacres and deportations, and of the effects of chemical gas on the population. The Iraqi government services were trained by Stasi experts from the East German secret police. They are obsessed with keeping records, even of the most horrible of their activities. During the Kurdish uprising of March 1991, part of their archives fell into the hands of the resistance, which passed them on to Human Rights Watch, a humanitarian organisation based in the United States. The eighteen tons of police files and political documents were transferred to the University of Colorado for safekeeping and analysis, and the material will soon be available on the Internet. With its help we can follow the stages of the Iraqi regime’s genocidal campaign against the Kurds.
400,000 deaths in fifteen years
We learn, for example, that Mr Al Majid convened the Ba’ath Party leaders on 26 May 1987. “As soon as we complete the deportations,” he informed them, “we will start attacking [the Pershmega resistance] everywhere... then we will surround them in a small pocket and attack them with chemical weapons. I will not attack them with chemicals just one day; I will continue to attack them with chemicals for fifteen days... I told the expert comrades that I need guerrilla groups in Europe to kill whoever they see of them [Kurdish oppositionists]. I will do it, with the help of God. I will defeat them and follow them to Iran. Then I will ask the Mujaheddin (2) to attack them there (3).”
On 3 June 1987 the Iraqi proconsul signed a personal directive, numbered 28/3650, declaring a zone that contained over a thousand Kurdish villages to be a prohibited area, from which all human and animal life was to be eradicated. “It is totally prohibited for any foodstuffs or persons or machinery to reach the villages that have been banned for security reasons,” the directive stated. “Concerning the harvest, it must be finished before 15 July and, after this year, farming will not be authorised in this region... The armed forces must kill any human being or animal present within these areas.”
The Iraqi forces were given a free hand. They launched an all-out attack that reached its peak with the Anfal campaign. (The name refers to a verse of the Koran authorising the plunder of infidels.) Anfal lasted from February to September 1988. The last operation was launched on 25 August, a few days after the ceasefire between Iraq and Iran that ended eight years of war. Sixteen divisions and a chemical weapons battalion, totalling 200,000 ground troops plus air support, conducted a “final cleansing operation” in the Kurdish province of Bahdinan along the Turkish border. This operation resulted in the flight of almost 100,000 civilians to Turkey.
In July 1988 the Iraqi army razed Halabja to the ground. Kurds have always considered the city a major cultural centre. It even acquired some fame in the English-speaking world, when Britain became the mandatory power in Iraq in the aftermath of the first world war. Adela Khanum, princess of Halabja and patron of the arts, fascinated her British overlords. They conferred on this Islamic Medicis the title Khan Bahadur, Princess of the Brave. These brave subjects of hers, famous since the time of Xenophon for their skill in the use of traditional weapons and the art of war, were finally to be vanquished by an invisible enemy, poison gas.
The destruction of Kurdish towns and villages continued into 1989. In June of that year Qala Diza, a city of 120,000 inhabitants on the Iranian frontier, was evacuated and razed to the ground. It was the last major action of the campaign. By Decree No. 271, issued on 23 April 1989, the Revolutionary Command Council revoked Hassan Al Majid’s special powers. In December Saddam Hussein considered the Kurdish question settled. He abolished the Northern Bureau which he had set up ten years earlier.
By the time the genocidal frenzy ended, 90 % of Kurdish villages, and over twenty small towns and cities, had been wiped off the map (4). The countryside was riddled with 15 million landmines, intended to make agriculture and husbandry impossible. A million and a half Kurdish peasants had been interned in camps. Since 1974 over 400,000 had died in Baghdad’s war against the Kurds. Almost half had disappeared without trace. About 10 % of the total Kurdish population of Iraq had perished.
The fate of those who had disappeared was raised with Baghdad in May 1991 by the Kurdish delegation to the abortive peace talks. When questioned about the 182,000 people who had vanished without trace, Mr Al Majid lost his temper. “You always exaggerate,” he shouted. “The total number killed in the Anfal campaign cannot be more than 100,000.” In the minutes of a meeting held in January 1989 (5), he makes no secret of the means employed. “Am I supposed to keep them in good shape... take good care of them? No, I will bury them with bulldozers. Then they ask me for the names of all the prisoners in order to publish them... Where am I supposed to put this enormous number of people? I started to distribute them among the governorates. I had to send bulldozers hither and thither.”
Protected by the West
At that time the regime was not worried about international reaction. In the recording of the meeting of 26 May 1987, Proconsul Al Majid declares: “I will kill them all with chemical weapons. Who is going to say anything? The international community? **** them! (6)” His language may be coarse, but the cynicism of the butcher of Kurdistan, later promoted governor of Kuwait and subsequently minister of defence, was fully justified.
Iraq was then seen as a secular bulwark against the Islamic regime in Teheran. It had the support of East and West and of the whole Arab world except Syria. All the Western countries were supplying it with arms and funds. France was particularly zealous in this respect. Not content with selling Mirages and helicopters to Iraq, it even lent the regime Super Etendard aircraft in the middle of its war with Iran. Germany supplied Baghdad with a large part of the technology required for the production of chemical weapons. And in an unusual display of East-West military cooperation, German engineers enhanced the performance of the Scud aircraft which Iraq had obtained from the Soviet Union, increasing their range so that they could strike at Teheran and other distant Iranian cities.
Despite the enormous public outrage at the gas attack on Halabja, France, which is a depositary of the Geneva Convention of 1925, confined itself to an enigmatic communiqué condemning the use of chemical weapons anywhere in the world. The UN dispatched Colonel Dominguez, a Spanish military expert, to the scene. In a report published on 26 April 1988, he confined himself to recording that chemical weapons had been used once again both in Iran and in Iraq and that the number of civilian victims was increasing (7). On the same day the UN Secretary-General stated that, with respect to both the weapons themselves and those who were using them, it was difficult to determine the nationalities involved.
Clearly, Iraq’s powerful allies did not want Baghdad condemned. In August 1988 the United Nations Sub-Committee on Human Rights voted by 11 votes to 8 not to condemn Iraq for human rights violations. Only the Scandinavian countries, Australia and Canada, together with bodies like the European Parliament and the Socialist International, saved their honour by clearly condemning Iraq.
Things did not begin to change until the end of the Iraq-Iran conflict and the influx into Turkey in September 1988 of refugees fleeing a new chemical weapons offensive. On 7 September France issued a communiqué in which President Mitterrand expressed concern at information received about the use of chemical weapons and other means of repression against the Kurdish population in Iraq. He added that he had no wish to interfere in Iraq’s internal affairs, but the bonds of friendship between Iraq and France were even more reason to make his feelings known. In America, a resolution urging sanctions against Iraq was tabled by Senator Claiborne D. Pell and passed by both Houses of Congress. It was vetoed by President Bush. The White House even granted Baghdad a further loan of a billion dollars.
It was not until Iraq occupied the oil-rich emirate of Kuwait in August 1990 that Saddam Hussein became America’s bogeyman, referred to by George Bush as a new Hitler. Still useful, however, he survived the Gulf war. American troops did nothing to overturn the Iraqi dictator. And they stood idly by in the spring of 1991 while his presidential guard ruthlessly suppressed the popular uprising for which the United States’ president had himself called.
More about Kendal Nezan. Translated by Barry Smerin
*Chairman of the Kurdish Institute of Paris
(1) See Christiane More, “Les Kurdes à la recherche d’une nouvelle stratégie”, Le Monde diplomatique, October 1988.
(2) Iranian opposition organisation based in Iraq and aided by the Baghdad government.
(3) The transcript of the recording of this meeting was published in Genocide in Iraq, The Anfal Campaign Against the Kurds, Human Rights Watch, New York, 1993.
(4) According to a study by the Ministry of Reconstruction and Development of the Kurdish Government, a total of 4,049 villages were destroyed and 673 spared in the three governorates of Erbil, Duhok and Suleymaniyeh. This study does not include the province of Kirkuk, where several hundred more villages were destroyed.
posted
10 Final Anfal: Badinan, August 25-September 6, 1988 "There was medicine from the airplane."
-- victim of the August 25 chemical attack on the village of Gizeh, Amadiya.
With only the last remnants of the PUK continuing to resist, Baghdad's plans for wiping out Mas'oud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) now began to advance rapidly. On August 7, 1988, as we have seen, Ali Hassan al-Majid personally stepped in to urge the Iraqi Army to hasten the completion of the Anfal operation. The following day, the Army High Command issued its "communique of communiques," to announce that a ceasefire had come into effect on Iraq's terms, putting an end to the eight-year Iran-Iraq War that had cost as many as a million lives.1
The ceasefire gave the Iraqi Army the critical boost it required to bring Anfal to a close. The First Corps, which had handled the earlier phases of Anfal from its base in Kirkuk, would now mop up the lingering resistance in the Shaqlawa-Rawanduz valleys. The Fifth Army Corps, based in Erbil, would take charge of operations in Dohuk governorate, along the Iraqi-Turkish border. Other divisions, reportedly including elements of the Third, Sixth and Seventh Armies, were now redeployed to Iraqi Kurdistan from the southern war front around Fao and Basra.
In his review of the Final Anfal campaign, Fifth Corps commander Brig. Gen. Yunis Zareb wrote, "The morale was so high and was clear on the faces of the fighters from the beginning, and especially after the collapse of the Iranian enemy in the victorious campaigns starting from the eternal battle of Fao through the battle of Muhammadthe Prophet of God.2 The formations which took part in [Anfal] had also taken part in those battles."3
This massive concentration of firepower was necessary, the general felt, because of the difficult logistical problems that his troops had to face in classic guerrilla warfare country:
The land is generally hilly with a hard terrain in its northern and eastern parts which lie parallel to the border line of Iraq and Turkey. There are many gardens, forests and natural trees. The surface of the earth consists of rocky lands and a sedimentary surface in the highlands. And the lowlands are a combination of hard land with a mixed soil of sand and mud which gradually descends westward and southward in the direction of the Sleivani and Aqra plains. This area has many rivers and valleys which run from the north and east toward the south and west, forming streams. The movement of the forces and machinery is greatly hindered by the series of mountains, high knolls, valleys and other obstacles.4
It was a military planner's inelegant description of Badinan, the traditional mountainous heartland of Mullah Mustafa Barzani and his sons, the "offspring of treason."
Although the terrain complicated the logistical needs of a regular army, the campaign against the KDP was in other respects more straightforward than the drive to destroy the PUK. The KDP peshmerga were largely concentrated in a single geographical area, Badinan, whereits operations were run from a headquarters at Zewa Shkan, an abandoned village hard up against the Turkish border.5
* * *
Although the Ba'ath Party had devoted five months to "purifying" the areas that were under the control of the PUK, it had never abandoned its particular hatred for the KDP. Once allied with the Shah, the KDP had rekindled a close relationship with the clerical regime in Teheran, and on several occasions acted as scouts for the Iranian army on the northern front. The strength of this alliance was curious in a sense, for religious fervor had never been a part of the KDP's identity. Instead, the party was deeply imbued with the traditional values of the steep, narrow valleys of Badinan, a 4,000 square-mile chunk of the Zagros Mountains bounded to the east by the Greater Zab river and to the north by Turkey. There are no major cities in this inhospitable terrain. Badinan has none of the cosmopolitan sophistication of a Suleimaniyeh, none of the thriving industry of an Erbil or a Kirkuk. Tribal structures and loyalties remained powerful, and the KDP had long made common cause with conservative local aghas and sheikhs who were still touched by a certain nostalgia for the days of the Ottoman Empire, when tribal fiefdoms in Kurdistan were granted a large measure of autonomy.6
While the KDP inspired a devoted partisan following, historically centered on the Barzan Valley, it had also made powerful enemies among other tribal leaders. These schisms in turn meant that the final stage ofAnfal had some characteristics that set it apart from the rest of the operation. Some of the tribal groups who had made a separate peace with Baghdad managed to avoid the worst of Anfal. A considerable number of villages survived in Badinan and on its fringes, at least for a time--especially those of the Surchi, the Zebari, the Bradost and the Dolamari. And Kurdish villagers who might otherwise have died were spared if the local mustashar could convince Baghdad that they were not contaminated by peshmerga sympathies.
It was never easy for outsiders to guess the numbers of active peshmerga in the KDP. According to one 1985 estimate, the party had some 6,000 fighters, compared to 5,000 for the PUK.7 A later estimate put the strength of each group at 10,000 in 1988.8 In fact these figures, cited by sympathetic writers, may have been inflated. Military and civilian intelligence reports told the Fifth Corps Commander, Brig. Gen. Zareb, that the total strength of the "saboteurs" in Badinan was no more than 2,600.9
Against this puny force, and against the civilian population of Badinan, Ali Hassan al-Majid's Northern Bureau sent as many as 200,000 troops. According to several former Iraqi military sources interviewed by Middle East Watch, between fourteen and sixteen regular army divisions of 12,000 men each took part in the Final Anfal campaign, in addition to a Chemical Weapons Battalion, units of the Iraqi Air Force and the National Defense Battalions, or jahsh. The regime's strategy, wrote Gen.Zareb, was "based on the guidelines issued by the Northern Bureau and those of the Chief of Staff in the August 7 Kirkuk conference." The underlying doctrine was the simple one that worked so well in the earlier phases of Anfal--the application of overwhelming force, "to operate by moving from the outside toward the inside in order to encircle the saboteurs, with "different forces act[ing] simultaneously to guarantee the encirclement."10
Larger geopolitical considerations also seem to have played a part in this thinking. "The area of operations was adjacent to the international Iraqi-Turkish border," Gen. Zareb observed, "and this caused some perplexity....Accordingly, all forces were ordered to tackle the matter in the best possible way and ensure the secrecy of the operation by not transgressing the frontier."11
The general's final headache was a logistical one. "The magnitude of the engineering work needed for the destruction and removal of the remnants of the saboteurs and their premises in the areas covered by the operation...was so great that it put an extra burden on the shoulders of the command of the unit."12 The removal of the remnants of the "saboteurs" and their premises: in other words, the destruction of some 300-400 Kurdish villages of Badinan.
* * *
Badinan on the Eve of the Final Anfal
In the days that preceded the Final Anfal, there were ample signs of what was to come. The massive buildup of ground troops was visible along the main highways of Dohuk governorate, and the area was softened up by intense shelling and aerial bombing, sometimes with cluster bombs. In the village of Spindar, for example, on the southern slopes of Gara Mountain, aircraft dropped cluster bombs on August 24,killing two small boys, cousins aged four and five, as they tended their family's goats in the fields.13
Even as these preliminary attacks began, some families began to flee, especially if their villages lay within walking distance of the Turkish border. But others stayed where they were, waiting for the violence to pass. After all, they reasoned, villages like Spindar had been attacked many times since the mid-1960s. Although Spindar itself had been burned down more than once, the government had never prevented the inhabitants from returning to rebuild.
The regime's control of Dohuk governorate had dwindled to a handful of towns and complexes along the main roads. From these strongholds, army troops had maintained brutally thorough checkpoints since the mid-1980s. "No food was allowed through," one villager recalled, "not even small cans of infant formula, and produce was not permitted to be taken to market."14 Another villager added, "For three or four years before Anfal only women were able to pass through the checkpoints. People resorted to smuggling--flour, rice, salt, oil, kerosene, soap, detergent and sesame paste--but everything cost much more this way. At the checkpoint [in the town of Sarseng] the soldiers confiscated anything they found and set fire to it. Sometimes women were able to hide things underneath their dresses."15 But several witnesses told stories of boys and men being arrested, and disappearing, if they were found concealing food, which was presumed to be destined for the peshmerga.
In Badinan, as in the Sorani-speaking areas to the south, the Kurds had long grown accustomed to the harsh routines of wartime. Aircraft bombed, strafed and rocketed them whenever the armed forces received intelligence reports of peshmerga movements. When the planes approached, villagers fled to caves, makeshift shelters or "shades." Occasionally, helicopters would drop infantry troops into a village for house-to-house searches for draft-dodgers and deserters. Artilleryemplacements in the nearest large town or military base rained down poorly directed shellfire, which would sometimes kill some luckless farmer working his fields. As if these Iraqi attacks were not enough, the inhabitants of some border areas also had to contend with raids from Turkish aircraft on search-and-destroy missions against contingents of guerrillas from Turkey's Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which maintained bases inside northern Iraq.16
In the spring of 1987, in accordance with the first decrees issued by the newly appointed Ali Hassan al-Majid, virtually the whole of Dohuk governorate--an area a little smaller than the state of Connecticut--was "redlined." As in the Sorani-speaking areas, there was a fresh flurry of village-burning that April and May, with some forty-nine villages being destroyed in various parts of Badinan.17 The "redlining" was announced over the official radio, said a man from a village near the town of Mangesh. Those who came over to the government side would be considered "our people," the broadcast declared. Those who did not would be regarded as Iranians. To drive home this message, the government blocked off the dirt roads leading to prohibited villages with mounds of earth.18 When the October census came, it had only a very limited effect in rural Badinan; many villages, Middle East Watch was told, did not even know of its existence.
Despite the grim news about Anfal that had filtered through to Badinan via KDP radio broadcasts from Iran, villagers do not appear to have believed that the government campaign of 1988 would be any different from its predecessors. Inexplicably, this absence of any unusual alarm afflicted not merely the civilian population but the KDP itself, whose central committee was meeting inside Iran as the Final Anfal approached, and seemed not to be anticipating anything out of theordinary. Although local peshmerga alerted villagers to the possibility that chemical weapons might be used, the KDP leadership does not appear to have broadcast any emergency alert. "After Halabja, we thought the international community would stop Saddam Hussein," one regional commander said--an astonishingly sanguine attitude, in view of the dozens of chemical attacks that had followed that spring and summer.19
Even in its own highly classified internal documents, the Iraqi military was evasive--almost to the point of silence--on the matter of chemical weapons during the Final Anfal.20 Gen. Zareb's report noted only that a battalion specialized in their use had played "a unique role" in the campaign, "just like all the other groups." The unit was kept in a state of readiness and supervised the use of flamethrowers by infantry troops. Otherwise, Zareb wrote, "It did not have another role during the battle because the battle was within the national geographical boundaries"--a curious scruple on the general's part, given how widely chemical artillery had been used on Iraqi soil in the earlier stages of the Anfal campaign.
Gen. Zareb's assertion may appear contradictory, given that the use of chemical weapons in the Badinan campaign was given wide publicity by the international press. But the explanation is quite simple: chemical bombing operations during the Final Anfal were the exclusive responsibility of the Iraqi Air Force, and the army's chemical artillerypieces that reportedly were deployed in a half dozen locations remained silent.21
Through the testimonies of traumatized Kurdish refugees in Turkey, the world learned quickly of the use of mustard gas and nerve agents in Badinan.22 Listing forty-nine villages that had been "exposed" to gas, Galbraith and Van Hollen concluded that Iraq had "used chemical weapons on a broad scale against its Kurdish population beginning August 25, 1988," and that the attacks had "been accompanied by large loss of civilian life."23
* * *
"Apples and Something Sweet":
The Chemical Attacks of August 25
The first gas fell on the KDP headquarters at Zewa Shkan, close to the Turkish border, late in the evening of August 24. Ten peshmerga reportedly died. The next morning, August 25, between about 6:30 and8:30 a.m., Iraqi warplanes launched a number of separate and almost simultaneous attacks, perhaps a dozen in all. Many of them were probably carried out by the same flight of aircraft, since they were concentrated within a strip measuring approximately sixty miles wide and twenty deep. Some of the aircraft targeted a single village or peshmerga base, but in at least two cases the planes hit a whole string of villages in rapid succession. (see map) The intent seems to have been less to kill than to spread mass terror. Perhaps twenty civilians died on the spot, and about the same number of peshmerga. But hundreds more, especially children, succumbed in the weeks that followed.
The precise cause of their deaths remains unknowable; it may have been the lethal after-effects of a combination of mustard gas and Sarin nerve gas; or the consequences of exposure, cold and hunger in the mountains where they fled; or the malnutrition and disease they endured in the camps after they were captured; or a combination of all three. In a sense, the question is academic; whatever the precise cause may have been, it was the Iraqi government that was responsible for their deaths.
In one interview after another, those who lived through the chemical attacks of the Final Anfal told very similar stories.
· The village of Birjinni, in the nahya of Zawita, had the misfortune to lie almost midway between two of the KDP's most important bases--one, the party's regional headquarters, located due north in the village of Tuka, just across the Khabour river, and the other a little way to the east, in the village of Gelnaskeh. All three places were hit by chemical weapons at breakfast time on August 25. The people of Birjinni had been watching the sky since dawn. For several days they had been aware of unusual numbers of aircraft overhead, and they were fearful of a conventional bombing attack. As eight airplanes came into view, many of the villagers fled in fear to the shelters they had built nearby. Three of the planes made a low pass over the village, from east to west, and dropped four bombs each. Surviving villagers told of clouds of smoke billowing upward, "white, black and then yellow, rising about fifty or sixty yards into the air in a column. Then the column began to break up and drift. It drifted down into the valley and then passed through the village. Then we smelled the gas."
It was a pleasant smell at first; "it smelled of apples and something sweet." Others said it reminded them of "pesticides in our fields." Soon, however, "it became bitter. It affected our eyes and ourmouths and our skin. All of a sudden it was hard to breathe."24 The villagers later found that four people from a single Birjinni family had died, including a 58-year old man and his five-year old grandson. The aircraft continued to circle overhead for perhaps a half hour, apparently observing the results of the raid. Others came later that day, dropping conventional weapons that set the tinder-dry late summer fields ablaze. From the mountain saddle on which Birjinni was built, the villagers could see that the surrounding area was filled with refugees, all fleeing northward in the direction of the Turkish border.25
· A few miles to the north of Birjinni, close to the Khabour river, the planes hit Tilakru, a large village that was home to many army deserters. A woman named Halima was preparing breakfast for her children when the bombs fell. She heard muffled explosions and looked out to see clouds of white smoke turning yellow. Her husband, a peshmerga on active duty, had told her how to recognize the signs. Having served in the Iran-Iraq War, he knew very well what a chemical attack looked like.
