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Anfal: The Kurdish Genocide in Iraq
by Khaled Salih
Gvteborgs Universitet
Iraq and the Kurds:
a bibliographic essay (1)
In October 1988, while the destruction of Kurdistan and the mass killing of
the Kurds by the Iraqi regime was a well-known fact, though understandably
not documented, at least in the West, Milton Viorst published a peculiar
article in the International Hearald Tribune (2) under the title: 'Iraq and
the Kurds: Where Is the Proof of Poison Gas?.'
Viorst felt that it was unjust to punish the Iraqi government 'for a
particular crime that, according to some authorities, may never have taken
place.' To do the Iraqi government some good he then spent a week in Iraq
'looking into the question.' Since those who alleged that Iraq had used
chemical weapons against the Kurds were not able to proof it, Viorst's
visit to Iraq was presented in the article as a proof of the opposite.
After confirming that Iraq sent its army 'to crush a rebellion of the
Kurds who fought at Iran's side,' as Iraq aimed 'to stamp out the
insurgency,' Viorst tells his readers what he saw from an Iraqi helicopter:
'the ruins of hundreds of Kurdish mountain villages that the Iraqi army
destroyed to deny the rebels sanctuary.' From what he saw, he could though
conclude that 'if lethal gas was used, it was not used genocidally - that
is, for mass killing.' Since the Kurdish population in Iraq constitute a
tightly knit community, 'If there had been large-scale killing, it is
likely they would know and tell the world. But neither I nor any Westerner
I encountered heard such allegations.'
During his visit, Viorst could not see that the Kurdish society showed
'discernible sings of tension.' In his eyes, everything seemed to take its
normal course. 'The northern cities, where the men wear Kurdish turbans and
baggy pants, were as bustling as I had ever seen them.' To convince his
readers about the 'normality' of life in the Kurdish areas, he tells us
that he talked to armed Kurds, members of Iraqi military units mobilised
against the rebels.
Even if Iraq used chemical weapons, Viorst says doubtfully, it 'probably
used gas of some kind in air attacks on rebel positions,' but not against
the civilians, since the symptoms the refugees showed to doctors sent by
France, the UN and the Red cross to the Turkish camps, 'could have been
produced by a powerful, but nonlethal, tear gas.' Stop then annoying Iraq
and harm the relationship between Iraq and the United States, was Mr
Viorst's clear message.
Less than two years later we came to realise how prophetically Viorst
spoke in October 1988, when he self-confidently reminded the US officials
and decision-makers that, 'Iraq, having put down the Kurdish rebellion, has
no wars on its agenda, and it has pledged to abide by the Geneva convention
on chemical warfare.' In August 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait, an event that led
to the Gulf war.
A Second Voice
During the war over Kuwait, the Iraqi regime's repression of 'its own'
people, in particular the use of chemical weapons against the Kurds, became
an important part of the ideological justification in the 'just war' to
restore Kuwait. The anti-war camp was no doubt irritated and upset by this
rather cynical strategy. They pointed out many inconsistencies in the
Allies' policies, being in the Middle East, world-wide, historically or
contemporary.
One person who could not leave this major event uncommented was of course
Edward Said. Several aspects of the event could encourage him to get
involved, such as the question of imperialism, Arab nationalism, and human
rights violation, to name but a few. On 7 March 1991, Said wrote:
"The claim that Iraq gassed its own citizens has often bee repeated. At
best, this is uncertain. There is at least one War College report,
done while Iraq was a US ally claims that the gassing of the Kurds in
Halabja was done by Iran. Few people mention such reports in the
media today (3)."
Given his public image of being among the critical intellectuals, Said's
attempt to cast doubt on Iraq's use of chemical weapons against the Kurds
was not only surprising but shocking, since it came from a 'secular
oppositional intellectual' who belonged to a 'class of informed,' who did
not allow himself 'the luxury of playing the identity game', who desired to
'more compassionately press the interests of the unheard, the
unrepresented, the unconnected people of our world,' and who wanted to do
that 'with the accents of personal restraint, historical scepticism and
committed intellect.'(4)
Detailed Documents
Although, at that time, no one would have been able to quote an Iraqi
document to help Edward Said to overcome his uncertainty, the events after
the war had at least one unimaginable dimension: it provided an
unprecedented opportunity to give sufficient proofs that the Iraqi regime
was using chemical weapons against the Kurds, and to do so by using the
regime's own detailed documents.