Halima's children had been asleep on the roof, so she pulled them down as quickly as she could, one by one, and bundled them into the family's air-raid shelter, a hole in the ground covered with wood, leaves and dirt. Looking round in horror, she realized that her one-year old baby, Zozan, was missing. Halima found her crawling around in the courtyard. But by the time she reached her, the child's face had turned yellow and she was gasping for breath and trying to vomit. Halima rushed her into the shelter and flung wet blankets over the walls. Buther infant daughter could not be saved, and she died several days later in a prison camp, as did several other children from Tilakru.26
· From a vantage point in the village of Spindarok, on the far bank of the Khabour, a farmer named Suleiman watched through binoculars as two aircraft attacked the KDP base at Tuka and the hamlet of Barkavreh, a few hundred yards away. With his radio tuned to an air force frequency, Suleiman even overheard snatches of the two pilots' cockpit conversation:
"They are firing at us."
"Drop the bombs on the high places."
"Don't fire while you are behind me. Hold your fire until you are next to me."
Suleiman concluded that the pilots were responding to ground fire. A friend, Obeid, said that in this area at least, there had been specific warnings of reprisals: "The government had told people that if a single bullet were to be fired from a village, a chemical bomb would be dropped. People came from government-controlled areas bringing this information." In the course of some 350 Middle East Watch field interviews, this was virtually the only example cited of the government issuing any prior warning of its intentions.
Suleiman counted thirteen bombs in all. Although most of them fell outside the village, he learned later that two bombs had landed close to the peshmerga headquarters, on the western outskirts of Tuka. According to three separate accounts, fourteen peshmerga died there, and one civilian. Since the wind was blowing from the east, all the farm animals on the western side of the village died, although no one inside the perimeter of the village was harmed.27
· The village of Warmilleh lay a little nearer to Turkey, between the Khabour and the western edge of Mattin Mountain, a peshmerga stronghold. The nearest guerrilla camp was in Bazeh, a three and a half hour walk across the mountains to the east. The people of Warmilleh, like those of Birjinni, had been expecting an attack on the morning ofAugust 25. Again, it came at about 8:00 a.m. This time, they counted six aircraft, but only two of them took part in the attack, dropping six bombs each. "We were lucky," a villager remembered, "for the wind was in the opposite direction to where the people were sheltering under the trees, half a kilometer away."28 Five people were affected by the drifting gas. They vomited; their skin turned black and peeled off. But a peshmerga doctor arrived later that afternoon, administered injections, and the five injured villagers joined their families' northward flight to the Turkish border.
Directly across the river, the planes also hit the village of Bilejaneh. The chemicals drifted on the wind to a hamlet called Bani. "I got sick and had to vomit," said a man who lived there. "We left Bani that afternoon and went to Bilejaneh and Girka. After that we had to cross the main road [from Begova to Kani Masi]. The army was not there yet. The first troops arrived at 2:00 a.m. on August 26 and cut off the escape route to Turkey. Those who crossed the main road before this were lucky. We got there at about 1:00 a.m., just before the soldiers."29
· North of the main road, one direct route to Turkey led through the villages of Ruseh and Nazdureh. "When the military came and began camping out on the road to Nazdureh, people expected an attack and fled," according to a KDP peshmerga from Ruseh, who had sent his family on ahead to Turkey.
The army attacked the next morning. The Iraqis were trying to seal the border area. People who were close to the border managed to cross, but those who failed were arrested and disappeared. I was near the border when the chemical attack happened. I saw yellow smoke. I was on top of the mountain, but people in the valley below were affected. My brother, who was two or three hundred meters away from me on the mountain side, was also affected by the chemicals. He began frothing at the mouth and choking and his skin became dark. Thenhe died. His name was Salim, and he was 45-years old. We buried him there on the spot.30
· The most concentrated attacks, however, came along Gara Mountain, the great ridge that begins near the town of Sarseng and stretches east for twenty miles or more. Here, the air force targeted at least fifteen and perhaps as many as thirty separate villages.31 On the southern slopes, the neighboring villages of Avok, Swareh, Sidara and Spindar (nahya of Sarseng) were all hit at about 8:00 a.m. on the same morning, August 25. There was a peshmerga base in the mountains nearby, and the people of Swareh had moved to the ravines and caves of Avok a year or so earlier in response to the government's continuous bombing and shelling.
A young women named Khadija was in one of these caves with her nine children when the bombs fell. Her elder sister, Aisha, had just gone outside to wash the dirty plates from breakfast. Khadija heard a series of powerful explosions, as if the bombs had fallen right overhead, and the mouth of the cave was quickly obscured by white smoke. The smoke smelled like "the same medicine that is sprayed on apples," and everyone inside the cave grew dizzy and found it hard to breathe. Their eyes burned and teared. Two teenage boys who had been hiding among the bushes outside tried to sprint to safety. But the planes cut them down with machinegun fire, and both youngsters died.
After about an hour, when the smoke had cleared, the family ventured out fearfully to look for Aisha. They found her lying on the ground outside the cave. She was sighing and moving her lips as if she wanted to speak, but no words came. She had vomited, and her skin was black. A few yards away the grass was blackened and burned, and dead farm animals lay all around. Aisha lived only another two or three hours. When the family washed her body that night for burial in the villagecemetery, her dry and blackened skin came off in their hands.32 Another young woman, Amina, also died in the attack. Others died later as they tried to hide out in the mountains, but many families managed to escape by walking through the narrow Ashawa Valley, close to the extravagant mountaintop palace which President Saddam Hussein had recently built himself.
· To the north side of Gara Mountain, the villages of Bawarkeh Kavri and Mergeti ("Meadow of the Mulberry Tree") lay next to each other in a small valley, separated only by a 10-minute walk. The army had burned Bawarkeh Kavri four times before Anfal, but the village had always been rebuilt. The valley had been "redlined" by the government in 1987, and both villages housed peshmerga bases.
Again, the bombing began at about 8:00 a.m. on August 25. Five or six bombs fell in Bawarkeh Kavri and nine or ten in Mergeti, witnesses said, but they struck some distance away from the KDP base. There was white smoke, and all the chickens and birds died, as did the goats. But none of the villagers lost their lives in the attack, even though those who were downwind of the gas suffered the usual symptoms--vomiting, tearing and dizziness. They ascribed their good fortune to the peshmerga, who had warned them a few days before that an attack might be imminent and showed them how to protect themselves by closing all the doors and windows and shrouding their heads in wet towels and blankets. That same evening, the villagers saw the ground forces approaching and fled to the mountains.
· It was a similar story in Sarkeh and Gizeh, neighboring villages deep in the folds of Gara Mountain, about ten miles south of the town of Amadiya. There were no guerrilla bases here, although fighters did pass through at frequent intervals. As the villagers sat down to breakfast, Mushir, a peshmerga in his early twenties, saw six aircraft discharge their bombs over Sarkeh before flying on to attack Shirana, the next village to the east. Mushir ran west toward Gizeh, the village of his birth. But it was deserted; the warplanes had already paid their visit.
"There was medicine from the airplane," said Khadija Sa'id, an old, partially sighted woman from Gizeh. "We noticed smoke, felt dizzyand fell down. My sister went blind. The smoke smelled like old alcohol, but the smell did not stay."
"I felt dizzy, about to faint," added her sister, Fahma. "Tears were coming from my eyes, and I fell down. I tried to wash my face. I vomited. Those who vomited survived. Others died at the beginning. Now I am like this; I can see only a little bit." The villagers of Gizeh fled to caves in the mountains, as they had in the past. On the evening of the same day, they watched ground troops enter the village and burn it to the ground.33
* * *
In psychological terms, these attacks were every bit as devastating as the regime presumably intended them to be. The raids terrified peshmerga and civilians across Badinan. With no village farther than twenty miles from the chemicals, word of them spread rapidly. The suddenness and intensity of the attack on so many fronts at once threw the KDP into disarray, and many peshmerga simply abandoned their posts to try and rescue their families and reach the border. Said one fighter,
I could not find any of my fellow peshmerga. They had all gone to help their relatives, and the chemical weapons had created a lot of fear among the people. We did not know how to fight them. We knew how to fight tanks, how to chase a military caravan until we ambushed it, and how to escape aerial bombardments. But we did not know how to fight chemicals.34
Immediately after the bombs had fallen, word reached the villages that resistance was useless. According to a young man who was a peshmerga in Spindar, the next village to the west of Swareh,
Even before the army entered our village we received a message from Mas'oud Barzani not to resist. The [KDP]leadership command told us, "Everything has ended; the revolution is over; we cannot fight chemical weapons with our bare hands; we just cannot fight chemical weapons." The KDP's First Branch told us, "You have a choice: if you want to surrender, do so in order to save the civilians, because the party does not have the ability to care for so many civilian casualties." We could not take so many elderly people and children to the border.35
Such scattered fighting as did take place after the first wave of chemical attacks cannot properly be called resistance. The best that the KDP could manage was a string of isolated rearguard actions, in which splintered groups of peshmerga tried to slow the army's advance. But their efforts were useless, for the places where the peshmerga tried to make a stand, such as the narrow defile known as Darava Shinyeh (or "Shinyeh Passage"), were also acutely vulnerable to renewed attacks from the air. According to one KDP veteran, these battles were "all very short ones, like pinpricks," and military helicopters continued to harass the fleeing peshmerga throughout the next day, August 26.36
Perhaps the most cowardly of all the chemical attacks was the bombing of the bridge at Baluka, one of the main crossing points on the fast-flowing Greater Zab river. The village of Baluka itself had been emptied during the border clearances of 1976, although a few families had straggled back, accompanied by the peshmerga. Now, with the sanctuary of Turkey barely four miles away across the mountains, villagers had begun to converge on the Baluka bridge from all directions, in flight from the army. At about 1:00 p.m. on August 25, the warplanes appeared over Baluka. They released two bombs on the village and several more over the river. The bridge was quickly covered in a greenish cloud and the corpses of farm animals piled up on the bridge, making it impassable.
By nightfall on August 26, the combat was effectively over. "The zealousness of the [army] fighters was boosted by the collapse of thesaboteurs and their complete inability to resist," Gen. Zareb noted with satisfaction in his written report on the Final Anfal.37
In many cases, the ground troops and jahsh -- or chatta ("bandits"), as they are known in the Kurmanji-speaking areas--moved into the abandoned villages on the same day as the chemical attacks. In others, they waited a day or two. But the occupation of Badinan was effectively complete by dawn on August 28, exactly on Gen. Zareb's original schedule. Tens of thousands of refugees headed for Turkey; others were captured in their homes, or surrendered after a brief, vain attempt at flight; others hid in the mountains until the September 6 amnesty.
* * *
In coordination with the first wave of attacks, the Iraqi Army occupied the highway that runs east from the small border city of Zakho until it meets the Greater Zab river at Baluka. The idea was evidently to seal off the Turkish border and stem the flood of refugees. In this, however, the army was strikingly unsuccessful. Although many died along the way, some were caught, and others were chased and strafed by fighter aircraft, between 65,000 and 80,000 Kurds did manage to make the crossing. In the impromptu camps that a reluctant Turkish government found itself obliged to open along the border, the refugees told their stories and displayed their injuries to the few members of the foreign press who managed to gain access. Those who lived in villages south of the highway found it more difficult to escape, and a lower proportion of them reached safe havens in Turkey.38
Many of those who could not break through the blockade line along the Zakho-Baluka road still managed to evade capture by hiding out in the mountains. They watched impotently as the bulldozers crawled back and forth through the valleys below, crushing everything in their path. Along the great east-west spine of Gara Mountain, south of Amadiya, the scattered peshmerga fighters took charge of a sprawling caravan of thousands of refugees. On foot and on horseback, they travelled east for three days, but found it impossible to get across the Greater Zab, because all the bridges were now controlled by the army. Retracing their steps to the west again, the refugees heard on the radios that the peshmerga carried that thousands of their fellow Kurds had found sanctuary in Turkey. As news of the recent chemical attacks spread, the peshmerga tried to keep up the morale of the civilians by telling them that foreign pressure on the Iraqi regime would soon force Saddam Hussein to declare a halt to the fighting.
Although they had no bread or other supplies, there was meat aplenty in the form of abandoned farm animals. But the most pressing problem was the lack of drinking water: all the rivers and springs lay in the valleys below, and these were in the hands of the army and jahsh, who were shooting at anything that moved. The fugitives went for three days without water, and according to at least one account many young children died on Gara Mountain as a result of diarrhea and dehydration.39 But a surprising number did survive the ordeal, and on their twelfth day in hiding, just after the radio had broadcast noon prayers, news came that the Revolutionary Command Council had decreed a general amnesty.
Many thousands of others were less fortunate. The villagers of Gizeh, for example, which had been attacked with chemical weapons on August 25, held out in the mountains for ten days--not quite long enough to benefit from the amnesty. Starving and exhausted, they wereeventually hunted down by soldiers who made them walk for four hours to Amadiya. There they were hustled into trucks that drove off to the west, in the direction of Dohuk. Gizeh was one of the worst hit villages in the whole of Badinan: according to Mushir, the young peshmerga from Sarkeh, ninety-three of its men were captured by the army and were never heard from again. Only Mushir and two others survived.
Some were captured in their homes on the first day of the assault. Part of the population of Mergeti, on the north side of Gara Mountain, did flee immediately after the August 25 chemical attack, but almost a hundred other people, including many of the older residents, were seized as soldiers and Kurdish chatta forces reached the village that evening. The troops warned them that if there was any resistance from peshmerga in the vicinity, they would all be executed on the spot.
In Warakhal, some way to the east in the nahya of Nerwa Reikan, a local mustashar told the village elders that their people should turn themselves in to the army; since they were not peshmerga, they had nothing to fear. The villagers obeyed, and were rounded up and packed into trucks. Their first destination was the complex of Deralouk, built where the main east-west highway crosses the Greater Zab. They remained there for three hours, crowded into animal pens, before being separated by age and sex. The women counted as eighty-three men from Warakhal were loaded into IFAs and driven off. They asked the jahsh what was to become of them, but were ordered to shut up. But there is evidence that the militiamen knew the answer only too well, for some of the women heard them muttering among themselves that it would be "a great loss for these people to disappear."40
From this point on, the story of the Final Anfal closely parallels what had happened during earlier stages of the campaign. The captured villagers were detained, for a few hours or a few days, in temporary holding centers on or near the main east-west highway. Sometimes there was a rudimentary interrogation. Several of these processing points were complexes like Deralouk, built to house displaced Kurds during earlier periods of the Iran-Iraq War. Captives from the area around Gara Mountain were kept briefly in the complexes of Sori Jeri and Kwaneh, and in a school in Sarseng. In the town of Amadiya itself, the police station, the army base and the headquarters of the Teachers Union wereall used. The temporary facilities were badly stretched, and transportation of so many prisoners also proved to be a problem, with many of the army IFAs breaking down. One civilian truck driver told Middle East Watch that his vehicle was commandeered, along with two civilian buses, to transport fifty or sixty prisoners--men, women and children--from the army brigade headquarters in Amadiya to Sarseng, and thence to Dohuk.41
Closer to Zakho, the complexes of Bersivi and Hizawa served the same purpose. Many people also told of being taken to the army fort in Mangesh, or to a primary or intermediate school in that town, sometimes lured there by false promises of amnesty. They remained in Mangesh for up to three days. Some were given meager rations of Kurdish flat bread and sun-heated water; others received nothing at all, although sympathetic townspeople reportedly threw food in at the windows.42 After three days, the IFAs were set to move again, this time to the south, toward Dohuk.
* * *
On-the-Spot Mass Executions
In the Sorani-speaking areas of Iraqi Kurdistan, faced with orders to exterminate their prisoners on an industrial scale, the executioners were sometimes sloppy about their work. From the Third Anfal alone, the Germian campaign, at least six survivors have surfaced to tell their stories. This is not the case in Badinan, where after more than a year of intensive research Middle East Watch has been unable to find a single male who emerged alive from the camps and the firing squads.
Between April and September 1992, and again in April 1993, MEW staff travelled extensively in Badinan, conducting dozens of interviews with survivors of the Final Anfal--Khatimat al-Anfal. In eachformer village group, surviving witnesses were asked to construct a list of those who had died or disappeared. In many cases, they were able to do so, giving complete names where possible and identifying anyone who had been an active peshmerga, a draft dodger or an army deserter. The lists provided by villagers from Badinan invariably included only adult and teenage males--with the signal exception of Assyrian and Chaldean Christians, as well as Yezidi Kurds, whose fate is detailed below.
The numbers reported to MEW from thirty-six villages give some hint of the probable death toll from the Badinan campaign. Some places went unscathed, with everyone making it across the border into Turkey; some lost a single man; many a dozen or twenty; a few suffered brutally, losing almost their entire adult male population--seventy-four from the village of Ikmala in the nahya of Al-Doski, for example, either eighty-three or eighty-seven (according to two separate accounts) from the village of Warakhal in the nahya of Nerwa Reikhan, and ninety-three from Gizeh. In all, these thirty-six villages lost 632 of their menfolk to Anfal, including a few boys as young as twelve or thirteen.43
All of these men and boys were last seen alive in Iraqi Army custody, either crammed into IFA trucks, handcuffed by the roadside at their place of capture, or (predominantly) in the fort at Dohuk, which functioned, so to speak, as the Topzawa of the North.44 None of them has been seen alive since their disappearance almost five years ago, and the only possible conclusion is that they were killed en masse by firing squads, just as their predecessors had been in the earlier stages of Anfal.
Hundreds of women and young children perished, too, as a result of the Final Anfal campaign. But the causes of their death were different--gassing, starvation, exposure and wilful neglect, rather than bullets firedfrom an AK-47. In the first seven Anfal operations, the mass disappearance of women and children frequently mirrored the pattern of peshmerga resistance. In the Final Anfal, there was no resistance to speak of. The KDP was simply routed, and this may help explain why the women and children of Badinan were spared. As for their menfolk, the standing orders could not have been clearer:
"We received orders to kill all peshmerga, even those who surrendered," Middle East Watch was told by a former lieutenant colonel in the Iraqi Army. "Even civilian farmers were regarded as peshmerga if they were working within a prohibited area. All men in the prohibited areas, aged from 15-60 [sic], were to be considered saboteurs and killed. The prohibited areas were shown in red on the army maps, and they covered everything except the paved highways." These orders, the officer explained, were conveyed in writing to the divisional level (tahriri) and then passed on orally to the lower-ranking officers. The reference is clearly to Northern Bureau directives 3650 and 4008 of June 1987, which contained the standing orders for the two-year period including Anfal. The lieutenant-colonel went on to explain that women and children in his own local area of operations, were to be rounded up, trucked to the army's divisional headquarters at Begova where he was stationed and then later resettled in a government complex.45
"Ali Hassan al-Majid's orders were clear," agreed another former officer who had served in the Istikhbarat. "They were to kill all men aged from 15-60. He did not want to see them again, they must be killed off." However, "people were killed according to the mood of the officer in charge. Some were good-hearted and let people go, while others killed them."
The "good-hearted" behavior of some officers is borne out by the testimony of witnesses. A Yezidi Kurd from the village of Mezeh (nahya of Sarseng) was among the thousands who hid out in the mountains after fleeing before the army's attack at the end of August. "Some forty to fifty women could no longer bear the hardship," he recalled, "and surrendered to an army unit in Shkafkeh village. The commander, who was friendly, gave them food and water, but told them he was under orders to kill everyone. So he sent them back into the mountains, saying that he was incapable of killing women and children, and told them to wait for anamnesty."46 Chatta units in this area also crossed peshmerga lines to warn everyone to stay where they were, since there was a general order to kill anyone who surrendered.
At least one large group of villagers was spared as the result of a private deal with the army. This startling case involved a group of 160 families from the village of Spindarok, who tried to flee toward Turkey on the first day of the Final Anfal. They had only made it as far as the main road when they encountered an important tribal leader, the father of one of the mustashars. They assured the man that there were no peshmerga in their ranks, and he in turn approached military intelligence on their behalf. The following afternoon they surrendered to the army, which trucked them to the Zakho headquarters of Istikhbarat. There they handed over their weapons and gave statements. After this they were allowed to go free, moving in with relatives in Zakho. (Their own village of Spindarok was burned and bulldozed.)47
* * *
Some of the captured men and boys of Badinan were lined up and murdered at their point of capture, executed by firing squads on the authority of a local army officer. The most notorious case is that of Koreme, a village of some 150 households just two and a half miles north of the town of Mangesh.48 Koreme was known locally as a pro-government village, and many of its men served as agents of Amn. Bythe time of Anfal, however, Koreme was already a village-in-hiding; since the previous year its population of 1,000 or so had taken refuge beneath damp rock overhangs in the ravines nearby. In the aftermath of the August 25 chemical attacks, Koreme--like innumerable other villages--held a fierce debate about what to do. By the 27th, several hundred people had decided to risk fleeing to Turkey. But later that same day other terrified villagers they encountered in the mountains warned them that they had left it too late; all routes to the border were now blocked by soldiers.
The Koreme refugees turned back, accompanied by a number of people from the village of Chalkey who had joined them in the ravines. They walked all night, in constant fear of attack. By the afternoon of August 28, they had reached the outskirts of Koreme once more. The soldiers and the jahsh, however, had got there first. As soon as they saw the troops, the men raised their hands high in the air to signal surrender.
The officers in charge, two young lieutenants in their twenties, had the villagers separated on the spot by age and sex. This done, they appeared unsure of what they should do next, but after a pause one of the lieutenants ordered a group of thirty-three men and teenage boys to stand apart from the others.49 Their ages ranged from thirteen to forty-three. As the other villagers were led away behind a hill, out of sight, the men were made to squat on their heels. The soldiers continued to tell them that no harm would come to them, and even offered them cigarettes and water. While they waited, one of the officers called his superiors in nearby Mangesh on his walkie-talkie. He reported that he had captured a group of "armed subversives" and asked for instructions. As soon as he put the radio down, the lieutenant shouted the order to his men to open fire. Twenty-seven of the thirty-three prisoners were killed--eighteen from Koreme and nine from Chalkey. Remarkably, however, six survived--even though the soldiers later went down the line to administer the coup de grace.50 The bodies were left to lie where theyhad fallen and to rot in the hot summer sun for more than a week before soldiers returned to bury them in two shallow pits.
To this day there is considerable speculation as to why Koreme should have been singled out in this way. Of all the theories that have been floated, the most plausible may be that their former role in Amn holds the key to the mystery. As a loyalist village, Koreme would have been expected to abide by the "redlining" of 1987 and register its inhabitants under the October census. Instead the village went into hiding. The regime would therefore have regarded its former Amn agents as especially traitorous, and captured official documents make it clear that this kind of desertion was punishable by summary execution.51
Koreme was not the only case of a mass execution in the field. Something similar took place on a smaller scale in Mergeti, the village on the northern slopes of Gara Mountain that had been attacked by chemical weapons on August 25. Most of the men were peshmerga, and they escaped to the mountain. But as we have seen, as many as one hundred villagers were captured in their homes by soldiers that same night. They were held for an hour or so by the spring that was Mergeti's only source of water. As they waited there, the soldiers set fire to their homes.
An Istikhbarat officer then reportedly called his superiors by walkie-talkie and told them that a number of "saboteurs" had been arrested. A member of the jahsh, who was standing nearby and spoke some Arabic, quietly told the villagers what the man had been ordered to do: "Separate the men and women and kill all the men older than fifteen." Twelve men were made to stand aside, and at nightfall the women were taken away on foot to the nearby town of Sarseng. In the confusion and darkness, an apparently tender-hearted infantry officer managed to conceal four of the men in the larger group of women in anattempt to save them.52 The other eight were taken by their captors to the nearby village of Bawarkeh Ka'ba, away from the mountains.
The soldiers' commanding officer was furious. "Why did you bring them here?" he shouted. "I ordered you to kill them. Why did you not implement my orders?" The man repeated his command: the men were to be taken back to their place of capture and shot. At a spot about 300 yards outside Mergeti, the prisoners were bound together hand and feet, blindfolded and handcuffed, and shot with Kalashnikovs.53
* * *
Thanks to Brigadier General Zareb's meticulous account of troop movements during the Final Anfal, it is possible to say with some precision who was responsible for the Mergeti and Koreme murders.54 Although Mergeti is not mentioned by name in Gen. Zareb's report, the village clearly fell within the area of operations of the Iraqi Army's 41st Infantry Division. The 41st controlled a detachment of commandos from the Sixth Army Corps, as well as three infantry brigades, numbers 103, 114 and 706. The commander of one of these three brigades--it is not specified which--was in charge of the division's first joint task force that was deployed against Gara Mountain from its base in Sarseng and wouldhave moved eastward through Mergeti in the first hours of the campaign.55
Within the plan of attack devised by the Fifth Army Corps, Koreme was part of the Khabour Basin area of operations. (see map) Stretching from Zakho and Batufa in the north to Mangesh in the south, this theater was in the hands of the 29th Infantry Division. Three infantry brigades were also assigned to the operation--numbers 84, 238 and 435--together with a tank battalion, an assortment of mechanized forces, field engineers, artillery units and waterborne troops, and sixteen National Defense Battalions, or jahsh.
The campaign was further subdivided into eight joint task forces, two of which--the sixth and seventh--were based in Mangesh.56 While the seventh task force was instructed to drive eastward and take the villages of Majalmukht and Alkushki, the sixth was to move north, as far as the twin villages of upper and lower Baroshki, on the south bank of the Khabour river. A secondary detachment was to peel off to the northeast, and to take Koreme. It was this unit that carried out the executions, and from the testimonies of witnesses, the assumption must be that the order came from the sixth task force commander of the 29th Infantry Division, based in Mangesh.
Gen. Zareb was well pleased by the performance of his officers. By August 29, he was able to report that the 29th and 41st Infantry Divisions had "occupied all [their] target places" and "completed all the duties assigned to [them]."57 Over the course of the next week, other units and task forces continued mopping-up operations and drove the last of the peshmerga into Turkey and Iran. By September 6, the last strategic border hilltop had been occupied, and from a military point of view the Final Anfal was complete. Gen. Zareb applauded the "military and civilian security authorities" for laying the groundwork for the successful campaign, and paid tribute to the comrades of the Ba'ath Party for "raising the degree of enthusiasm and zealousness of the fighters."58
The general detected the same sterling fighting qualities in the jahsh. "The combatants of the National Defense Battalions zealously and enthusiastically fought to achieve the target of destroying the saboteurs in their positions," he wrote. "In all the convoys, they used to march ahead of the troops because they knew the area and also because of their good physical fitness, especially for mountain-climbing. They...played an active role in the destruction of villages and the collection of plunder."59 There was a meticulous inventory of the "plunder": cattle and goats; rugs, mattresses and blankets; watches, cash and pieces of gold; picture albums, eating utensils, packets of powdered milk, toothpaste...60
His forces had met "almost no resistance," the general reported, and this was reflected in the army's casualty figures. Only thirty-one men died in the Final Anfal, and eighteen of those were jahsh, who had dutifully played the role of cannon fodder assigned to them by the army and the Ba'ath Party. As for the "saboteurs" taken into army custody during the Badinan campaign, they were listed as follows:
Saboteurs Surrendered 803
Saboteurs Captured 771
Men 1,489
Women 3,368
Children 6,964
Total 13,395
Others, of course, had died in the field. But these were not tallied accurately, with the exception of forty-eight peshmerga reported killed in clashes with the 29th Division. Instead, Gen. Zareb contented himself with a terse notation: "Too many bloodstains were seen in all the places cleaned by our forces."
* * *
The Fort at Dohuk and the Women's Prison at
Salamiyeh
The Dohuk Fort squats by the roadside at Nizarkeh, on the eastern outskirts of the capital of the governorate. It is a huge concrete structure, built of Soviet design in the 1970s and protected by a battery of four anti-aircraft guns on the roof. Of the 13,395 "saboteurs" captured in Badinan, most were taken to the fort, trucked there in army IFAs from their place of capture. Some male prisoners from the southern part of Badinan were reportedly also taken to the city of Mosul, but no one has apparently returned alive to tell the story of what happened there.
Most of the inmates were held on the second floor of the fort, which was so crowded that the prisoners spilled over into the corridors. They stayed in Dohuk between two and five days, although some old people were kept there longer, for periods of as much as a couple of weeks. Some women spent the whole of the first night in the courtyard of the fort, confined to the same trucks that had brought them. As in Topzawa, the newcomers were segregated on arrival: men and boys of military service age to one side and women, children and the elderly to the other. Soldiers took brief statements from the men and confiscated their IDs, but no one else was questioned. With their customary fondness for keeping documentary records, security agents made videotapes of these brief interrogation sessions.
As their wives and sisters stood by, powerless to help, the men were beaten with wooden batons and lengths of plastic tubing, kicked, punched and slapped. Army guards amused themselves by putting lighted matches to the prisoners' beards and mustaches. Children screamed and tried to run to their fathers, but were driven back with kicks and blows. Iram, a young woman from Gizeh, on Gara Mountain, watched as soldiers beat her brother-in-law bloody. She begged them, "by God and by the Prophet," to let her cross the courtyard to wash his wounds. The soldiers refused. "You have no God and no Prophet," they sneered.61
When the registration process was completed, the prisoners were dispersed to filthy communal cells that were strewn with human waste. "It was like living in a toilet," one elderly woman recalled in disgust. There were thousands in the fort, men packed into the ground level cells and women, children and the elderly on the floor above. Hundreds morearrived each day. They were from all the major tribes of the Badinan area--Doski, Sindi, Reikan, Barwari, Sleivani and others. Several hundred of the prisoners were from Yezidi and Assyrian Christian villages, and these people were segregated from the Muslim detainees by a partition wall.
In many respects the conditions at Nizarkeh were even more squalid than at Topzawa. Most strikingly, there was no attempt to feed the inmates. Although there were faucets in the courtyard, guards barred the prisoners from using them. Small amounts of insanitary, sun-warmed water were available from barrels in the yard, but there was no effort to distribute this systematically. There was not even bread. "You Kurds have been sent here to die," was the comment that many prisoners reported hearing from their guards.
Small gestures of sympathy from local townspeople helped to ward off starvation--something that happened at a number of other detention facilities for Kurds during Anfal. Once, a Kurdish guard dumped two sacks of bread in the courtyard, and the fitter children scrambled for these. But other children, and some of the older adults, did succumb to hunger and disease. As many as twenty died in one two-day period in early September, according to one account.62 Over time, the longer-term elderly inmates were able to buy food from their jailers, in the same way as their fellow Kurds in Nugra Salman. When only the elderly remained, security also became more lax, and some relatives even managed to slip inside the fort for brief visits. At night the prisoners would slip out to the barbed wire perimeter fence to collect large plastic sacks of food that the people of Dohuk left there.63
For the younger inmates, the guards' brutality continued as a matter of daily routine. New arrivals saw recent bloodstains on the floors and walls. Any woman attempting to visit her husband on the lower levelof the fort was beaten back. Men were savagely beaten with pruning hooks of the sort that Kurds customarily use in their fields. One overweight young man was pummeled senseless, stuffed into the trunk of a Volkswagen Passat and driven out of the fort. He was not seen again. Others were pounded on the head and upper body with concrete blocks, sometimes when they were tied to posts in the courtyard. "I saw it myself when officers killed one young man with such a block," said an old man from the Amadiya area. "I cried and prayed to God to save us all."64
On another occasion, a prisoner saw soldiers and Istikhbarat officers taking turns to beat a group of twelve young men in peshmerga dress. The army men were yelling and cursing them: "Are you not ashamed of being saboteurs, donkeys, sons of dogs!" Later, the witness saw the bloodied bodies of the twelve young men being dragged away by soldiers. He was told by a guard that they were peshmerga who had surrendered or been captured by helicopter on Mattin Mountain.65
Another young man who was a carpenter in Dohuk learned that a friend's father was among the detainees in the fort, and rushed there immediately with sacks of bread and grapes. At the gate of the fort he asked an Amn agent for permission to enter. "How could you go in?" the man asked. "You'll get beaten. Let me show you what happened to some of the people in there." The Amn man took the carpenter to a patch of lower ground outside the fort and pointed to a number of bloodstains, as well as what appeared to be the remains of human brains. The guard explained that these belonged to people from the villages of Spindar and Swareh, on the slopes of Gara Mountain. Eighteen of them had been killed here, summarily executed.66
After a few days in this hellish atmosphere, the first groups of women and children were told to assemble in the huge central courtyard, where vehicles were waiting to take them away to a new destination. Sometimes these were closed buses with two small windows in the rear,sometimes minibuses or coasters, sometimes ordinary army IFAs. Armed guards--identified as Amn and Istikhbarat--waited to accompany the convoys. The final images that the women took with them from Nizarkeh were of the continued sufferings of their menfolk. As one group waited to depart, they saw cursing soldiers beating a number of men in the courtyard with cement blocks and sticks. The men were blindfolded and handcuffed. As the buses pulled away, one woman cried, "Let our children die too, now that their fathers are dead."67 And in the days that followed, the older inmates of the Dohuk Fort saw more buses come--some of them khaki-colored, others blue--to take away the younger men.68 With hardly an exception, they have never been seen again.
* * *
The vehicles carrying the women and children headed south toward Mosul, before turning on to the Baghdad road. In one truck, a pregnant woman from the Amadiya area began to go into labor. The other women yelled at the driver to stop, but he refused, and a belligerent soldier aimed a kick at the pregnant woman. But as the crowded truck continued to bump along the highway, she gave birth to her baby. The child survived, and they called it Hawar, or "scream."
About five hours after leaving Dohuk, the convoys pulled up outside a prison, or military base, in the small town of Salamiyeh, on the east bank of the Tigris a few miles south of Mosul. On arrival, there was a brief registration process and Istikhbarat, which had overseen the Dohuk Fort, handed the women and children over into the custody of new guards, whom witnesses identified as belonging to the Iraqi police and Popular Army. The prisoners found themselves in a huge single-story building, divided into perhaps two dozen large, overcrowded halls, each some fifty yards in length. Every hall held people from a particular region, but all the inmates were from Badinan; not a word of Sorani washeard. Here the women were to stay for anything between ten days and two weeks.
The prison regime at Salamiyeh was a distinct improvement on the Nizarkeh fort, and none of the women reported being specifically harassed or abused. Recollections of Salamiyeh varied from case to case. Perhaps memory is dimmed by time and trauma; on the other hand, it may well be that prison conditions changed over time. Some women recalled a diet of nothing but "hard, rough bread" and water from tanks in the yard; other said that they received three meals a day, including bread, rice, soup and jam, and that water was readily available from faucets. There were even iceblocks to counter the summer heat, and a small prison shop that sold a few basic staples. Although there was no soap, the women could wash their clothes each day in the courtyard.
Even so, conditions at Salamiyeh were grim. The prisoners were detained here with no semblance of legal process; no charges were ever brought against them, and they were never given any reason for their confinement. Women and children slept on the bare concrete floor without blankets and used filthy, overflowing toilets. The inmates of different halls were forbidden to communicate with each other. There was no medical attention, and at least two deaths were reported during the two weeks that the Salamiyeh prison was in service. One of the dead was a child from Gizeh village, who was crushed beneath a water tank. Soldiers removed the body, and refused to tell the child's mother where they were taking it.
Above all the women suffered the constant mental torment of not knowing what had become of their husbands and brothers. At least two witnesses said that some of the Badinan men were taken for a time to Salamiyeh, although they were held in separate quarters. One woman from the nahya of Guli learned from the guards that her husband and three brothers were alive in the prison. Another, who was held in Hall No.7 with other prisoners from the Sarseng area, found one day that the steel door of her cell had been locked. It remained that way for six days. On the sixth morning, it was left open for two hours. From her vantage point close to the door, the woman had a partial view of the courtyard outside. "I saw men, blindfolded with their hands cuffed behind them," she told Middle East Watch. "They were wearing Kurdish cummerbunds and headscarves (jamadani)." It was the first time she had been aware of male prisoners at Salamiyeh. "I saw those men being put into military vehicles, closed vehicles with only a small hole in the back." As each pairof vehicles was loaded up, they drove away. Another two took their place, then another two, and another. She saw many men moved out of Salamiyeh in this way. She surmised that this had been going on during the six days that the door of Hall No.7 had remained locked: "It had to be for a purpose; otherwise the doors were always left open."69
Shortly after the removal of these blindfolded male prisoners, there was a sudden burst of gunfire. But it turned out to be nothing more ominous than joyful guards letting off their weapons into the air. President Saddam Hussein had declared a general amnesty, they told the women. Now their husbands would be safe. There was to be music, a big party. They even expected the Kurdish women to dance with them.
______
1 Cordesman and Wagner, op. cit. p.3, calculate that there were between 450,000 and 730,000 Iranian and between 150,000 and 340,000 Iraqi deaths. These figures are based on unclassified CIA estimates.
2 The Battle of Muhammad the Prophet of God was the Iraqi drive to remove Iranian troops from the mountainous northern front in mid-June 1988.
3 Analysis: Operation End of Anfal, p.39.
4 ibid.
5 While the PUK had regional commands (malband), the KDP had four branches, or lak, which handled both political and military affairs. Zewa Shkan housed the first lak; the second lak, based in the Smaquli Valley, handled operations in Erbil governorate; the third, in the Qara Dagh village of Ja'faran, ran KDP affairs in al-Ta'mim (Kirkuk) governorate; and the fourth, in the Chwarta area, was responsible for Suleimaniyeh. The KDP also had special units known as the Barzan Forces in Hayat (nahya Mergasur). Middle East Watch interview with Hoshyar Zebari, Washington, D.C., June 7, 1993.
6 Among Kurdish tribes, aghas are the secular and sheikhs the religious leaders. The definitive work on the subject is Martin Van Bruinessen, Agha, Shaikh and State, op. cit..
7 Van Bruinessen, "The Kurds Between Iran and Iraq," p.27.
8 A. Sherzad, "The Kurdish Movement in Iraq, 1975-1988," in Kreyenbroek and Sperl, eds., The Kurds: A Contemporary Overview, p.138.
9 The Army estimated that the KDP itself had between 1,800 and 2,000 fighters in Badinan, divided into a half-dozen local committees. In addition to the KDP, there was a unit of 250-300 PUK peshmerga in the valley of Zewa Shkan, close to the Turkish border and northeast of the summer resort of Amadiya; 200-220 combatants of the Iraqi Communist Party; and seventy "saboteurs" of the Kurdistan Popular Democratic Party of Sami Abd-al-Rahman, a KDP breakaway group. The KDP continues to dispute the accuracy of the army figures. According to senior KDP officials, the organization's combat strength on the eve of Anfal was 8,000, with an additional 36,000 villagers formally registered as members of the civilian "backing force." Middle East Watch interview with Hoshyar Zebari, Washington, D.C., June 7, 1993.
10 "Analysis: Operation End of Anfal," p.2.
11 ibid, p.32.
12 ibid, p.33.
13 Middle East Watch interview, Dohuk, June 10, 1992.
14 Middle East Watch interview, Gund Kosa village, September 5, 1992; see also the 1987 government recommendations on tightening the economic blockade, above p.90.
15 Middle East Watch interview, Kwaneh complex, August 29, 1992.
16 Since the 1930s, Turkey and Iraq had frequently cooperated in suppressing Kurdish dissent. In 1982 the two governments signed an agreement authorizing Turkey to send its armed forces into Iraq in pursuit of rebel Turkish Kurds or in joint operations with the Iraqi Army against Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga. See The Economist, June 18, 1983.
17 According to surveys by the Kurdistan Development and Reconstruction Society (KURDS), a local relief agency.
18 Middle East Watch interview, Dohuk, September 4, 1992.
19 Middle East Watch interview, Zakho, September 1, 1992.
20 Even in internal communications, the Iraqi government evidently treated the matter of its chemical weapons with the utmost secrecy. Letter no. Sh 5/19299 from the Amn director of the governorate of Erbil to all branches, dated December 17, 1988 and classified "secret and personal for addressee only," reads: "Pursuant to the memorandum from the Honorable Office of the Presidency, no. 4/4/11/44154 of December 4, 1988, a decision has been taken to give all letters (memoranda) which contain information about the production of chemical weapons the highest degree of secrecy. Take all necessary measures, keep this memorandum to yourself, and sign for its receipt."
21 One mustashar did allege that chemical artillery was used against the village of Warmilleh, but this could not be confirmed in interviews with residents. Middle East Watch interview, Zakho, September 1, 1992. On the events in Warmilleh, see below pp.272-273.
22 There have also been persistent rumors about Iraq's use of biological weapons, including reports of mysterious and localized outbreaks of disease in peshmerga-controlled areas. At least one document proves that the Iraqi Army did possess stockpiles of such weapons. In a "highly confidential and personal" letter no. H1277, dated August 8, 1986, Erbil district commander Gen. Abd-al-Wahab Izzat instructs all units in his area to carry out a half-yearly stocktaking of all biological and chemical agents in their possession.
23 Galbraith and Van Hollen, op. cit., pp.1, 42. Their list appears to include a number of villages that were affected by windborne gas from other locations. A persistent difficulty in documenting Iraqi chemical attacks is in distinguishing primary sites from other places suffering the secondary effects, and the list on
pp. 323-327 includes only proven primary targets. This is not only a problem of methodology; it is also the most vivid illustration of the indiscriminate character of these weapons.
24 Soil samples from Birjinni were collected on June 10, 1992 by a forensic team assembled by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) and Middle East Watch. They were subsequently analyzed at the Chemical and Biological Defence Establishment of Great Britain's Ministry of Defence at Porton Down, and found to contain trace evidence of the nerve gas GB, also known as Sarin, as well as of mustard gas. See the PHR-Human Rights Watch statement, "Scientific First: Soil Samples Taken from Bomb Craters in Northern Iraq Reveal Nerve Gas--Even Four Years Later," April 29, 1993.
25 A full account of the chemical attack on Birjinni is contained in Middle East Watch/Physicians for Human Rights, The Anfal Campaign in Iraqi Kurdistan: The Destruction of Koreme, pp. 31-44.
26 Middle East Watch interview, Gri Gowr complex, August 27, 1992.
27 Middle East Watch interviews, Hizawah complex and Zakho, September 1, 1992.
28 Middle East Watch interview, Warmilleh village, August 31, 1992.
29 Middle East Watch interview, Batufa, April 9, 1993.
30 Middle East Watch interview, Batufa, April 9, 1993.
31 A number of Middle East Watch interviews produced strikingly similar lists of the villages attacked with chemicals along Gara Mountain: to the northern side, Dehukeh, Bawarkeh Kavri, Mergeti, Havintka, Birozana, Drisheh, Mijeh, Kavna Mijeh, Spindar Khalfo and Geyrgash; on the mountain itself, Garagu, Goreh, Zewa Shkan, Baluti, Gizeh, Zarkeh, Razikeh, Sarkeh, Rodinya, Shirana and Ikmala; and on the southern side, Spindar, Swareh, Avok and others.