In her introduction to a documentary book, Saddam speaks on the Gulf
Crisis: a collection of documents, (5) an Israeli specialist on modern Iraq,
Ofra Bengio, indicated that the invasion of Kuwait could best be
understood against the background of Iraq's internal political development
since July 1979, i.e. after Saddam Hussein's rise to power. By August 1990,
Saddam Hussein's 'megalomania led him to apply his domestic style of rule
to foreign policy.' But what do we exactly know about the characteristics
of this 'domestic style of rule'? Is it possible to understand and
comprehend the scale of violence inflicted upon the Kuwaitis, without
having a proper picture of this domestic style of rule applied to foreign
policy?
During the unsuccessful Kurdish uprising of March 1991, huge quantities of
Iraqi government records were captured by the Kurds in the secret police
buildings in the major towns and cities. Although much of the documents was
burned or destroyed during the confusing days of the uprising, more than 18
tones of documents, contained in 847 boxes with a total number of pages
estimated as over four million, are now in the USA for safe-keeping, under
the auspices of the Middle East Watch (MEW). Genocide in Iraq (6) and
Bureaucracy of Repression (7) are the latest to be published by Middle East
Watch in order to reconstruct, document, and demonstrate the Iraqi regime's
policy against the Kurds, particularly during the years of 1987 through
1989. Their conclusion is that the organisation 'believes it can
demonstrate convincingly a deliberate intent on the part of the government
of President Saddam Hussein to destroy, through mass murder, part of Iraq's
Kurdish minority.
[the Kurds] were targeted during the Anfal as Kurds.
[and that] Saddam Hussein's regime committed a panoply of war crimes,
together with crimes against humanity and genocide.' This is not a hasty
conclusion; but rather one based on a unique combination of three
painstaking research projects lasted over eighteen months:
1. oral testimony from over 350 eyewitnesses or survivals;
2. forensic evidence from areas of mass graves; and
3. huge amount of captured Iraqi documents.
Bureaucracy of Repression is published in order to give a general picture
about the Iraqi documents currently being analysed by Middle East Watch. It
is 'a Holy Grail for researchers: to have opportunity to speak to survivors
of human rights violations, dig up bones of those who did not survive, and
then read the official account of what took place - all while the regime
that carried out these outrages was still in power - was unique in the
annals of human rights research.' The sample of 38 Arabic documents with
English translation that the book contains serves as a very good
introduction to that huge amount of documents.
The samples are organised around several important categories, such as
Arabization of the Kurdish areas, a policy with many roots in the 1960s;
policy towards prohibited areas created prior to the major operations of
1987-1989; destruction of thousands of Kurdish villages and a dozen of
towns; chemical attacks against the Kurdish civilians; the administrative
framework of the most important campaign called Anfal by the regime itself,
from March 1987 to April 1989; the Anfal campaign, lasted officially from
23 February to 6 September, 1988; the war over Kuwait and the subsequent
domestic uprisings; and last category as other documents of interests.
Procedural Language
All together, the documents 'display a remarkable consistency in style.
The language is dry and formal, indicating rigid bureaucratic procedures.
[They] highlights, as well as show the methodology and routine character of a bureaucracy of repression in action.
[they] offer a unique vista on the inner workings of a sophisticated one-party police state.
[The completeness and sophistication of the Iraqi archive] emphasize that the documents constitute a credible, authentic expression of the state's action
against the Kurds.' This report offers a clear introduction to the unique discourse of repression the Ba'thi regime developed in an enclosed, isolated and concealed Iraq from which little was escaping the machinery of state censorship, prior to March 1991.
Scholars writing on authoritarian and totalitarian regimes admit the
difficulties of obtaining reliable documentary information on most of the
subjects, but more so when it comes to the question of 'sensitive' issues
such as violation of human rights, ideology-related projects of relocation,
displacing part of the country's inhabitants and re-shaping the social
composition of the entire population, often referred to as 'modernisation'.
This is also true in the case of Iraq.