32 Middle East Watch interview, Dohuk, June 10, 1992.
33 Middle East Watch interviews, Jezhnikan complex, May 3, 1992 and Sarseng, April 11, 1993.
34 Middle East Watch interview, Dohuk, June 6, 1992.
35 Middle East Watch interview, Dohuk, June 2, 1992.
36 Middle East Watch interview, Amadiya, August 29, 1992. According to this fighter, the helicopter attacks included the renewed use of chemical weapons.
37 "Analysis: Operation End of Anfal," p.39.
38 It is clear that a very serious incident occurred either in the Bazeh gorge, through which thousands of civilians fled in an attempt to cross the main Zakho-Baluka road, or in nearby Bazeh village, a peshmerga headquarters. During their September 1988 interviews with refugees in Turkey, Galbraith and Van Hollen spoke with two people who reported witnessing a massacre of some 1,300 people, including women in children, in Bazeh village. According to these accounts, the victims were machinegunned and then buried in mass graves dug by bulldozers. The British film-maker Gwynne Roberts interviewed two teenage refugees in Turkey, who claimed to have witnessed a chemical attack on the Bazeh gorge in which "more than 3,000" people died. According to one of these witnesses,"thousands of soldiers with gas masks and gloves" entered the gorge the next day, dragging the bodies into piles and setting fire to them. However, Middle East Watch interviews in Bazeh and surrounding villages turned up no recollection of such an event four years later. Neither were there any reports of significant deaths or disappearances of women and children that might have occurred during an attack such as those described. Exactly what took place at Bazeh remains an enigma.
39 Middle East Watch interview, Dohuk, September 7, 1992.
40 Middle East Watch interviews, Jezhnikan complex, May 3 and July 13, 1992.
41 Middle East Watch interview, Amadiya, August 29, 1992. Gen. Zareb, in his "Analysis: Operation End of Anfal," acknowledged the problem of frequent vehicle breakdowns.
42 There is a brief account of conditions at the fort in Mangesh in The Destruction of Koreme, p.58.
43 According to a dossier compiled by the Kurdistan Reconstruction and Development Society, some 310 villages were destroyed in the Dohuk governorate during the Final Anfal. The internal Iraqi Army figure for the total number of males taken into custody during the Final Anfal, including "saboteurs" who surrendered or were captured, is 3,063. See below p.289. The pattern of male disappearances from villages surveyed by Middle East Watch suggests that the total numbers may be rather higher.
44 It should be noted, however, that at least some of the Dohuk prisoners were subsequently transferred to Topzawa, which remained in operation to the very end of the Anfal campaign.
45 Middle East Watch interview, Zakho, June 24, 1992.
46 The commander himself is extremely unlikely to have been under orders to kill all those he apprehended, regardless of age or gender, since there are no documented instances of this occurring. If this report of his comments is accurate, he may have had in mind what would happen later to those he handed over into the custody of Amn and Istikhbarat. Middle East Watch interview, Khaneq complex, August 27, 1992.
47 In a curious footnote to this story, the families were detained after the September 6 amnesty by Amn, which sent them on via the fort at Dohuk to the complex of Baharka--entirely in line with the bureaucratic logic of Anfal. Middle East Watch interview, Hizawa complex, September 1, 1992.
48 The story of this village is told in considerable detail in The Destruction of Koreme, especially pp.12-29, 45-52.
49 There was some debate among the villagers as to whether all the members of this group had been carrying weapons when they surrendered. See The Destruction of Koreme, pp.45-47.
50 The sloppiness of the Koreme execution was remarkable in itself. Even more surprising was the fact that one of the six who survived, a 34-year old man, was wounded by the gunfire, but removed to the hospital in Mangesh the nextday by a jahsh unit. He was treated there and eventually transferred to the fort at Dohuk--which he also, inexplicably, survived. See The Destruction of Koreme, pp.51-52.
51 According to Ba'ath Party membership forms found in the Iraqi government archives, merely concealing prior membership in another political party constituted grounds for the death penalty.
52 These four were later disappeared from the fort at Dohuk, according to a Middle East Watch interview, Dohuk, June 9, 1992.
53 This account is based on the testimony to relatives of one of the eight men, who was wounded in the shooting, escaped temporarily to a nearby jahsh post in the complex of Qadish, but was later handed over by his fearful family to Amn in Sarseng. From there he disappeared. The seven men who died were Muhammad Saleh Abd-al-Qader (b.1938), Serdar Sa'id Muhammad (b.1957), Mustafa Abd-al-Qader Mustafa (b.1926 or 1928), Suleiman Sha'aban Checho (b.1956), Adel Muhammad Khaled (b.1961), Ramadan Ahmad Hamou (b.1968) and Hamid Ahmad Hamou (birthdate unknown). The temporary survivor was Banjin Mustafa Abd-al-Qader (b.1966). The full names of the twenty-seven men executed in Koreme are given in The Destruction of Koreme, p.50.
54 "Analysis: Operation End of Anfal," pp.17-19.
55 ibid, p.16.
56 ibid, pp.17-19.
57 ibid, p.27.
58 ibid, pp.38-39.
59 ibid p.39.
60 ibid pp.57-60.
61 Middle East Watch interview, Jezhnikan complex, May 3, 1992.
62 Middle East Watch interview, Telkabber complex, August 28, 1992.
63 Apart from a handful who reportedly died of disease and starvation, the elderly prisoners survived Nizarkeh. So, by a curious quirk, did at least two younger men who were confined with the elderly because of their injuries. One was the wounded survivor of the execution squad at Koreme; the other was a man suffering from the effects of the poison gas attack on Warmilleh, the only adult male to survive from that village. Middle East Watch interviews, Koreme and Warmilleh villages, May 30 and August 31, 1988.
64 Middle East Watch interview, Jezhnikan complex, May 3, 1992.
65 The witness identified two of the peshmerga as Muhammad Taher Musa, age twenty-five, from Zewa Shkan village (Sarseng), and Lazgin Omar, age between twenty and twenty-two, from Ikmala village (Mangesh). Middle East Watch interview, Bateli, Dohuk, June 12, 1992.
66 Middle East Watch interview, Dohuk, September 4, 1992.
67 Middle East Watch interview, Kwaneh complex, August 29, 1992.
68 One witness described the blue vehicles as being "as long as buses, but not looking like buses," with a single small window high up on one side, near the driver's compartment. This witness saw between seven and ten of these buses leaving the fort each day for several days. Middle East Watch interview, Dohuk, September 4, 1992.
69 Middle East Watch interview, Bateli, Dohuk, June 12, 1992.
IP: Logged |
posted
* * * It was Iraq that launched the war in 1980, and Iraq that maintained the initiative for much of the eight years that the conflict lasted.6 Nonetheless, the Iranians did succeed in putting Iraq on the defensive on a number of occasions. In July 1983, Iranian troops had seized the important border garrison town of Haj Omran, east of the town of Rawanduz. But the highpoint of the war from Iran's point of view was its Val Fajr 8 offensive of February 1986; this included a surprise attack that seized the marshy Fao peninsula, thereby blocking Iraq's access to the Persian Gulf.
Fresh from its success in Fao, which inflicted huge losses on the Iraqi Army (and reinforced the U.S. "tilt" toward Baghdad), Iran reopened its second front in the north, in the rugged mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan. For more than six years, the Iraqi regime had ceded de facto control overmuch of the rural north to the peshmerga; now foreign troops threatened to occupy more and more border territory, diverting much-needed forces from the southern front around Basra. As the October 1986 raid by Iranian pasdaran suggested to nervous Iraqi officials, the vital Kirkuk oilfields, almost a hundred miles from the border, were no longer immune.
There is debate among scholars as to the precise threat that Iraq faced from Iran at this late stage of the war. Certainly, Iran's huge Karbala 5 offensive against Basra's Fish Lake in January 1987 marked its final use of the "human wave" tactic of hurling tens of thousands of troops--most of them poorly trained basij7--against fixed enemy targets. The resulting casualty levels were simply not sustainable, as Teheran now acknowledged. On February 12, Iranian troops returned to the Haj Omran area with a small offensive codenamed Fatah 4--although some believe that this was less a real attack than a diversionary action for propaganda purposes.8 But three weeks later, on March 4, a new and more alarming Iranian assault, this one codenamed Karbala 7, managed to penetrate eight miles into Iraqi territory east of Rawanduz with a joint military force which this time included peshmerga of the KDP and the PUK. The Iraqi regime was infuriated by these renewed signs of collusion, particularly since they now involved both rival Kurdish parties.9 On March 13, in a rare interview with a foreign reporter, Iraqi cabinet minister Hashim Hassan al-'Aqrawi commented, "The Iranians are trying to use these people to carry out dirty missions, and since they know the geography of the area and its ins and outs, the Iranians use them merely as guides for the Khomeini Guards andthe Iranian forces." The Kurds--or at least Talabani's PUK--even began to talk openly of dismembering the Iraqi state.10
On March 14 or 15, Saddam Hussein presided over a five-hour meeting of the Armed Forces General Command. Ali Hassan al-Majid was also reportedly in attendance. Any outsider's account of what took place in such a secretive meeting must be highly speculative, but according to at least two accounts, the Iraqi president told his senior officers that he feared a "defeat by attrition."11 On March 18, the Revolutionary Command Council and the Ba'ath Party's Regional Command jointly decided to appoint al-Majid, the president's cousin, as Secretary General of the Northern Bureau of the Ba'ath Party Organization. His predecessors, Sa'adi Mahdi Saleh and Muhammad Hamza al-Zubeidi, had allowed the Kurdish problem to fester for too long; al-Majid would not repeat their mistakes.
In essence, the disagreements among scholars of the Iran-Iraq War are academic--at least as far as the Kurds are concerned. Saddam Hussein may indeed have foreseen a slow defeat as a result of Baghdad's existing policies; alternatively, he may have seen Iran's stalled Fish Lake offensive in January as a turning point in Iraq's favor, and an opportunity to press home his advantage. Either way, it is apparent that he decided that exceptional measures were necessary to settle the Kurdish problem, that troublesome sideshow of the Iran-Iraq conflict, once and for all.
Ali Hassan al-Majid's extraordinary new powers--equivalent in the Autonomous Region to those of the president himself--came into effect with decree no. 160 of the Revolutionary Command Council, dated March 29, 1987. Al-Majid was to "represent the Regional Command of the Party and the Revolutionary Command Council in the execution of their policies for the whole of the Northern Region, including the Kurdistan Autonomous Region, for the purpose of protecting security and order, safeguarding stability, and applying autonomous rule in the region." The decree went on to explain that, "Comrade al-Majid's decisions shall be mandatory for allstate agencies, be they military, civilian and security." His fiat would apply "particularly in relation to matters that are the domain of the National Security Council and the Northern Affairs Committee." A second order by Saddam Hussein, issued on April 20, 1987, gave al-Majid the additional authority to set the budget of the Northern Affairs Committee.
Al-Majid's "decisions and directives" were to be obeyed without question by all intelligence agencies--including military intelligence (Istikhbarat)--and by all domestic security forces; by the Popular Army Command (Qiyadat al-Jaysh al-Sha'abi); and by all military commands in the northern region. Decree 160 and its riders leave no room for doubt: simply put, Ali Hassan al-Majid was to be the supreme commander, the overlord, of all aspects of Anfal.
* * * Almost a year would pass before that campaign began. But within weeks of al-Majid's appointment, the logic of Anfal was fully apparent. Its legal framework was set in place; new standing orders were issued to the security forces; and a two-month wave of military attacks, village destruction and forced relocations was unleashed--a rough draft, as it were, of the larger campaign ahead. "I gave myself two years to end the activity of the saboteurs," al-Majid later told his aides.12 And with the first warm days of spring and the melting of the snow in the mountains, al-Majid embarked on his brutal three-stage process of "village collectivization"--in other words, the wholesale destruction of hundreds of Kurdish farming villages and the relocation of their residents into mujamma'at.
Even his top military commanders were shocked by the brutality of what he had in mind. He later confided to aides:
When we made the decision to destroy and collectivize the villages and draw a dividing line between us and the saboteurs, the first one to express his doubts to me and before the President was [former Fifth Corps commander] Tali'a al-Durri. The first one who alarmed me was Tali'a al-Durri. To this day the impact of Tali'a is evident. He didn't destroy all the villages that I asked him to at thattime. And this is the longest-standing member of the Ba'ath Party. What about the other people then? How were we to convince them to solve the Kurdish problem and slaughter the saboteurs?13
The timetable for the three phases of al-Majid's campaign is clearly spelled out in a number of official documents, notably including a letter from the General Staff of the jahsh to the command of the Fifth Army Corps, dated April 13, 1987. This appears to be in response to a verbal order from the Fifth Corps commander concerning "final obligations in winding up [illegible] procedures for the termination of sabotage in the Northern Region, [and] the manner and the priorities of implementing the evacuation and demolition of security-prohibited villages." The first phase of the operation would begin on April 21 and end on May 20; the second would start immediately on May 21 and continue until June 20.14 Military and security maps were "redlined," with clear boundaries drawn to denote areas "prohibited for security reasons." Amn set up a special "prohibited villages committee" to oversee the forbidden areas. Within the zones designated for phases one and two, the order was clear and explicit: "All prohibited villages will be destroyed."15
A former military intelligence (Istikhbarat) officer who later crossed over to the PUK told Middle East Watch of a meeting in Kirkuk that spring, attended by the governors of Erbil, Kirkuk, Dohuk and Suleimaniyeh, the commanders of the First and Fifth Army Corps, divisional military commanders and senior Ba'ath Party officials. Ali Hassan al-Majid, speaking in characteristically irascible tones, gave orders that "no house was to be left standing" in the Kurdish villages on the Erbil plain. Only Arab villages would be spared.16 At a later meeting in Erbil,the witness heard al-Majid repeat these orders, and back them up with a personal threat: "I will come and observe," he said, "and if I find any house intact, I will hold the section commander responsible." After receiving these orders, the former Istikhbarat officer said, "I got two IFAs [East German-built military trucks] full of explosives from a warehouse in Erbil. I commandeered 200 bulldozers from civilians of Erbil--by force, with no payment. We started destroying mud villages with bulldozers, and dynamiting the cement structures. We used military engineers for this." The troops went in at dawn; wells were filled in and electricity supplies torn out, leaving only the poles standing. After the engineering work was completed, Istikhbarat would inspect the affected villages by helicopter. If any structure was found to be still standing, the sectional commander would be ordered to return and finish the job, and would risk disciplinary action. It was an extraordinarily thorough enterprise, and the evidence is visible all over Iraqi Kurdistan, with many villages not so much demolished as pulverized.
No farming of any sort was to continue in the destroyed areas. Government aircraft would conduct regular overflights to detect any unauthorized farming, and local security committees would be held responsible for any violations. Stringent restrictions were imposed on all grain sales in the Kurdish areas, as well as on agricultural trade across governorate boundaries.
Al-Majid also reportedly issued specific rules of engagement at the Erbil meeting. The army should only open fire in cases of active resistance, he ordered. But if resistance were encountered, the entire village population was to be killed in reprisal. In the event, there was no resistance, since the villages selected for the 1987 clearances were on or near the main roads and under government control. Only during Phase III of the campaign would the troops venture into peshmerga-held territory.
* * * The Chemical Threshold Even before the first stage of the village clearances got underway, the Iraqi regime had crossed a new barrier in its war against the Kurds. Throughout the early weeks of al-Majid's rule, the peshmerga--and in particular the PUK--kept up a steady rhythm of military actions. In earlyApril the PUK launched its most ambitious drive to date in the Jafati Valley, which runs southeast from Dukan Lake. The valley was home to the PUK's national headquarters, and thousands of peshmerga congregated there for the assault. In a matter of hours they had overrun dozens of small military posts and taken hundreds of prisoners.
The government's response was not long in coming. "Our leadership received information that the Iraqis were going to use chemical weapons," said a PUK peshmerga who fought in this campaign:
They issued instructions on what to do in case of a chemical attack. We were instructed to put wet cloths on our faces, to light fires, or to go to places located above the point of impact. In the beginning, the government used chemical artillery shells. This was in the Jafati and Shahrbazar valleys [on April 15], one or two nights after our victory. We didn't realize they were chemicals. The sound was not as loud as the ordinary shelling, and we smelled rotten apples and garlic.... Uncounted numbers of shells fell on us, but they had little effect.17
This was not the case the following day, however, in the villages of Balisan and Sheikh Wasan. These two settlements lie scarcely a mile and a half apart, in a steep-sided valley south of the town of Rawanduz. The Balisan valley was home to the PUK's third malband, or regional command.18 Yet few peshmerga were present on the afternoon of April 16, since most had been taking part in the military action in the Jafativalley, on the far side of Dukan Lake. Instead, their families would be made to suffer the repercussions.
Balisan itself was a sizeable village, which until April 1987 had some 250 households (about 1,750 people)19 of the Khoshnaw tribe, as well as four mosques, a primary school and an intermediate school. As the crow flies, it lay some twelve miles east of the town of Shaqlawa; Sheikh Wasan, a smaller settlement of about 150 houses, lay nestled in the hills a little way to the northeast. The valley was long-time peshmerga country; the Barzani movement had controlled it from 1961-74, and the PUK, through its third malband, since the outbreak of the war with Iran in 1980. Since about 1983, the Balisan Valley had been a "prohibited area," with government checkpoints attempting with only partial success to prevent the entry of foodstuffs and supplies. Food rations had been suspended, and government teachers withdrawn from the schools. Iraqi aircraft made frequent harassment attacks, to which the villagers responded by hiding away in deep, dark caves in the surrounding mountains. But ground troops had never managed to penetrate the valley.
In the drizzly late afternoon of April 16, the villagers had returned home from the fields and were preparing dinner when they heard the drone of aircraft approaching. Some stayed put in their houses; others made it as far as their air-raid shelters before the planes, a dozen of them, came in sight, wheeling low over the two villages to unload their bombs. There were a number of muffled explosions.
Until this moment no government had ever used chemical weapons against its own civilian population. But the plummeting enlistment rate among Iranian volunteers over the previous year, when poison gas was widely used on the battlefield, was vivid testimony to the Iraqi government of the power of this forbidden weapon to instil terror. More gruesome yet was the decision to record the event on videotape.
The Iraqi regime had long conducted its record-keeping in meticulous fashion. (Those in neighboring countries say, only half-jokingly, that the Iraqis are the "Prussians of the Middle East.")20 From the grandest decree to the most trivial matter, all the business of the security forces was recorded in letters and telegrams, dated, numbered and rubber-stamped on receipt. Even when an original command carried a high security classification, abundant numbers of handwritten or typed copies were later prepared, to be handed down the chain of command and filed, the writers apparently confident that prying eyes would never see these secrets. In the mid-1980s, the Iraqi security services developed a fascination for video technology as a valuable new form of record-keeping. The actions of the security forces were now to be routinely documented on tape: village clearances, executions of captured peshmerga, even chemical weapons attacks on civilians.
The official videotape of the Balisan Valley bombing, reportedly made by a member of the jahsh, shows towering columns and broad, drifting clouds of white, gray and pinkish smoke. A cool evening breeze was blowing off the mountains, and it brought strange smells--pleasant ones at first, suggestive of roses and flowers, or, to others, apples and garlic. Other witnesses still say there was the less attractive odor of insecticide. But then, said one elderly woman from Balisan, "It was all dark, covered with darkness, we could not see anything, and were not able to see each other. It was like fog. And then everyone became blind." Some vomited. Faces turned black; people experienced painful swellings under the arms, and women under their breasts. Later, a yellow watery discharge would ooze from the eyes and nose. Many of those who survived suffered severe vision disturbances, or total blindness, for up to a month. In Sheikh Wasan, survivors watched as a woman staggered around blindly, clutching her dead child, and not realizing it was dead. Some villagers ran into the mountains and died there. Others, who had been closer to the place of impact of the bombs, died where they stood.21 One witness, a peshmerga, told MiddleEast Watch that a second attack followed an hour later, this one conducted by a fleet of helicopters.22
The few fighters who had been at home when the raid occurred were taken by the PUK for treatment in Iran, fearing that they would not survive a visit to an Iraqi hospital. (The presence of peshmerga in the village is, one should add, quite irrelevant from a legal point of view. By their very nature, chemical weapons make no distinction between civilian and military targets, and their use is outlawed under any circumstances.)23
The following morning, ground troops and jahsh entered Balisan, looted the villagers' deserted homes and razed them to the ground. The same day, or perhaps a day later--having presumably left sufficient time for the gas to dissipate--army engineers dynamited and bulldozed Sheikh Wasan. But the surviving inhabitants had already fled during the night of the attack. Some made their way to the city of Suleimaniyeh, and a few to Shaqlawa. But most headed southeast, to the town of Raniya, where there was a hospital. They were helped on their way by people from neighboring villages, some of which--including Barukawa, Beiro, Kaniberd and Tutma--had also suffered from the effects of the windborne gas.
The people of Beiro sent tractor-drawn carts to Sheikh Wasan, and ten of these vehicles, each carrying fifty or sixty people, left for Raniya. At the complex of Seruchawa, just outside the town, the tractors stopped to bury the bodies of fifty people who were already dead. The refugees who reached Raniya spent one night there. Local doctors washed their wounds and gave them eye-drops, but these did nothing to ease the effects of the gas on their vision. The refugees spent a restless night, and the hospital at Raniya was full of the sound of weeping.
The next morning, agents from Amn --and some witnesses say also from military intelligence (Istikhbarat)-- arrived at the hospital. They ordered everyone out of bed and into a number of waiting Nissan Coasters that were parked outside.24 These would take them to the city of Erbil for medical care, the villagers were told; however, they were warned later that day that they would only be given treatment if they told the doctors that their injuries were the result of an attack by Iranian airplanes.25
At about 9:00 that morning, exhausted and bedraggled people in Kurdish dress began to stream into the emergency room of the Republic Hospital in Erbil. One witness counted four packed coasters, each with twenty-one seats, and seven other vehicles--both cars and pickup trucks. Others placed the number of arrivals at perhaps 200, of all ages, men, women and children. They were all unarmed civilians. Four were dead on arrival. The survivors arriving from Ranya told the doctors that they had been attacked with chemical weapons. Despite their burns, their blindness and other, more superficial injuries, those who had survived the journey from the Balisan Valley were generally still able to walk, although some were unconscious.
Even with the assistance of doctors who rushed across from the nearby Maternity and Pediatric Hospital, the facilities were not sufficient to deal with such a large-scale emergency. There were far from enough beds to deal with so many victims; many of the patients were laid on the floors, and the occupants of three of the four coasters were obliged to wait in the parking lot while the preliminary triage was done and the first treatment carried out. On examination, the doctors found that the victims' eyes were dried out and glued shut. Having some rudimentary notion of how to treat chemical victims, they applied eye drops, washed their burns and administered injections of atropine, a powerful antidote to nerve agents.
The doctors had been at work on their patients for about an hour when the head of the local branch office of Amn arrived, an officer by the name of Hassan Naduri. The staff of the Erbil Republic Hospital, and especially the municipal morgue which was attached to it, had a great deal of prior and subsequent experience of Amn. The city housed not only themunicipal office of the secret police agency, but also Amn's headquarters for the Erbil governorate and its operational command for the entire "autonomous region" of Iraqi Kurdistan. For several years the Republic Hospital morgue had received a steady flow of corpses from both Amn offices. Hospital records examined by Middle East Watch give details of approximately 500 bodies received from Amn between 1968-1987--although there is no reason to suppose that this was more than a very incomplete record.
These deaths were recorded in the form of letters of transmittal from Amn, and the agency's bureaucracy appears to have been scrupulously efficient. Two copies of each letter of transmittal were sent to the morgue; the doctor on duty was required to sign one of these and then return it to Amn. Hospital staff also kept a second, secret ledger of their own, entitled "Record Book of Armed Dead People from Erbil." This covered a three-year period beginning in June 1987; the final entry was dated June 25, 1990. The entries were cross-referenced to the number of the relevant Amn transmittal letter. In interviews with Middle East Watch, hospital staff also estimated that they made out some 300 death certificates, on orders from Amn, for named individuals whose bodies were never made available to them. This practice began in 1987.
There appears to have been no single standard procedure: Corpses arrived at the Erbil morgue in a number of different ways. Sometimes the staff would receive a telephone call from Amn, often in the middle of the night, telling them that they should prepare to receive the body or bodies of "executed saboteurs" and ordering them to issue death certificates. Individual hospital porters were hand-picked for the task of handling the bodies, presumably because they enjoyed the trust of the Amn agents. On some occasions the corpses arrived in pickup trucks or station wagons, covered with blankets. At other times, hospital ambulances would be summoned to collect the bodies from the Amn headquarters in Einkawa, a Christian suburb of Erbil, or from a nearby military base. Although some showed signs of having been beaten to death, most appeared to have been executed by firing squads; they had multiple gunshot wounds, sometimes as many as thirty, and had their hands and upper arms bound behind them,as if they had been tied standing to a post.26 The eyes were blindfolded with articles of clothing such as a Kurdish cummerbund or headscarf. The bodies had been stripped of their wristwatches, IDs and other personal possessions.
However the bodies arrived, the entire operation was shrouded in secrecy, and morgue staff were ordered (under threat of death) neither to contact the relatives of the deceased nor to divulge their names to anyone else in the hospital. Doctors on duty in the morgue were not allowed to touch or examine the bodies; their duty was merely to furnish death certificates. If the cadavers arrived during daylight hours, the entire area around the morgue would be cordoned off by Amn guards and other hospital personnel warned away from the area. Amn personnel would even take charge of the morgue's freezer facilities until municipal employees arrived to take the corpses away for secret burial in the paupers' section of the Erbil cemetery. If an especially large number of corpses was involved, a bulldozer would be commandeered from a local private contractor to dig a mass grave. The morgue staff were forbidden to wash the bodies or otherwise prepare them for burial facing Mecca, as Islamic ritual demands. "Dogs have no relation to Islam," an Amn officer told one employee.27
When Hassan Naduri arrived at the Republic Hospital on the morning of April 17, 1987, every doctor in the hospital was busy dealing with the emergency. The officer was accompanied by two other Amn agents; a large number of guards also remained outside in the hospital courtyard. According to some witnesses, Hassan Naduri was accompanied by Ibrahim Zangana, the governor of Erbil, and by a local Ba'ath Partyofficial known only by his first name, Abd-al-Mon'em. The Amn officers questioned the hospital guards, demanding to know where the new patients were from and who the doctors were who were treating them. They then repeated these questions to the medical personnel, and demanded to know what treatment was being given. With these questions answered, Capt. Naduri telephoned Amn headquarters for instructions. After hanging up, he ordered that all treatment cease immediately. He told the doctors to remove the dressings from their patients' wounds. The doctors asked why. The captain responded that he had received orders from his superiors to transfer all the patients to the city's Military Hospital. At first, the hospital staff demurred, but the three Amn agents drew their pistols and ordered them to stop what they were doing at once. Otherwise they would be taken off to Amn headquarters themselves.
After a second phone call, this time ostensibly to the Military Hospital, a number of ambulances or trucks arrived and took the patients away, together with those who had remained, for a full hour now, in the three parked coasters. Later that day, the doctors telephoned the Military Hospital to check on the condition of their patients. But they had never arrived there, and the doctors never saw any of the survivors of the Balisan Valley chemical attack again. They heard later that loaded military ambulances had been seen driving off in the direction of Makhmour, to the southwest of Erbil.
In fact, a handful of survivors told Middle East Watch, the Balisan Valley victims were taken to a former police station that was now an Amn detention center, a stark white cement building in the Arab quarter of the city, near the Baiz casino. There was a chaotic scene on arrival, as Amn agents attempted to sort out the detainees by age and sex, and in the confusion several people managed to escape. At least one woman fled leaving her children behind. Those who remained were thrown into locked cells, guarded by uniformed agents--some dressed all in green and others all in blue. Here they were held for several days with neither food, blankets nor medical attention.
Hamoud Sa'id Ahmad is an employee of the municipal morgue attached to Erbil's Republic Hospital, a dignified middle-aged man who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Over the next few days, he was summoned on a number of occasions to the Amn jail in the city's Teirawa quarter and ordered to pick up bodies and prepare them for burial. Over a three-day period he counted sixty-four bodies. Arriving to collect them, he saw other prisoners wandering around in the prison courtyard building. Some hada clear fluid oozing from their mouths; others had dark, burn-like marks on their bodies, especially on the throat and hands. He saw men, women and children in detention, including several nursing babies in their mothers' arms. The bodies, kept in a separate locked cell, bore similar marks. None showed any signs of gunshot wounds. Most of the dead appeared to be children and elderly people. An Amn official told Ahmad that "they are saboteurs, all saboteurs we attacked with chemical weapons." An ambulance driver told Ahmad that he recognized one of the dead as a Republic Hospital employee from Sheikh Wasan.
Family members waiting outside the jail for news said that the detainees were being held as hostages, to compel their peshmerga relatives to surrender. On the last of his three visits, Ahmad saw two large buses pull up outside the prison, their windows sealed with cloths. Later in the day, a female prisoner managed to whisper to him, "Do you know what the buses were doing here? They took all the men away, to the south, like the Barzanis [in 1983]." The men were never seen alive again.28
After the mass disappearance of the men, the surviving women and children were taken out during the night and driven off in the direction of Khalifan, three hours to the northeast of Erbil. At a place called Alana, they were dumped in an open plain, on the banks of a river, and left to fend for themselves. They were reunited here with the Balisan Valley villagers who had fled to Suleimaniyeh. These people reported that they had been detained there in a converted hospital that was guarded by Amn agents and off limits to civilians. (There is no independent account of what happened to their menfolk, some of whom also disappeared.)
At Alana, the mother who had escaped from the Amn jail in Erbil was reunited with her children. She recognized families from the villages of Kaniberd and Tutma, as well as from Sheikh Wasan and Balisan, who told her that many children had died in this place of hunger, thirst and exposure. (With the exception of a few villages, the entire Balisan Valley had been evacuated in terror: Ironically, as we shall see, their flight mayhave saved thousands of lives during the following year's Anfal campaign.) Eventually, sympathetic Kurdish residents of the town of Khalifan took some of the survivors into their homes--"in their arms and on their backs"--and cared for them until they regained their health and strength. Other survivors ended up in the squalid government complex of Seruchawa, where so many of their fellow villagers had fled on the night of the chemical attack. When the elderly mullah of Balisan went to Ba'ath Party officials at Seruchawa to plead for an improvement in conditions in the complex, he was told contemptuously, "You're not human beings."29
* * * On the basis of interviews with four survivors, and with a number of medical and morgue personnel in Erbil, it is possible to give a rough estimate of the numbers who died as a result of the chemical bombing of Balisan, Sheikh Wasan and neighboring villages.
· Twenty-four deaths in Balisan, as a direct result of exposure to chemical weapons; these people were buried in a mass grave in the village;
· 103 deaths in Sheikh Wasan, including about fifty buried in a mass grave in the complex of Seruchawa. The dead included thirty-three children aged under four, another twenty-eight aged 5-14, and nine elderly people, aged 60-85;30
· Eight or nine deaths in the hospital at Raniya;
· Four dead on arrival at the Erbil Emergency Hospital;
· Between sixty-four and 142 deaths in the Amn detention center in Erbil, of untreated injuries sustained in the chemical bombing, aggravated by starvation and neglect. These included two elderly womennamed Selma Mustafa Hamid and Adila Shinko, and a nine-year old girl, Howsat Abdullah Khidr;
· Two busloads of adult men and teenage boys, disappeared from the Amn detention center in Erbil and presumed by Middle East Watch to have been executed later. A number of witnesses place the number at between seventy and seventy-six: twenty-two men from Balisan, fifty from Sheikh Wasan and four from other nearby villages. Among these were Muhammad Ibrahim Khidr, aged eighteen, and Mohsen Ibrahim Khidr, aged twelve, the two youngest sons of the mullah of Balisan;
· "Many children" dumped on the barren plain near Khalifan.
Allowing for some overlap, Middle East Watch calculates that at least 225, and perhaps as many as 400, civilians from the Balisan Valley died as a direct or indirect result of the Iraqi air force's chemical attack on their villages on April 16, 1987.
The Sheikh Wasan and Balisan attacks are significant for a number of reasons. First, they are the earliest fully documented account of chemical attacks on civilians by the Iraqi regime. Second, they offer concrete evidence of the security forces' intent, on the orders of higher authority, to disappear and murder large numbers of civilian non-combatants from areas of conflict in Iraqi Kurdistan. In this sense, like the mass abduction of the Barzani men in 1983, the Balisan Valley disappearances directly prefigure Anfal--although with the crucial difference that women and children were directly targeted. Similarly, the treatment of those who survived the actual bombing, in particular their separation by age and sex, their illegal confinement without food or medical care, and the dumping of women and children in barren areas far from their homes, foreshadowed many of the techniques that were employed on a much vaster scale during the 1988 campaign. The Balisan Valley episode also illustrates the central role that would be played in the extermination campaign by the General Security Directorate--Amn. The events at Erbil's Republic Hospital additionally constitute the gravest possible violation of medical neutrality.
* * * The regime was far from finished with these rebellious valleys, however. Amidst the thousands of pages of secret Iraqi intelligence reports on air-raids and village burnings, Middle East Watch researchers discovered one that contained an intriguing detail. It is a brief report from Amn Erbil, dated June 11, 1987, on a recent airstrike on five villages in the Malakan Valley, a few miles to the east of Balisan and Sheikh Wasan. In the course of the attack, it noted, "thirty persons lost their eyesight." Two of the victims were named. Here was an unmistakable fingerprint, for there is only one kind of weapon that characteristically causes blindness, and that is poison gas.31 During a subsequent field-trip to Iraqi Kurdistan, it proved possible to interview one of the blinded survivors--one of many occasions on which a precise match could be made between documentary and testimonial evidence.
The man's name was Kamal, and he was living in Choman, a destroyed town on the road from Rawanduz to Iran.32 An active peshmerga, Kamal had already experienced chemical warfare in the Jafati Valley, and his account of the April 15 attack there is included above at pp.59-61. Hearing the news of the devastating attack on the Balisan Valley the next day, he rushed back to his family in the nearby village of Upper Bileh. He found that they had taken refuge in some caves in the mountains. It was bitterly cold, and Kamal persuaded them to return cautiously to their homes.
At 6:00 a.m on May 27, his wife woke him to warn him that the village was under attack.
"We knew it was chemicals because the sound [of the explosions] was not loud. There were many bombs. I told my family that it wasn't a chemical attack because I didn't want to scare them, but they knew what it was. So we began burning the branches we had stored for animal feed, and they made a very strong fire. We also soakedcloths and headscarves at the spring. My aged father was there. The attack was so intense that we were unable to leave the village; that was why we lit the fires. There was a separate spring for the women, and I told everyone, men and women, to jump into the water. The attack lasted until 10:00 a.m., and I sent my brother to the malband to get medical help. By sunset the situation was getting worse. Several people had gone blind.
After sunset we crossed the stream and moved to a rocky area outside the village. Our situation was very bad. We had all been affected by the chemicals. We had trouble seeing and we were short of breath. We had nosebleeds and fainting spells. We sent someone to the surrounding villages to fetch water, and I offered to pay them whatever they asked for. But the villagers were afraid to come, thinking that the chemicals were contagious. But people from Kandour village, who are very brave people, came to bring us milk.33
In the meantime, my brother and a companion had reached the malband, but on the way back they collapsed because they had lost their sight. People from other villages sent mules to bring them back. They were carrying some medicine and eyedrops provided by the malband. When morning came, no one had died, but things were very bad. The third malband sent us a doctor and money to buy horses that could carry us to Iran. The women with us were in a terrible state, and we had to spoon-feed them. The small children were hardly breathing. We went to Malakan, where it was colder. We thought it would be better because of the fresh air. Then we reached the Sewaka area. There were people there who raised animals and they took pity on us. They wept a lot and gave us food. Next morning we left for Warta. We had to cover our faces because the bright light hurt us like needles stuck into our eyes."34
On the third night, the caravan of survivors reached the lower slopes of Qandil Mountain, a towering peak of almost 12,000 feet on the Iranian border south of Haj Omran. Once they reached Iran, they were given medical care. All of them lived through the ordeal but one--Kamal's eighteen-month old nephew.
* * * The Spring 1987 Campaign: Village Destruction and Resettlement Five days after the Balisan Valley chemical attack, the infantry troops and bulldozers went to work on hundreds of villages in Iraqi Kurdistan. According to Resool's authoritative survey, the army obliterated at least 703 Kurdish villages from the map during the campaigns of 1987. Of these, 219 were in the Erbil area; 122 in the hilly plain known as Germian, to the southeast of Kirkuk; and 320 in various districts of the governorate of Suleimaniyeh. Badinan, too was hit, although less severely, with the Kurdistan Reconstruction and Development Society (KURDS), a local relief agency, listing fifty villages that were destroyed in Dohuk governorate. Most of the villages destroyed during Ali Hassan al-Majid's "first and second phases" lay along the main roads and were under government control. Their removal had the effect of physically severing the peshmerga-controlled rural areas from the rest of the country.
For destruction on this scale, the Iraqi state had to deploy vast resources. Yet there were important differences between the village clearances of spring 1987 and the Anfal campaign of the following year. The most important concerned the treatment of residents of the villages destroyed by the army. The 1987 campaign offered them clear, if unpalatable alternatives; Anfal did not.
The inhabitants of Narin, for example, a village in the nahya of Qara Tapa in the southern part of Germian, were relocated in 1987 to theRamadi area, in central Iraq.32 The villagers of nearby Zerdow were warned that their turn was next. They left their homes and moved in with relatives in nearby towns or villages. Some were resettled in the newly opened complex of Benaslawa, six miles from Erbil on the site of an old Kurdish village. They were not punished otherwise, although Zerdow itself was razed to the ground with bulldozers a few days later. One family interviewed by Middle East Watch lost its livestock, furniture and food stores in the destruction of Zerdow, but was paid compensation of 1,000 dinars ($3,000 at the then-official exchange rate). Later, the family was able to build a house in Benaslawa with a 4,500 dinar loan from the state Real Estate Bank.
This was a typical pattern. The villagers were not physically harmed; some token compensation was paid, although it might be withheld if a family refused to accept relocation in the towns or complexes; there was some advance notice of the regime's intent to destroy the village (even if this was not always respected in practice). The villagers of Qishlagh Kon, for example, in the Germian nahya of Qader Karam, were told by soldiers that they had fifteen days to evacuate; in fact, the army moved in and razed their homes well before the expiry of this deadline. According to one man from this village, army troops swept through the area populated by the Kurdish Zangana tribe in April 1987, bulldozing and dynamiting between seventy and one hundred villages along the main road, spread out over three adjacent nahyas--Qader Karam, Qara Hassan and Qara Hanjir.33
Many of the villagers were offered an explicit choice by the soldiers or jahsh. "Go to the saboteurs or join the government," was the message delivered to one Qader Karam village of the Jabari tribe. No neutrality was to be allowed, and a person's physical location would henceforth be taken as proof of their political affiliation. Coming over to the government's side was spoken of as "returning to the national ranks," a phrase that appears in official documents with increasing frequency from early 1987 onward. Previous political loyalties were irrelevant to this new drawing of battle lines, and so was the size of the settlement. Several nahyaswere cleared of their population and/or destroyed during the spring 1987 campaign, including Naujul, Qaradagh, Qara Hanjir, Koks and Sengaw. Shwan followed in September. In the northernmost governorate of Dohuk, the nahya of Kani Masi was evacuated and destroyed, apparently in retaliation for a six-day takeover by KDP forces. Some of these nahyas were towns of several thousand people.
Even a strong jahsh presence offered no protection, if the town lay within a designated area of army operations. As Ali Hassan al-Majid later told a meeting of senior Ba'ath Party officials, "I told the mustashars that the jahsh might say that they liked their villages and would not leave. I said I cannot let your villages stay because I will attack them with chemical weapons. And then you and your family will die."34
For all the scale of the destruction, it is apparent from one batch of official Iraqi files, found in the Amn offices in Erbil and Shaqlawa, that the regime was far from satisfied with the "first stage" of its village clearance program. A watchful, almost apprehensive tone creeps into many government documents from this period. Among the questions put to people surrendering to the authorities from peshmerga-controlled areas was one that asked, "How are the people affected economically and psychologically by the elimination of the villages and other policies?"35
On April 20, Amn Erbil warns its branches that the new campaign of village destruction may provoke demonstrations to mark the 14th anniversary of the bombing of Qala Dizeh on the 24th. On the same day the Erbil Security Committee, presided over by Governor Ibrahim Zangana, warns that "saboteurs" may attack government installations as a reprisal against the deportation of villagers from the "prohibited areas" (manateq al-mahdoureh). On April 22, Governor Zangana predicts that the PUK may even try to bring in the International Committee of the Red Cross to observe the clearances. Three days later, on April 25, Amn Erbil issues an alert warning of peshmerga reprisal raids on Arab villages; it also complains that government forces destroying the village of Freez have come under attack from "saboteurs" and that air-cover has failed to materialize as requested. By May 20, the director of Amn Shaqlawa iscomplaining to Erbil that the "saboteurs" have been able to exploit the unpopularity of the campaign; in particular he expresses irritation that no complexes have been made ready for the villagers who are to be relocated, and that many of them have been obliged to remain in the open air, exposed to the elements.36
* * * Early Uses of al-Majid's Special Powers In these early months of Ali Hassan al-Majid's rule, the Ba'ath Party tightened the noose around the population of rural Kurdistan through a series of sweeping decrees and administrative orders.37
· On April 6, all "saboteurs" lost their property rights. "By the authority vested in us by the Revolutionary Command Council's decree number 160 of March 29, 1987," writes al-Majid himself, "we have decided to authorize the chairmen of the security committees [Ru'asa' al-Lijan al-Amniyeh] in the northern governorates to confiscate the real and personal property of the saboteurs, provided that their properties are liquidated within one month of the date of issuance of the confiscation decree."38
· On April 10, al-Majid suspended the legal rights of the residents of villages prohibited for security reasons. "His Excellency has given instructions not to hear cases brought by the population of security-prohibited villages," writes deputy secretary Radhi Hassan Salman of the Northern Bureau Command, "and likewise those brought by the saboteurs, no matter what their character, as well as to freeze all claims submitted previously."39
· On May 1, al-Majid began to order the execution of first-degree relatives of "saboteurs." It had long been the policy of the regime to detain and punish the families of active Kurdish peshmerga, often by destroying their homes. But al-Majid now ordered their physical elimination, at least on an occasional exemplary basis. These orders evidently remained in force throughout the Anfal campaign and for some time afterwards. For example, a handwritten note dated November 20, 1989, signed "Security Chief, Interrogating Officer," and originating in Amn headquarters in the city of Suleimaniyeh, gives details of a case in which an Iraqi citizen has petitioned the authorities for news about his disappeared parents and brother.
The security chief's letter informs the unnamed recipient (who is addressed only as "Your Excellency,") that the missing parents, Qoron Ahmad and his wife Na'ima Abd-al-Rahman, were "liquidated" in Baghdad on May 19, 1987. Their son, Hushyar Ahmad, "a member of the group of Iranian saboteurs," was executed by hanging on July 12, 1987 by order of the Revolutionary Court (mahkamat al-thawrah). What is significant here is the reason for the killing of the man's parents. It was ordered, the document explains, "in compliance with the order from the StrugglingComrade Ali Hassan al-Majid, member of the Regional Command [of the Ba'ath Party] that was relayed to us by letter no. 106309 of the Security Directorate of the Autonomous Region, marked 'Secret and to be Opened Personally,' and dated May 1, 1987, regarding the liquidation of first-degree relatives of criminals."
Another letter on Amn Suleimaniyeh letterhead, numbered S-T: 21308, dated September 16, 1989 and classified "Top Secret," describes the public execution by firing squad of five "criminals" with a "connection to the internal organizations of the agents of Iran." The execution had been carried out on October 24, 1987 in the presence of intelligence and Ba'ath Party officials.40 Some time afterwards, "it was decided that three families of the criminals...should be executed in a discreet manner." The authority for their execution was given by letter number 6806, dated December 12, 1987, from the Northern Bureau Command.
· Wounded civilians could now also be executed, according to a hand-written communication (no. 3324) of May 14 from the Security Director of the city of Halabja, in southeastern Iraqi Kurdistan, to Amn Suleimaniyeh. This note gives details of an operation against the city's Kani Ashqan neighborhood, and makes reference to a cable (no. 945), dated the previous day, from the Command of the Fifth Army Corps. "It was by order of the Commander of the First Army Corps, on the recommendation of Comrade Ali Hassan al-Majid, to execute the wounded civilians after confirming their hostility to the authorities with the Party Organization, the Security andPolice Departments and the Intelligence Center, and to utilize backhoes and bulldozers to raze the neighborhood of Kani Ashqan."41
* * * Orders for Mass Killing The full extent of the Iraqi regime's intentions, however, are spelled out with brutal clarity in two directives issued by al-Majid's office in June 1987. Both documents lay out, in the most explicit detail, a prohibition on all human life in designated areas of the Kurdish countryside, covering more than 1,000 villages, to be applied through a shoot-to-kill order for which no subsequent higher authorization is required.
The first is a personal directive, numbered 28/3650, signed by Ali Hassan al-Majid himself and dated June 3, 1987. Addressed to a number of civilian and military agencies, including the Commanders of the First, Second and Fifth Army Corps, the Security Directorate (Amn) of the Autonomous Region, the Istikhbarat and Mukhabarat, it states the following:
1. It is totally prohibited for any foodstuffs or persons or machinery to reach the villages that have been prohibited for security reasons that are included in the second stage of collecting the villages. Anyone who so desires is permitted to return to the national ranks. It is not allowed for relatives to contact them except with the knowledge of the security agencies.
2. The presence of the people from relocated areas who are from villages prohibited for security reasons includedin the first stage until June 21, 1987, is prohibited for the areas included in the second stage.42
3. Concerning the harvest: after the conclusion of winter, which must end before July 15, farming will not be authorized in [the area] during the coming winter and summer seasons, starting this year.
4. It is prohibited to take cattle to pasture within these areas.
5. Within their jurisdiction, the armed forces must kill any human being or animal present within these areas. They are totally prohibited. (emphasis added)
6. The persons who are to be included in the relocation to the complexes will be notified of this decision, and they will bear full responsibility if they violate it.
These orders were evidently relayed later to the lower echelons in the chain of command. They are repeated word for word, for example, in a letter (no. 4754), dated June 8, 1987, from Amn Erbil to all its departments and local offices.
Three days after al-Majid's directive, on June 6, Radhi Hassan Salman, deputy secretary of the Northern Bureau Command, issued a series of general instructions to all army corps commanders, "aimed at ending the long line of traitors from the Barzani and Talabani clans and the Communist Party, who have joined ranks with the Iranian invader enemy with a view to enabling it to acquire territory belonging to the cherished homeland." Salman ordered increased combat readiness, improved intelligence and a heightened state of alert among all units, whileat the same time betraying a certain anxiety about renewed peshmerga attacks designed "to cut the chain of command."43
The most important document of all, however, was issued on June 20, 1987. Issued by the Northern Bureau Command over Ali Hassan al-Majid's signature, and additionally stamped with the seal of the RCC's Northern Affairs Committee, this directive, coded SF/4008, amended and expanded the June 3 instructions in a number of very important ways--including a direct incitement to pillage, in clear violation of the rules of war, and the baldest possible statement of a policy of mass murder, ordered by the highest levels of the Iraqi regime. From the repeated references to it in official documents throughout 1988, it is apparent that directive 4008 remained in force as the standing orders for the Iraqi armed forces and security services during the Anfal campaign and beyond. For example, a letter from Amn Suleimaniyeh, dated October 29, 1988, makes reference to the directive as the basis for "the execution of 19 accused, executed by this directorate because of their presence in the security-prohibited villages."
It is quite apparent that al-Majid's demand for the summary killing of people arrested in the prohibited areas caused some consternation among those who were charged with carrying out his orders. Throughout 1987 and 1988, high-level Iraqi officials issued a steady stream of ill-tempered clarifications of clause 5 of directive SF/4008--the paragraph that concerns executions. "The security agencies should not trouble us with queries about clause 5," complains a Northern Bureau letter of December 1987; "the wording is self-explanatory and requires no higher authority."44 Instructions from Amn Erbil, dated November 22, 1988, insist that clause 5 must be "implemented without exception."
The full text of directive SF/4008 reads:
June 20, 1987
From: Northern Bureau Command
To: First Corps Command, Second Corps Command, Fifth Corps Command45
Subject: Procedure to deal with the villages that are prohibited
for security reasons
In view of the fact that the officially announced deadline for the amalgamation of these villages expires on June 21, 1987, we have decided that the following action should be taken with effect from June 22, 1987:
1. All the villages in which subversives, agents of Iran and similar traitors to Iraq are still to be found shall be regarded as out of bounds for security reasons;
2. They shall be regarded as operational zones that are strictly out of bounds to all persons and animals and in which the troops can open fire at will, without any restrictions, unless otherwise instructed by our Bureau;
3. Travel to and from these zones, as well as all agricultural, animal husbandry and industrial activities shall be prohibited and carefully monitored by all the competent agencies within their respective fields of jurisdiction;
4. The corps commanders shall carry out random bombardments using artillery, helicopters and aircraft, at all times of the day or night in order to kill the largest number of persons present in those prohibited zones, keeping us informed of the results; [emphasis added]
5. All persons captured in those villages shall be detained and interrogated by the security services and those between the ages of 15 and 70 shall be executed after any useful information has been obtained from them, of which we should be duly notified; [emphasis added]
6. Those who surrender to the governmental or Party authorities shall be interrogated by the competent agencies for a maximum period of three days, which may be extended to ten days if necessary, provided that we are notified of such cases. If the interrogation requires a longer period of time, approval must be obtained from us by telephone or telegraph or through comrade Taher [Tawfiq] al-Ani;
7. Everything seized by the advisers [mustashars] and troops of the National Defense Battalions shall be retained by them, with the exception of heavy, mounted and medium weapons.46 They can keep the light weapons, notifying us only of the number of these weapons. The Corps commanders shall promptly bring this to the attention of all the advisers, company commanders and platoon leaders and shall provide us with detailed information concerning their activities in the National Defense Battalions. [emphasis added]
For information and action within your respective fields of jurisdiction. Keep us informed.
[Signed]
Comrade
Ali Hassan al-Majid
Member of the Regional Command
Secretary General of the Northern Bureau
cc: Chairman of the Legislative Council;
Chairman of the Executive Council;
Party Intelligence;
Chief of the Army General Staff;
Governors (Chairmen of the Security Committees) of Nineveh,
al-Ta'mim, Diyala, Salah al-Din, Suleimaniyeh, Erbil and Dohuk;
Branch Secretaries of the above-mentioned governorates;
General Directorate of Military Intelligence (Istikhbarat);
General Directorate of Security (Amn);
Director of Security of the Autonomous Region;
Security Services of the Northern Region;
Security Services of the Eastern Region;
Security Directors of the governorates of Nineveh, al-Ta'mim,
Diyala, Salah al-Din, Suleimaniyeh, Erbil and Dohuk.
Ali Hassan al-Majid evidently insisted on a high degree of personal control of even the smallest details of the campaign. For example, one order issued in the middle of the Anfal operation indicates that no town or village may be searched without his express personal approval.47 Nonetheless, the list of institutions to whom his June 20 directive was copied gives some hint of the bureaucratic scope of the effort and the large number of civilian, party, military and security agencies involved in its execution.
* * * Defining the "National Ranks": The Census of October 17, 1987 After June 20, the village destruction campaign temporarily abated. Although it had also targeted areas near the smaller roads that criss-cross Iraqi Kurdistan, its most striking effect was to remove a broad swathe of formerly government-controlled villages close to the highway that runs from Mosul to Erbil, Kirkuk and Tuz Khurmatu, before turning east through Kifri, Kalar, Peibaz and Darbandikhan. For the time being, the Iran-Iraq War deprived the regime of the military muscle that would have been required to press the campaign any further. But the political and bureaucratic logic of the spring 1987 clearances--as well as the incipient logic of Anfal--became apparent during the second half of the year. This was to effect a sharp division between the "national ranks" and thegenerally more mountainous peshmerga-controlled regions to the east and north. These were the "prohibited areas" (manateq al-mahdoureh) and their inhabitants, regardless of age or sex, would be regarded without exception as "saboteurs."
They would, however, be given one last chance to change sides. As al-Majid's June 3 directive stated, it was still possible for Kurds to "return to the national ranks" --in other words to move to the cities, towns or mujamma'at and align themselves with the regime. To keep a close track, family by family, of how the two sides lined up, the Iraqi regime had an ideal instrument to hand, in the form of a national census. Iraq had carried out five censuses in the half-century since its independence. The results of the most recent, conducted in 1977, were classified as "secret." Designed to be held every decade, another was due in 1987. It was scheduled for October 17.
As the census date drew near, the authorities repeatedly insisted on improving security and intelligence measures to inhibit any contact or movement between the two sides, other than on the regime's terms. Amn Erbil ordered renewed vigilance on the complexes of Benaslawa, Daratou and Kawar Gosek, which all housed villagers relocated during the spring 1987 campaign.48 Orders were issued to seize and destroy tractors, since these might help the "saboteurs" skirt the economic blockade of the prohibited areas. The tractor owners in question were to receive "the maximum exemplary punishment."49
On September 6, Ali Hassan al-Majid chaired a meeting of senior Ba'ath Party officials to discuss preparations for the census. Case by case, individual by individual, the make-up of the two sides was to be refined in the most legalistic fashion. "Subversives who repent" were to be allowed to return to the fold right up to the day of the census. No such returnees would be accepted after October 17, however, "even if they surrender their weapons." At the same time, al-Majid regarded it as unacceptable for thefamilies of unrepentant saboteurs to remain in government-controlled areas. These people were to be physically removed and forced to join their saboteur kin in the prohibited areas.
This general policy had been in effect for at least two years.50 But al-Majid now demanded a full inventory of all such cases from the security committees of each of the northern governorates. This list was to reach his desk not later than September 15. As soon as it was complete, "the families in question should be expelled to the regions where their subversive relatives are, with the sole exception of males aged between 12 and 50 inclusive, who should be detained."51
The local security agencies appear to have cooperated with alacrity. Middle East Watch has examined dozens of individual expulsion orders by Amn Erbil, for example, during this pre-census period. One typical case in mid-September 1987 gives the full names, addresses, dates of birth and residence permit numbers of eighty women, children and old men aged from 51-89, taken from their homes and summarily expelled "to thoseregions where the saboteurs are present."52 A single male relative born in 1949 is mentioned as having been detained "to receive the proper sentence."
Most strikingly of all, the Northern Bureau Command ordered that:
Mass seminars and administrative meetings shall be organized to discuss the importance of the general census, scheduled to take place on October 17, 1987. It shall be clearly emphasized that any persons who fail to participate in the census without a valid excuse shall lose their Iraqi citizenship. They shall also be regarded as army deserters and as such shall be subject to the terms of Revolutionary Command Council decree no. 677 of August 26, 1987.
The importance of this provision can scarcely be overstated, for RCC decree 677 stipulated that, "The death sentence shall be carried out by Party organizations, after due verification, on any deserters who are arrested, should the period of their flight or delinquency exceed one year or should they have perpetrated the crime of desertion more than once." [emphasis in original]53 Failure to register under the census, in other words, could in itself be tantamount to the death penalty.
The results of the 1987 census were never publicly divulged. Employees of the government census office in Suleimaniyeh told Middle East Watch that they estimated it to have been only 70% accurate--no doubtbecause large expanses of Iraqi Kurdistan, as well of the rebellious southern marshes, could not be included. Most residents of the "prohibited areas" opted to stay where they were; some, especially in the more remote parts of the Badinan region, said they never even learned that the census was taking place, despite a vigorous campaign conducted over government radio and television.
The instructions were quite different from those of the five previous censuses. Those who were not included in the census would no longer be considered Iraqi nationals, the official broadcasts announced; they would cease to be eligible for government services and food rations. Only two options were offered by the census: one could either be an Arab or a Kurd--nothing else. These ethnic lines were drawn with great rigidity. A number of official documents from 1988 and 1989 transmit orders from Saddam Hussein and Ali Hassan al-Majid to the effect that any citizen may become an Arab by simple written application. By contrast, anyone wishing to be considered a Kurd will be subject to the destruction of their homes and deportation to the Autonomous Region.
People could be counted only if they made themselves accessible to the census-takers. For anyone living in a prohibited area, this meant abandoning one's home. Inclusion in the census involved registering oneself as the resident of a government-controlled town or mujamma'a. (The only hope of evading this regulation was to bribe an official--a time-honored means of survival in Iraq, which continued to apply even during Anfal.) Villages that had been destroyed in earlier army operations--the Arabization drive of 1975, the border clearances of the late 1970s, or the spring 1987 campaign--no longer existed as far as the government in Baghdad was concerned. Some inhabitants of the border zone had returned illegally to their homes to rebuild, but the census would not count them. The remainder were now in complexes.
As a partial indication of the scale of this exclusion, government statisticians provided Middle East Watch with figures for Suleimaniyeh, one of the four governorates in the Autonomous Region of Iraqi Kurdistan. The 1977 census had counted 1,877 villages in Suleimaniyeh; by the time of the 1987 census, this number was down to just 186. Almost 1,700 villages had thus disappeared from the official map. Of these, several hundred had been destroyed during the border clearances of the 1970s and at various stages of the war against Iran. Most of their inhabitants had been resettled in the nine complexes that were also listed in the 1987census. The remaining villages were simply not counted, because they now lay in "prohibited areas" of peshmerga influence.
Once the population count was complete, the consequences of not registering soon became apparent. Shelling and aerial bombing intensified. When families went to the nearest town to seek their food rations, said one man from a village near Qara Dagh, they were told that they could now forget about them. "You are Iranians," officials said, "Go to the Iranians for your food rations!"54 The same was true of villagers seeking marriage licenses or government permits for other civil transactions.
On October 18, the day after the census, Taher Tawfiq, secretary of the RCC's Northern Affairs Committee, issued a stern memorandum to all security committees in Kurdistan, reminding them that aerial inspection would ensure that Directive no.4008 of June 20 was being carried out "to the letter." Any committee that failed to comply would "bear full responsibility before the Comrade Bureau Chief"--that is to say, Ali Hassan al-Majid.55 Several other documents from late 1987 insist, in a tone of distinct irritation, that paragraph 5 (mandating summary execution after interrogation) does not require the authorization of higher authority on a case-by-case basis. The Northern Bureau should no longer be troubled by these requests, since the standing orders are quite explicit.
The blockade of the north was now to be made even more systematic. On September 29, al-Majid agreed to a set of harsh new proposals from an ad-hoc committee chaired by Taher Tawfiq and including Khaled Muhammad Abbas, head of Eastern Sector Istikhbarat, Farhan Mutlaq Saleh, head of Northern Sector Istikhbarat, and Abd-al-Rahman Aziz Hussein, director of Amn for the Autonomous Region. The group complained that food, medicines, fuel and other supplies were still getting through to the "saboteurs." Accordingly, security would be steppedup at checkpoints; many grocery stores in the towns would be closed down; the secret police would monitor the stocks in all restaurants, bakeries and cafes; and a strict ban would be enforced on the sale of all agricultural produce from prohibited areas. Food rations would be cut back to the minimum necessary for human survival. The loyalty of all workers in the food distribution sector would be evaluated.56
Under this bitter regime, the inhabitants of the prohibited areas struggled to survive. During Ali Hassan al-Majid's first eight months in office, the groundwork for a "final solution" of Iraq's Kurdish problem had been laid. Its logic was apparent; its chain of command was set in place. But the events of 1987 were "just a preliminary step," a former Istikhbarat officer explained, "because the war was still going on. The Iraqi government was not so strong and many troops were tied up on the front. They postponed the anger and hate in their hearts"--but only until the beginning of 1988, when the major winter offensive that Baghdad had feared failed to materialize, and Iran's fortunes on the battlefield began rapidly to decline.
______
1 The marshes have been the object of a vast engineering scheme designed to bring the rebellious south under the control of the central government in Baghdad. The regime's treatment of the Shi'a inhabitants of the south, including the Ma'dan, or Marsh Arabs, is detailed in the Middle East Watch report, "Current Human Rights Conditions among the Iraqi Shi'a," March 1993.
2 The Northern Bureau is one of four regional bureaus of the Ba'ath, and is quite separate from the Northern Affairs Committee of the Revolutionary Command Council. Other party bureaus have responsibility for the South, the Center, and the capital city of Baghdad. This division of Iraq into security zones is mirrored by the four-bureau organization of Amn and military intelligence (Istikhbarat).
3 The family tree is shown in Simon Henderson, Instant Empire: Saddam Hussein's Ambition for Iraq (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1991), p.87. Other notable cousins of Saddam's include the former Defense Minister Adnan Khairallah, who died in a helicopter crash in 1989, and Hussein Kamel Majid, Minister of Industry and Military Industry.
4 Middle East Watch interview with former mustashar, Zakho, September 1, 1992. In 1989 al-Majid was appointed as Minister of the Interior, and then, after the August 1990 invasion, as governor of Kuwait. He is now Iraq's Defense Minister, and continues to be implicated in actions of the grossest brutality. According to an eyewitness, Majid personally shot to death some 25-30 detainees in Basra Prison on April 3 or 4, 1991. The dead included six children. See Middle East Watch, "Current Human Rights Conditions Among the Iraqi Shi'a," March 5, 1993.
5 The Iraqi Army has seven regular corps in all. The term "special forces" requires some explanation. In the U.S. armed forces and others built on the U.S. model, these are light infantry forces designed to conduct irregular missions such as guerrilla warfare and covert operations. Iraq's special forces, by contrast, are mobile elite infantry units, armed with the best available weapons and often supported by tank battalions. Growing out of the Iran-Iraq War, they have been compared to the German Stosstruppen of World War One. See "Iraqi Order of Battle: Ground Troops," in Desert Shield Factbook (Bloomington, IN: GDW, 1991), pp.50-59.
6 The basic texts on the war include Edgar O'Ballance, The Gulf War (London: Brassey's, 1988); Dilip Hiro, The Longest War: The Iran-Iraq Military Conflict (New York: Routledge, 1991); Shahram Chubin and Charles Tripp, Iran and Iraq at War (Boulder: Westview Press, second revised edn., 1991); and Cordesman and Wagner, The Lessons of Modern War, Volume II. Most of these books share the defect of neglecting the temporary revival of Iran's fortunes in the final year and a half of the war--without which it is difficult to understand the relationship between the first Gulf War and the Anfal campaign. A useful corrective is Richard Jupa and James Dingeman, Gulf Wars: How Iraq Won the First and Lost the Second. Will There Be a Third? (Cambria, CA: 3W Publications, c.1991), pp.1-9.
7 The basij, or Mobilization Unit, were virtually untrained volunteers under pasdaran supervision. They were integral to Iran's conception of an "Islamic warfare" that depended more on faith than on technology and conventional military skills. See Chubin and Tripp, Iran and Iraq at War, pp.42-49.
8 See, for example, Cordesman and Wagner, op cit, p.257.
9 The KDP and PUK eventually reached formal military and political agreements to collaborate in November 1987, and in 1988 formed the Iraqi Kurdistan Front. Five smaller parties later joined the Front.
10 According to comments by Naywshirwan Mustafa Amin in an April 1987 interview with Le Monde, one option under consideration by the PUK was "the severance of Iraq into a number of small states: Shi'a, Kurdish and Sunni." Cited in Baram, op. cit., p.127.
11 Cordesman and Wagner, op. cit., pp.259-260. O'Ballance also echoes this view, but provides less detail.
12 Audiotape of a conversation between Ali Hassan al-Majid and unnamed Ba'ath Party aides, January 22, 1989.
13 Ibid. For the full text, see appendix A, pp.351-352.
14 Special National Defense Forces General Staff (Operations) to Fifth Corps Command, Erbil: letter no. 28/573, dated April 13, 1987 and classified "Top Secret and Confidential." The town of Makhmour lies some thirty-five miles southwest of Erbil.
15 Minutes of Shaqlawa Security Committee meeting, April 4, 1987.
16 Middle East Watch interview, Zakho, June 24, 1992.
17 Middle East Watch interview, Choman, March 23, 1993. There was also reportedly a chemical attack on April 15, 1987 on the KDP headquarters in Zewa, a largely depopulated area close to the Turkish border.
18 The PUK had four malbands altogether. The first, based in the Qara Dagh mountains, was responsible for political and military affairs in the governorate of Suleimaniyeh. The second, in the Jafati Valley, was in charge of operations in Kirkuk (al-Ta'mim). The third and fourth, based in the Balisan Valley and the adjoining Smaquli Valley, shared responsibility for the PUK's work in Erbil. Later, the third and fourth malbands were merged; under the PUK-KDP unity agreements, a new fourth malband was opened in Zewa, the KDP headquarters on the Turkish border, to handle operations in the governorate of Dohuk.
19 Population figures for Balisan and Sheikh Wasan are derived from Resool's dossier of destroyed villages, although villagers interviewed by Middle East Watch suggested that Balisan may have been even larger, with perhaps as many as 525 households. Officials of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees assume an average household size of seven persons in Kurdish villages.
20 Not coincidentally, the Iraqi intelligence agencies were mainly equipped and trained by their East German equivalents. It may well be that the files of the former Staatssicherheitsdienst (Stasi) will shed further light on this relationship.
21 The symptoms described by villagers are generally consistent with the effects of mustard gas--although reports that some victims died immediately suggest that nerve agents may also have been used, since mustard gas, even in high concentrations, is not usually lethal for at least half an hour. See Physicians for Human Rights, loc. cit..
22 Middle East Watch interview, Erbil, March 16, 1993.
23 In an interesting, if indirect confirmation of the May 16 attack, an undated handwritten note from Amn Shaqlawa also mentions that sixteen Iranian Revolutionary Guards (pasdaran) were present during a bombing raid on the villages of Balisan, Sheikh Wasan and Tutma. The pasdaran are reported to have "made fires which saved their lives"--a reference which cannot conceivably apply to anything but an attempted defense against poison gas. A separate Amn Shaqlawa document in the same file, dated May 20, 1987, notes that three members of the PUK Politburo are reported to have been injured by gas during "the latest military attacks in Kurdistan."
24 These workhorse vehicles are ubiquitous in Iraq. They are commonly known simply as "coasters," and are referred to by that name throughout this text.
25 Middle East Watch interview, Balisan, April 30, 1992.
26 This is consistent with the procedures of an Iraqi firing squad, as recorded on a videotape that has been viewed by Middle East Watch. Five prisoners in Kurdish clothes are blindfolded, tied to posts and machinegunned with almost luxurious excess by a line of troops with AK-47s. The firing continues long after it is obvious that the prisoners are dead. Even then, a uniformed officer delivers the coup de grace to each man with a pistol. There is a pause. Finally, another officer moves down the line, discharging his pistol into the fallen bodies. This particular execution was carried out in a public square in front of a large crowd, and was greeted with applause from party and security dignitaries in the front row.
27 This account is based on Middle East Watch interviews in Erbil, April 23-25, 1992.
28 The bodies of those who died in custody were exhumed from the Erbil cemetery in September 1991, and reburied in a ceremony that was recorded on videotape. In the course of later exhumations Hamoud Sa'id Ahmad discovered the body of his own brother, who was killed by Amn in a separate incident in April 1988. Ahmad was interviewed by Middle East Watch in Erbil, April 25, 1992. For additional detail, see Middle East Watch/Physicians for Human Rights, Unquiet Graves: The Search for the Disappeared in Iraqi Kurdistan, February 1992.
29 Middle East Watch interview with Sheikh Qader Sa'id Ibrahim Balisani, Balisan, April 30, 1992.
30 A handwritten list of 103 dead and forty-eight injured villagers was given to Middle East Watch in 1992 by the Inspection Committee of Oppressed Kurds, a human rights group in Erbil.
31 Amn Erbil governorate to Amn Shaqlawa, letter no. Sh Sh/4947, dated June 11, 1987, and classified secret. Exposure to mustard gas causes prolonged temporary blindness or vision impairment, and dozens of survivors interviewed by Middle East Watch described being blind for at least a month after a chemical attack.
32 Middle East Watch interview, Choman, March 23, 1993.
33 Kandour is one of the five villages named in the Amn report on the May 27 attack. The others are Malakan, Talinan and Upper and Lower Bileh.
34 The symptoms described by Kamal are entirely consistent with exposure to mustard gas.
32 There are two basic administrative divisions within each Iraqi governorate: the qadha and the smaller nahya. The nahya of Qara Tapa belongs to the qadha of Kifri. The examples of Narin and Zerdow are drawn from a Middle East Watch interview, Benaslawa complex, July 7, 1992.
33 Middle East Watch interview, Suleimaniyeh, July 23, 1992.
34 Audiotape of a meeting between Ali Hassan al-Majid and senior Ba'ath Party officials, Kirkuk, May 26, 1988.
35 June 1987 statement by a "returnee to the national ranks," found in Amn files.
36 Since few villages were destroyed in the Shaqlawa area at this time, other than those in the Balisan Valley, it is possible that this may refer to the dumping of the survivors of the chemical attack, at Alana. See above p.68-69.
37 The power structure of the Ba'ath Party is complex, and a full grasp of the chain of command in the anti-Kurdish campaigns depends on understanding the nuances that distinguish several overlapping bodies. As one national branch of the Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party, the Iraqi Ba'ath has a Regional Command--of which Ali Hassan al-Majid had been a member since 1986. Within Iraq, the highest executive body is formally the Revolutionary Command Council, which did not include al-Majid--although in practice ultimate power is wielded by Saddam Hussein himself and a largely Tikrit-based group of loyalists from the military and security sectors, many of them related to the president. Al-Majid is a key member of this fraternity.
The RCC in turn has a number of regionally based committees, including its Northern Affairs Committee. Saddam Hussein was secretary of this committee at the time of the 1970 autonomy manifesto. In 1987-1988, the post was held by Taher Tawfiq, who, as an RCC member, was thus technically al-Majid's superior--although the temporary special powers granted to al-Majid under decree 160 superseded this. Al-Majid himself was Secretary General of the Ba'ath Party Northern Bureau; to complicate matters further, the Northern Bureau Command was a parallel but separate entity, under Taher Tawfiq. The Northern Bureau and Northern Bureau Command are clearly distinguished where necessary in the text.
38 Northern Bureau letter S Sh/18/2396, April 6, 1987.
39 Northern Bureau Command letter no. 1/2713, April 10, 1987.
40 The principle of collective implication in executions, including an insistence that party members form part of the firing squads, is a well-established element of Ba'ath Party rule. The most notorious example of this was the televised purge of two dozen senior Ba'ath officials and military officers, including several members of the Revolutionary Command Council, in July 1979--a month after Saddam Hussein had assumed the presidency. In front of a roomful of their peers, the condemned men make ritual confessions on charges of treason in front of a roomful of their peers and are then whisked away to be killed. A tearful Saddam implores--and thus effectively orders--other senior Ba'athis to take part in the execution squad. See al-Khalil, Republic of Fear, pp.70-72. Also Chibli Malat, "Obstacles to Democratization in Iraq: A Reading of Post-Revolutionary Iraqi History through the Gulf War," unpublished paper, 1992--which differs from al-Khalil in other important respects about the nature of the Ba'ath's exercise of power.
41 This exemplary collective punishment, according to a former resident interviewed by Middle East Watch in Halabja on June 11, 1992, was meted out in retaliation for an anti-government demonstration. Some 1,500 homes were reportedly destroyed.
42 By now it appears that the two phases originally envisioned (April 21-May 20 and May 21-June 20) have been collapsed into one single operation. In this order, the "second stage" is clearly intended to begin on June 21.
43 Northern Bureau Command letter reference no. 28/3726, dated June 6, 1987 and classified "highly confidential and personal." This document is reproduced in the "Report on the situation of human rights in Iraq, prepared by Mr. Max Van der Stoel, Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights, in accordance with Commission resolution 1992/71," February 19, 1993, p.77.
44 Northern Bureau Command directive no. 855, classified "confidential and personal for addressee only," December 29, 1987.
45 This is only one of numerous copies of directive SF/4008 which Middle East Watch has found in Iraqi government files, addressed to different agencies.
46 In other words, the Kurdish paramilitary jahsh, whose ranks had been greatly expanded in the period immediately following Ali Hassan al-Majid's appointment, according to a Middle East Watch interview with a former mustashar, Zakho, August 30, 1992. This clause of decree SF/4008, with its reference to booty, may offer some hint of the connection between the coming campaign and the concept of Anfal in the Koranic sense (see above, pp.31-32). Army documents reviewing the Anfal campaign make further reference to the approved role of the jahsh in seizing booty. See p. 289.
47 Northern Bureau Command letter no. 3321, July 6, 1988, cited in Amn Suleimaniyeh circular to all security directorates (number illegible), July 16, 1988.
48 This letter also urged that "saboteurs should be dealt with strongly, like the Iranian enemy." Amn Erbil governorate to all branches, letter no. Sh.S1/13295 of October 15, 1987, classified "secret and personal to be opened by addressee only."
49 Letter no. 542, classified "secret and confidential" and dated (month illegible) 30, 1988, from Suleimaniyeh governorate Committee to Fight Hostile Activity to all local Committees to Fight Hostile Activity.
50 It is mentioned, for example, in a letter from the Special Office of the Army Chief of Staff to Second Corps Command, no. RAJ/1/13/1/5033 of June 14, 1985; order no. 4087 of December 22, 1986 from the Security Committee of Erbil governorate; and communique no. 4151 of the RCC Northern Affairs Committee, dated June 15, 1987.
51 The only exception was for "families which comprise martyrs [i.e. those killed in battle], missing persons, captives, soldiers or fighters in the National Defense Battalions [jahsh]. In those instances, only the mother is to be expelled, together with any subversive sons." The summary conclusions of the September 6 meeting are included in a cable, reference 4350, dated September 7, 1987, from the Northern Bureau to all regional security committees. These instructions evidently received very wide distribution. Middle East Watch has also found a second version of this document, in the form of a letter, number 2/237, classified "secret, urgent and immediate" and dated September 19, 1987, from the Shaqlawa district security committee to a number of local party and police agencies. Although in other respects identical, it gives the ages of those to be detained as "17 to 50." Whatever the final regulation on minimum age may have been--12, 15 or 17--it is apparent from survivor testimonies that the separation of those to be killed during Anfal depended less on birth certificates than on a quick visual inspection of the prisoners. See below p.212.
52 Amn Erbil to Erbil Police Directorate, letters nos. 9475 and 9478, September 16 and 17, 1987, classified "secret." The 44 families are broken down as follows: Agents of Iran (PUK)--22; Offspring of Treason (KDP)--7; Treacherous Communist Party--8; Socialist Party--3; unknown affiliation--4.
53 RCC decree no.10 of January 3, 1988 modified some aspects of decree 677, but maintained this clause intact. Both were signed by Saddam Hussein as Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. Two additional comments are pertinent here. First, the census gave the regime a means of detecting deserters, a perennial problem for the Iraqi military. Second, and more important, it specified that executions of deserters would be carried out by agents of the Ba'ath Party itself--a hint, perhaps, of the identity of the executioners during the Anfal campaign.
54 Middle East Watch interview, Naser complex, July 28, 1992. The existence of a subsidized food system was a key element of the national economy during the Iran-Iraq War and a significant source of political control for the regime.
55 Northern Bureau Command, letter no.1216, dated October 18, 1987, classified "secret and confidential," to all Security Committees and Security Directorates in the Governorates of the Autonomous Zone and the Governorates of Diyala and Salah al-Din.
56 A copy of the findings of Tawfiq's committee on the blockade was found attached to a letter from the head of the economic section of the Interior Ministry, Erbil, reference no.248, dated November 14, 1987.
IP: Logged |
posted
* * * Documentary Evidence In the March 1991 popular uprising in northern Iraq, Kurdish civilians and members of the Kurdish political parties stormed and took control of offices of the Iraqi government and its agencies, including the various intelligence agencies. Several of these buildings were heavily damaged, or even burned to the ground, but others survived unscathed. The Kurds thus came into possession of the inventories of many of these facilities. Matters taken include large quantities of documents, logs and registers, as well as audiotapes, videotapes, films and photographs.
In the days before the uprising was crushed by advancing Iraqi troops, the Kurdish parties succeeded in removing the majority of the documents they had captured from the towns to strongholds in the mountains. In the spring of 1992, one of the two largest parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), agreed to a tripartite arrangement in which Middle East Watch and the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee were the other two partners. Under this arrangement, the PUK agreed to send the documents in its possession to the United States for research and analysis; the Senate Foreign Relations Committee agreed to turn the documents into official records of the U.S. Congress and store them in the facilities of the U.S. National Archives; and Middle East Watch agreed to conduct research on the documents for human rights purposes, including the pursuit of a genocide case before the International Court of Justice at The Hague.
The PUK cache consists of fourteen tons of documents contained in 847 boxes. The total number of pages has been estimated at over four million. In May 1992, the PUK placed these documents in the temporary custody of Middle East Watch and they were then flown, in the presence of the director of Middle East Watch, to the United States. In Washington, D.C., the documents were then handed over to the U.S. National Archives and placed in its storage facilities, while remaining under the joint custody of the PUK and Middle East Watch.
At the end of October 1992, a Middle East Watch-led team of researchers began the task of screening, cataloguing, and analyzing these documents. Important documents were pulled out, photocopied and translated, and a number of these have been included in this report. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Iraq, Mr. Max van der Stoel, has also made use of some of the documents found by Middle East Watch, in his report to the U.N. Human Rights Commission in March 1993.
The vast majority of the documents are from two main locations: Suleimaniyeh governorate and its districts; and Erbil governorate and its districts, especially the qadha of Shaqlawa. Almost all hail from the offices of Iraq's General Security Directorate (Mudiriyat al-Amn al-Ameh) in these locations, with a smattering of documents belonging to the General Military Intelligence Directorate (Mudiriyat al-Istikhbarat al-Askariyeh al-Ameh) and the Ba'ath Party. Generally, the documents are either file folders or pages tied together with shoelaces between two hard covers. There are also a number of bound ledgers. Due to the conditions that prevailed at the time of the uprising, especially in Suleimaniyeh, a number of the documents have completely fallen apart, and individual pages have been burned, trampled upon, muddied, or, in many cases, torn. The majority of the documents are in good order, however.
All documents, handwritten or typewritten, are in good and legible Arabic. They cover a wide variety of subjects that can most easily be divided into three main categories:
(2) Personal information: These are files containing information on agency staff, ordinary citizens, or suspected members of Kurdish resistance parties. They include secret background checks, as well as records of investigations and interrogations. A number of files containvirtual life histories, some concluding with execution orders and death certificates.
(3) Reports on events in the area, and policy statements: These two types of documents are often mixed in together, and include reports on Amn and military actions undertaken against the peshmerga; reports on peshmerga activity in a particular area; and official orders and instructions that are being passed on down through the ranks.
Although the three categories generally appear separately in the documents, it does happen that a copy of an important order concerning the government's policy vis-a-vis the Kurds will appear in a person's secret file. Sometimes, evidence of abuse is either fragmentary and embedded in a larger text that outwardly seems innocuous, or phrased in such euphemistic terms that an untrained eye would have difficulty in recognizing it. The task of the Middle East Watch-led team, then, has essentially been to sift through these tons of documents in search of hidden nuggets.
* * * Forensic Evidence A team of forensic investigators was sent by Middle East Watch and Physicians for Human Rights to Iraqi Kurdistan in May-June 1992. The team consisted of forensic investigators trained in forensic anthropology, archeology, and law, who had carried out exhumations of graves in several countries, including Argentina, Chile, El Salvador and Guatemala. It carried out exhumations of graves at three sites in Iraqi Kurdistan: at the village of Koreme, the village of Birjinni, and the cemetery of a complex of Anfal survivors outside the city of Erbil.
In its investigations, the team followed internationally accepted standards set forth in the United Nations "Model Protocol for a Legal Investigation of Extra-Legal, Arbitrary and Summary Executions" (the "Minnesota Protocol").1 The full results of the team's investigations arefound in Middle East Watch and Physicians for Human Rights, The Anfal Campaign in Iraqi Kurdistan: The Destruction of Koreme, January 1993, and its methodology at each site is described below.
Koreme Site:
The team undertook the exhumation of a mass grave at the destroyed village of Koreme containing the skeletal remains of twenty-six men and boys, all of whom had died by gunfire at close range in a line indicating execution by firing squad. The team archaeologist directed the survey of the destroyed village, mapping the village as it stood before destruction, using standard archeological survey techniques; in addition, the team archeologist directed the collection and mapping of cartridge casings to determine the pattern of weapons firing at the execution site. The team's lead anthropologist directed the exhumation of the gravesite at Koreme, using standard exhumation techniques to preserve the skeletons and other artifacts. Investigations were carried out at the morgue at Dohuk General Hospital to determine the number of different individuals in the grave; sex, age, and other identifying marks; and manner of death. The team's lawyers directed interviews with survivors and other villagers to give a narrative of events corroborated by scientific evidence.
Birjinni Site:
The team carried out archeological surveys and exhumations of graves at the destroyed village of Birjinni which, according to surviving villagers, had been bombed in August 1988 with chemical weapons. The team archeologist carried out standard surveys of the ruined village. The forensic anthropologists exhumed the graves of persons reported to have died from inhalation of chemical agents. The team's lawyers conducted interviews with surviving villagers to obtain their account of events. In addition, the team took soil and other samples from the craters where chemical weapons were reported to have impacted. In 1993, the British Ministry of Defense chemical weapons laboratory at Porton Down reported discovering degradation products of mustard gas and nerve agents in samples taken from these sites. This is the first instance of a chemical weapons attack being proved on the basis of chemical residues left behind at the impact site.
Erbil Site:
The team undertook exhumations at the graveyard of a complex where survivors of the Anfal were taken. The gravesite was surveyed by the archeological team in order to make determinations of the ratio of adult and child graves in the cemetery. The forensic scientists exhumed three children's graves, one of them reported to have been made by a survivor from the village of Koreme and containing his infant sister. The exhumation of that grave corroborated his account, and contained the skeletal remains of a girl about one-year old, with evidence of malnutrition.
______
1 Manual on the Effective Prevention and Investigation of Extra-Legal, Arbitrary and Summary Executions, 1991.
IP: Logged |
posted
Foe .The US could be investigating the genocide against the Kurds but the Regan administration directly suported it. Sadam should be on trial but President bush is afraid his dad the vice president Cheney and sec Rumsfield might be hanging in the gallows next to Mr. Sadam Husein. Globalsecurity.com had all of the national archive of our cheamical weapons sales to sadam posted and it is all gone now. I think the Us government is trying to help itself by killing websites that tell the truth. Democreats are also responsible. Kerry voted for the war and is in the back pocket of haliburton like most other democrat leaders .,, this country and the world are screwed. we need to put out the truth and educate people if we can....
IP: Logged |
posted
At the last minute I voted for Nader, almost voted for Kerry but then I thought ,he voted for the war,,, what am I doing? and changed to Nader.
IP: Logged |
posted
The Bush administration is continuing the ethnic cleansing in northern Iraq.
You Are In: USINFO > Products >Washfile 14 November 2003
U.S. Says Kurdistan Party PKK/KADEK Remains Terrorist Organization State Dept. says PKK/KADEK leaders are subject to arrest
The State Department said November 14 that the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), now known as the Kurdistan Freedom and Democracy Congress (KADEK), remains a terrorist organization and that its leaders are still subject to arrest.
"A recent clash between PKK/KADEK forces and the Iraqi Border Police and U.S. forces, as well as the group's recent attacks in Turkey, demonstrate its terrorist nature," said State Department Deputy Spokesman J. Adam Ereli. "The PKK/KADEK, under any alias, is a terrorist organization, and no name change or press release can alter that fact."
Following is the statement:
(begin text)
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE Office of the Spokesman November 14, 2003
Statement by J. Adam Ereli, Deputy Spokesman
PKK/KADEK CONGRESS
Through its recent actions, the Kurdistan Workers Party/Kurdistan Freedom and Democracy Congress (PKK/KADEK) appears to be making an effort to evade responsibility for its terrorist acts by changing its name. The PKK/KADEK, under any alias, is a terrorist organization, and no name change or press release can alter that fact. A recent clash between PKK/KADEK forces and the Iraqi Border Police and U.S. forces, as well as the group's recent attacks in Turkey, demonstrate its terrorist nature.
The Coalition in Iraq will treat the PKK/KADEK or the Kurdistan People's Congress as terrorists; its leaders are subject to arrest. President Bush has committed to prevent the use of Iraq as a terrorist haven, and we will meet that commitment. All legitimate Iraqi parties have condemned terrorism and emphasize that Iraq can no longer provide a base for terrorism. There is no place for terrorism or terrorist organizations in the new Iraq.
(end text)
(Distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
Page Tools: Print this article E-mail this article
posted
The few people who resisted Sadam Husein are to be eradicated by US forces.
"Mr. Speaker, over the past several years, Turkey, a NATO ally and United States friend, has made repeated incursions into Iraq. The invasions, which violate international law, are undertaken ostensibly against Kurdish guerrillas waging a violent insurgency in Turkey. In reality, these military campaigns result in countless civilian casualties, widespread population displacement, severe economic hardship, and if anything, encourage local support for the guerrillas. While the Turkish military declares the guerrillas eradicated after each incursion, repeated cross-border attacks expose this as a fiction.
The latest invasion raises new cause for concern. For more than three weeks, Turkish forces have actively supported the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), which has been engaged in years of bloody fighting with its rival, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). Widespread reports indicate Turkey is using napalm and cluster bombs, despite international covenants banning their use. The PUK receives significant United States funding, so in effect, our ally Turkey is attacking a party which receives funds from the United States Government. I question why our Government refuses to acknowledge this inconsistency. And even more importantly, I question our Government's silence when a United States-supplied ally violates a United States-imposed `no-fly zone' to kill Kurdish civilians and destroy their villages in the so-called safe haven.
Mr. Speaker, Turkey along with the U.S. and Britain, had been participating in the ``Ankara Process'' in an effort to bring the two feuding Kurdish factions to the negotiating table. Turkey's military support for the KDP ends any hope that it can serve as a neutral regional peace-broker. Furthermore, Turkish plans to establish a ``buffer zone'' in Iraqi Kurdistan, with at least 8,000 troops, will destabilize the entire region and invite intervention by Iraq, Iran and Syria.
It is tragic and ironic that Turkey seeks answers to its ``Kurdish question'' outside its borders, when in reality it should be working these issues out at home. Turkey's 15 million Kurds have faced oppression since modern Turkey was forged in 1923. Since then, there have been 28 major Kurdish uprisings. The most recent, underway since 1984, has claimed almost 30,000 lives. According to Turkish Government sources 3,185 Kurdish villages have been evacuated and up to three million people have been internally displaced from southeast Turkey. Despite the severity of the conflict, Turkey refuses access by the International Red Cross to the stricken region. The conflict costs billions of dollars each year and destroys hopes of economic development that is greatly needed in the region.
Mr. Speaker, the Turkish regime must put flesh on its skeletal democracy, or the Kurdish problem and other pressing issues will fester and continue to prevent Turkey from moving closer to Europe. Turkey's civilian and military leaders have repeatedly stated their intentions to address human rights problems, yet the problems persist and reform efforts seem little more than public relations exercises. Meanwhile, our Government continues business as usual, sending billions of dollars worth of security assistance to Ankara while refusing to acknowledge increasing signs of political instability. Such unequivocal support is unwise because it reinforces the military and other non-democratic forces in Turkey, and sends a message that the United States Government will support the Turkish Government no matter how deficient it remains in human rights areas.
Mr. Speaker, as I stand before this distinguished body, a group of Kurds and Americans, including Kathryn Cameron Porter, are fasting in front of this building to protest human rights violations in Turkey. They too believe our Government has remained silent in the face of growing threats to democracy in Turkey. A major impetus for their protest is the continued imprisonment of four Kurdish parliamentarians, including Leyla Zana, whose indictment included charges related to her appearance at a Helsinki Commission briefing. All Kurdish-based political parties in Turkey are suppressed, even though Kurdish political opinions must be considered if political institutions are to be truly representative. Non-violent Kurdish parties must be allowed to participate in political life. Individuals should not be jailed for expressing opinions deemed harmful by the Government. Open debate and dialogue is imperative.
Mr. Speaker, another democratic measure is freedom of the media. On October 21, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) issued a report entitled ``The Anatolian Archipelago'' which details the fate of 78 journalists jailed for speech crimes in Turkey. CPJ, which does meticulous research and seeks Turkish Government input before publishing, has concluded in each of the last 3 years that more journalists are jailed in Turkey than in any other country.
Human rights defenders and Kurdish peace activists are also subject to harassment, imprisonment or worse. This past week, Yavuz Onen and Akin Birdal, two internationally recognized rights leaders, and Ahmet Turk, a Kurd, were charged for reading in public a report detailing the ongoing scandal linking officials to death squads and face up to 3 years in prison. On October 20, well-known peace activist, Esber Yagmurdereli, was jailed for 22 years. On October 21, the president and 7 other Human Rights Association (HRA) executives were sentenced to between 1 and 2 years in prison for speeches made during human rights week in 1996. In recent years, 20 HRA branches have been closed, including all that serve Kurdish communities in Southeast Turkey.
Free expression is only one area where Turkey is deficient in meeting its stated human rights commitments. Local NGOs, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and our own State Department conclude that torture remains widespread and few accused of torture are brought to justice. Last week, a panel of judges presiding over an internationally publicized trial, refused to make police accused of torturing 14 young people, some as young as 13, appear in court. Also pending is the legal appeal of the human rights foundation doctor who refused to turn over to the government information on victims of torture.
Mr. Speaker, I have joined more than 150 of our colleagues in signing a letter calling for the release of imprisoned parliamentarians in Turkey. At the very least, as Members of an elected legislature, we should demand that our colleagues in Turkey be freed, for it is unthinkable that legislators in a democratic society would be jailed for speaking out on behalf of their constituents. I urge my colleagues to sign the ``Dear Colleague'' letter and to visit those fasting on the steps of this building.
I have also joined my colleagues on the Helsinki Commission in introducing a resolution expressing the sense of the Congress that Turkey should not be chosen as the host of the next summit meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. As long as Turkey continues to violate international law and its own commitments to OSCE principles, Turkey should not be considered an appropriate venue for a human rights summit. Such a privilege, Mr. Speaker, should be reserved for participating States that have demonstrated, in word and in deed, steadfast support for Helsinki principles and standards, particularly respect for basic human rights."
IP: Logged |
As Generals Seek Military Solution, Kurdish Problem Poisons Turkish Life
by Marvine Howe Diyarbakir, a dusty frontier post encircled by powerful Roman ramparts on the banks of the Tigris River, has changed unbelievably over the past few years. Ungainly, hastily built cement apartment blocks and administrative buildings have sprawled out of control beyond the city walls. Along every street and vacant lot, children and men are trying to eke out a livelihood selling anything from pencils and chewing gum to shoe soles. Turkey’s government admits that Diyarbakir’s population has swollen since 1990 from 200,000 to about a million today. (Human rights sources put this unnatural population explosion at 1.7 million).
Most of the newcomers come from villages and hamlets that have been forcibly evacuated and destroyed “for security reasons.’’ In an attempt to eradicate Kurdish insurgents, the Turkish armed forces have emptied large Kurdish-inhabited areas, turned them into no-man’s-lands or declared them forbidden military zones. Villagers suspected of sheltering guerrillas or charged with refusing to participate in the officially-promoted Village Guard system are forced to leave their homes and farms, which then are often burned to the ground to deprive guerrillas of shelter.
No one knows for sure how many people have been displaced in the conflict, which has dragged on since 1984, because the Turkish authorities have rejected offers of assistance from outside organizations like the International Red Cross. But the Turkish Human Rights Association charges that 2,657 villages have been destroyed in Turkey’s southeast and an estimated three million people turned into refugees.
What seems to be happening is the Kurdization of Turkey. One-fifth of the population, or about 15 million people, are said to be of Kurdish origin and many of these have long since been assimilated into Turkish society. But since the early 1990s large numbers of unassimilated Kurds, who used to be concentrated in the southeast, have been uprooted and dispersed around the country. Those with the means to do it move westward and cram into the shantytowns around such large cities as Mersin, Adana, Antalya, Izmir and Istanbul. The poor seek shelter with extended relatives in southeastern cities: Mardin, Van and Diyarbakir.
Although I had not planned to go to the southeast during a June visit this year to Turkey, reports on the Kurdish conflict were so sketchy and contradictory that I felt obliged to make at least a brief trip to Diyarbakir, capital of the area that Kurdish nationalists call Kurdistan.
There had been a Kurdish problem when I had last visited Diyarbakir in the early 1980s as bureau chief in Turkey for The New York Times, but in those days almost no one talked about it. People were afraid to admit they were Kurds, except in private. There were no Kurdish political parties or newspapers, and no Turkish Human Rights Association. Even then, however, the region was under a state of emergency. The Beirut-based Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) had publicly declared its intention to fight for a national homeland in southeastern Turkey, but had carried out only isolated terrorist attacks.
Since then, the Kurdish question has poisoned Turkish life, resulting in more than 20,000 deaths, draining the economy through unending military expenditures, and devastating a large section of the country. It has triggered a mass migration to cities and tremendous social problems, blackened the country’s human rights record, and strained relations with Turkey’s Western allies and neighbors.
The late President Turgut Ozal initiated a slight political opening in 1990, with the legalization of pro-Kurdish political parties and Kurdish-language publications. However, the first Kurdish parties soon were outlawed for sympathizing with the PKK, their publications seized and some leaders, including parliamentarians, were assassinated or jailed.
A Taboo Lifted But the taboo was lifted on the concept of a Kurdish identity. In last December’s national election, the People’s Democratic Party (HADEP), a reincarnation of the earlier Kurdish groups, made a strong showing in the southeast, winning 1.2 million votes. That was only 4.2 percent of the nationwide total, however, well below the 10 percent threshold needed for party representation in parliament.
From the Turkish capital of Ankara, it is not clear what is happening at the front. Military experts claim that the Turkish army, with better training and a huge increase in forces, has turned the situation around in the past two years. Having abandoned conventional warfare in favor of counter-guerrilla tactics, the army is said to have cleared the area of PKK guerrilla groups, which never numbered more than a few thousand.
A Western diplomat who follows the Kurdish issue closely recalls the situation was so insecure at the end of 1993 that he was not authorized to drive between the major towns of Erzurum and Elazig. Since then, a new chief-of-staff, General Ismail Hakki Karadayi, has doubled the size of Turkish forces to 200,000, issued new rules of engagement and “achieved an acceptable level of violence,’’ the diplomat said.
Yet every week military dispatches continue to report 20, 50 or 100 PKK terrorists killed in action. And of late a spate of terrorist acts has been claimed by the PKK. In fact, Turkish political and business leaders increasingly concede there is no military solution to the Kurdish question and call for additional political measures. Akim Birdal, head of the Human Rights Assocation in Ankara, calls the Kurdish problem “the top human rights issue in Turkey today.’’ He provides monthly statistics showing high levels of deaths by torture, detentions, disappearances under detention, mystery killings, and deaths of people, mostly Kurds, in armed classes.
“The military operations have only made things worse,’’ Birdal says. “Every time they kill a guerrilla, the whole family turns PKK.’’
On first impression, the military presence in Diyarbakir is not particularly conspicuous, except for soldiers stationed at key points atop the 5.5-kilometer circle of Roman walls and occasional patrols down the main streets. An American photographer and I were free to walk about the city, even at night. The atmosphere was generally relaxed with bustling mosques and markets and makeshift cafés in alleys crowded with men on tiny stools, sipping tea or coffee at all hours. (Women tend to stay at home in this traditionally Muslim society.)
With recommendations from Turkish friends, we contacted several local journalists, but they seemed extremely nervous and urged us to go to the Foreign Press Office. They also advised us to get a special press passin addition to the Turkish press card if we wanted to travel outside Diyarbakir.
Seddik Algul, director of the Foreign Press Office, readily gave us passes, but said only the super governor is authorized to speak about “regional security’’and he was out of town. Mr. Algul did assure us that since the massive incursion into northern Iraq to get rid of PKK bases in May 1995, the armed forces “have restored security and normal daily life in Diyarbaker.’’
“The government knows this is a weak, under-developed region,’’ the official spokesman continued, citing an unemployment rate of 20 percent. He spoke of new housing for 2,050 families and a newly opened industrial zone on the road to Elazig, but acknowledged the need to expand private and government investments. By the year 2000, he said, work would be finished on five new dams in the area, providing 200,000 jobs in agriculture and industry.
Since we had many people to see in our five days in Diyarbakir, we limited our excursions to a bus trip to Mardin, seat of an ancient Christian community, near the Iraqi border. During the journey of some 60 miles, there was almost no civilian traffic and the countryside appeared deserted. But we passed five military posts with either armored personnel carriers, troop carriers or tanks. Twice, soldiers with assault rifles entered the bus to check everyone’s identity. We were encouraged not to travel at night.
Old Mardin, known as Marida since pre-Roman times, hangs precariously on a peak overlooking the Mesopotamian plain. Around the base of this natural fortress an entirely new city is rising. When we asked how refugees could afford these new confortable-looking dwellings, we were told they were destined mainly for military and police families.
Most of the touristic sites at Mardin were closed, as was the state tourism office. The only other visitors we encountered were soldiers strolling in formation along the main street, apparently on a shopping expedition. Outside of town, the Syrian Orthodox Dezafaren Monastery, built in the eighth century, is still functioning with a handful of monks. And there are still 60 Syrian Orthodox families and 10 Chaldean families who appear determined to stay in this tenuous border area.
There is no sign marking the Diyarbakir branch of the Human Rights Association. Yet a large crowd was gathered in its spartan sixth-floor offices in a building in the center of town. Mostly refugees from evacuated villages, they were seeking any kind of help. There also were frantic relatives of prisoners who had come to find out what was happening in Diyarbakir’s central prison, where they had seen clouds of smoke. (Later, the association said 19 prisoners had set themselves on fire in protest against prison treatment and 14 had died from their wounds.)
Kadri Bilen, a 37-year-old farmer, told the Human Rights Association representative how, on the previous night, soldiers surrounded his village of Hiskamerg, 36 miles east of Diyarbakir. Most of the 450 inhabitants fled to save their families and their tractors. Bilen left his wife and five children in another village and walked through the fields to get a bus for Diyarbakir. Only old and sick people stayed behind, along with four shepherds and 1,000 sheep, which were confiscated by the military. Security forces had raided Hiskamerg many times before, accusing the villagers of helping the PKK because they refused to join the Village Guards. But this time, Bilen said, was different because there had been a clash and two neighboring Village Guards were killed. He was sure the army would burn Hiskamerg so nobody could go back. Bilen owns 200 acres of wheat and barley but was unable to plant this year becuse of the insecurity. Under questioning, he admitted that “70 to 80 percent of the village is pro-PKK.’’
Sara Ara, wearing traditional flowered bloomers and headscarf, was suffering sharp pains in her chest and stomach and had come to the Human Rights Association for medical help. She already had been to the state clinic, where she was given a handfull of pills. They had done no good, and she couldn’t afford to go to a private doctor.
Mrs. Ara, who was accompanied by her eight-year-old daughter but doesn’t know her own age, described her situation through a Kurdish interpreter with little show of emotion. She and her husband, Hanza, owned a 50-acre wheat and grape farm and lived with their 10 children in the village of Huseynik near Lice. Guerrillas had come many times to Huseynik and she had cooked bread for them.
One night in February 1995, the guerrillas came to the village to get food and left about midnight. At 4 a.m., her husband left the house and at 7 a.m., soldiers surrounded the village looking for her husband.
She heard gunfire and shortly afterward the soldiers took her 11- and 9-year-old sons and forced them to stay in the river until evening, although it was very cold. Her husband didn’t return and she didn’t know what had happened to him.
In May, the military returned and burned down the village, over 100 houses. The soldiers warned that if she didn’t leave, they would keep her sons. She sent two boys to relatives in Mersin and moved into a cellar in Diyarbakir with the rest of her children. Then, eight months after her husband disappeared, a neighbor found his body buried in the cow pasture.
“We have suffered too much,’’ she concluded quietly. “How can we forget?’’
Across town, more people crowded into the well-marked offices of HADEP, the Kurdish nationalist party. Some had come to ask for help but others were there to volunteer.
“HADEP wants peace and equal rights for Kurds and Turks,’’ a 19-year-old student volunteer told me, warning that if I used his name he would go to jail. “It’s a crime to call for equal rights or read a Kurdish newspaper or look at Kurdish TV, but HADEP is the number one party at the university.’’
Abdullah Akin, chairman of HADEP in Diyarbakir, laughed when I asked if the military had things under control: “That’s a comic idea,” he said. “If things are under control, why have they emptied 3,000 villages? Why have 3,500 civilians been killed in the past three years? Why are more than 10,000 people in jail, including many deputies and writers? Why has the army stepped up operations in the past two years?’’ Commenting on the social and economic situation, the 30-year-old lawyer said southeast Turkey is the country’s poorest area, with a $200 per capita income compared to $2,000 for the rest of the country. “Sure, they’re building dams,” he said, “for western Turkey. Many towns, villages and gecekondu [shantytowns] here don’t have electricity and even luxury neighborhoods get cuts.’’
Akin said the main reasons for HADEP’s poor showing in the recent Turkish elections were difficulties in registering the uprooted population and military pressures preventing HADEP from opening offices in a number of towns like Mus and Bitlis. “Refah came in first because of the Kurdish vote but it’s no different from the other parties on the Kurdish question,’’ Akin said, referring to the victory of the Islamist Welfare Party. “We’ll be better organized next time.’’
What about the PKK, I asked? The HADEP leader did not miss a beat: “In my opinion and that of the party, the PKK is not a terrorist organization but a resistance movement.’’
Most people we talked to, from random taxi drivers and shopkeepers to teachers, students and refugees, referred to the PKK with respect. They unhesitatingly described themselves as ``Kurdsnot Turks,’’ and chafed at the prolonged state of emergency and the government’s unfulfilled promises.
“People are very angry,’’ said a Diyarbakir rug dealer, complaining there haven’t been any tourists since the Gulf war. “Refugees from the villages live here like animals ten to a room and nobody helps them. America should get the Turkish government to talk to PKK.’’
From this albeit cursory visit, I came away with the feeling that the Turkish armed forces have indeed gained the upper hand against the guerrillas and established order at least in cities like Diyarbakir and Mardin and along the highways. But clearly they have a long way to go to win the struggle for the hearts and minds of the local population.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Home > Backissues > 1096 > Special Report
IP: Logged |
posted
“How many great poets like Nazim Hikmet could we have had if in the past hundred years our culture had not been suppressed,” Yasar Kemal once lamented. He would know the answer better than anyone. Himself an ethnic Kurd, Kemal has always been outspoken on issues of human and minority rights not only via his writing but also via his activism. In 1995 after publishing an article in Der Spiegel, he was given a suspended sentence of 20 months in prison. During Kemal's trial 1,000 intellectuals had claimed responsibility for the book in which his article had appeared in order to stand behind him. Among these intellectuals, 99 went on trial at the Istanbul State Security Court (DGM).
Viewed from this perspective, it looks like nowadays an old pattern is repeating itself. Once again an acclaimed Turkish novelist is being put on trial for his views. Orhan Pamuk will go to court in December for the views he expressed during an interview with a Swiss paper. In that interview Pamuk had claimed, "Thirty thousand Kurds and 1 million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it.” Once this statement was heard in Turkey, it triggered a huge reaction and nationalist uproar. At the same time there was an intricate debate in the Turkish media, full of twists and turns. The debate was not between “black” and “white” but between “shades of gray.” Not many Western journalists have paid attention to the nuances of this debate, and not many Turkish intellectuals have tried to explain the nuances to foreign journalists. As a result, civil society in Turkey has been depicted as more black-and-white than it really is.
There is no clash of civilizations. Instead there is a clash of opinions and values. As in many countries, in Turkey too there is a clash between two forces. On the one hand there is the “state oriented.” They comprise a crooked alliance: army officers, conservative bureaucrats, some diplomats, ultranationalist groups, some Kemalists and some groups on the far left. All these people can act together if they suspect that “Atatürk's legacy is being challenged” and that the state is in danger. For them the state machinery is above everything, above society and the individual. They all respond with a nationalist reflex when a Turkish intellectual voices a critical opinion outside Turkey. The desire to look “good” in the eyes of the Western world runs deep in the subconscious of this group. Anyone who taints Turkey's image in the eyes of the Western world is seen as a “traitor.” This group is strong, as it is backed by state apparatuses. Yet, it is also problematically heterogeneous.
The second major force in Turkey today is the “civil society-oriented.” These, too, compose an alliance: liberals, libertarians, some social democrats, some conservative Muslims critical of an excessively centralized regime, many Kurds and Alawis and Sufis and all open-minded intellectuals. This second alliance is pushing the country harder and harder towards a multicultural, cosmopolitan regime and strongly favors Turkey's accession to the EU. This group is strong. The problem is, the more they gain pace, the more the backlash against them.
Turkish media and civil society were recently stirred by a critical conference that was held for the first time in Istanbul: a conference on Ottoman Armenians. Over the last four years, similar workshops and conferences had been organized by open-minded Turkish and Armenian scholars in different parts of the United States. Yet this conference differed from the previous ones in three aspects: It was held in Istanbul, organized collectively by three Turkish universities and all its keynote speakers came originally from Turkey. For the first time critical-minded Turkish intellectuals came together to jointly explore what had happened to the Ottoman Armenians before, during and after 1915. Though highly diverse in other ways, the participants shared one thing in common: their belief in the need to face the atrocities of the past, no matter how distressing or dangerous, in order to create a better future and a more democratic society in Turkey. Despite a last-minute legal maneuver by a lawyer to prevent it from happening, the conference was held and openly supported by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. All papers were presented without censure, and even the taboo word “genocide” was publicly uttered. The next day Turkey's Milliyet said “Another Taboo Has Been Smashed.”
Though there has been an accompanying nationalist smear campaign, the number of Turks supporting the network of intellectual solidarity between Turkish and Armenian intellectuals is on the rise. Through the collective efforts of academics, journalists, writers and media correspondents, 1915 is finally being opened to discussion in Turkey like never before. All this is accompanied by a series of important steps that the government has taken to improve its human rights record.
Therefore, Pamuk's case will be received within such a complicated framework in which two forces are in conflict. We are in need of collective efforts for the civil society-oriented to preside over the state-oriented. Turkey is a country where in the past, social transformation was always introduced from above, imposed by a cultural elite on the rest of society. This time it has to be different. For a true democracy to exist, change has to come from below and from within. This is what we are struggling for.
Turkish intellectuals will stand by Pamuk on the day of his trial, just like they stood by Kemal in the past. Our country has already hurt and isolated many of its great poets and writers in the past. We cannot let it happen again.
IP: Logged |
posted
The US and UN official responce to the gassing of the Kurds " It is dificult to determine witch countries are involved", the The UN voted 9- 11 on a motion to condemn the acts, the us presured others to not vote for the condemnation. The US helped with the gassing Sold them the gas, gave satelite imaging to give the gas better affect.
IP: Logged |
UBBFriend: Email this page to someone!
Printer-friendly view of this topic
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
![[Cool]](cool.gif)