Scholarly Circumspection
Two kinds of scholarly publications on the Ba'thi rule in Iraq is
dominant. One of them is at its best exemplified by Frederick Axelgard's (8)
book published in 1988. His main theme is that, during the Iraq-Iran war in
Iraq a 'coherent national identity' emerged, thanks duly to the leadership
of Saddam Hussein and the Ba'th Party. The war and the 'modernisation'
policies embarked on by the regime of Saddam Hussein, although it appeared
to be harsh in outsiders' eyes, created a 'new nation' characterised by
loyalty to the Iraqi state and the leadership of Saddam Hussein. The main
evidence of this successful enterprise is that the Shi'is in the South,
despite all the Iranian attempts, never attempted to rise against the
Ba'thi regime. The Kurds were also brought under control, and were in 1988
mainly loyal to the regime.
Characteristic of this kind of literature is the absence of any discussion
regarding the conditions of 'stability' and 'cohesion' they praise the
Ba'th regime has brought about in such a highly 'unstable', 'unruly' and
'fragmented' society like that in Iraq. There is no account of the kind and
extent of the suffering inflicted on the population by such policies.
The other kind of literature, which is highly critical, is of course best
exemplified by Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett's publications (9)
and by Samir al-Khalil's book (10). Despite their critical account of the
events and their distaste for the Ba'thist methods of conducting politics,
their attempts to document the political events were limited by the
politics of secrecy and the suppression of information, characteristic of
the Ba'th in Iraq since 1968.
Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the subsequent war and the March 1991 uprisings
of the Shi'is in the South and the Kurds in the North radically changed
that. The vicious circle of fear and apathy was broken by the new
conditions emerged gradually during the Gulf war and the Iraqi army's final
defeat by the Allied forces. The uprisings did not only show how
superficial the image of stability and cohesion was; they suddenly made it
possible to report on its internal conditions, the methods and the
procedures used, and the level of the suffering of the entire population,
particularly that of the Kurdish civilians in northern Iraq (11).
In this sense Genocide in Iraq is most well come to fill this gap. It
demonstrates with cold precision, though forcefully and above all honestly,
how the crime of genocide was committed by the present Ba'thi regime in
Iraq against the Kurdish population. It does not give an account of theeven
ts from an Iraqi helicopter, nor does it quote a War College source to
denounce allegations. Rather, it is based on the experience and testimony
of the those who were affected by the horror of chemical weapons, brutal
army attacks, terror of security services and collaboration of Kurdish
militia men rounding up villagers. To substantiate the testimonies Genocide
in Iraq quotes instead Iraqi documents never meant to see daylight, in
written forms, on recorded audio tapes and on video tapes, as well as
forensic evidence from identified sites of mass graves.
Anfal Operations
Despite all public denial of using chemical weapons against the Kurdish
civilians in 1988, the Iraqi regime did not deny a campaign it called
Anfal. In a reply to a petition by a former Kurdish POW, Chief of the
Bureau of the Presidency informed the man that his 'wife and children were
lost during the Anfal Operations that took place in the Northern Region in
1988.' Anfal, a name of a sura in the Koran, is thus the official military
codename used by the Iraqi government in its public pronouncements and
internal memoranda. It was a name given to a concerted series of military
offensives, eight in all, conducted in six distinct Kurdish geographic
areas between late February and early September 1988.
It is important to note that in reality Anfal corresponded to something
more than military offensives against the Kurdish villages and Kurdish
resistance. Anfal meant co-ordination of many measures starting with
destruction of thousands of villages; gathering rural population after
multiple chemical attacks; transporting them to the camps; processing the
captives through isolating them and determine who should be sent to death;
transporting different groups to different destinies - women and children
to particular camps, elderly people to southern Iraq and the men aged
between 15 and 50 to gravesites- under extreme secrecy; using fire squads
to kill large groups of men near pre-dugged mass graves and then covering
the mass graves as well as denying to know anything about their fates.
Iraqi authorities did nothing to hide the Anfal campaign from public view.
'On the contrary, as each phase of the operation triumphed, its successes
were trumpeted with the same propaganda fanfare that attended the
victorious battles in the Iran-Iraq War.'
As such, Anfal was a logical extension of nearly two decades of government
Arabization of the Kurdish areas. For all its horror, Anfal was not
entirely unprecedented, because terrible atrocities had been visited on the
Kurds by the Ba'th Party on many occasions particuraly since 1968. In the
wake of an official autonomy granted to the Kurds in the firs half of the
70's, the Ba'th Party embarked on the Arabization of the oil-producing
areas in Kurdistan, evicting Kurdish farmers and replacing them with poor
Arab tribesmen from the south, guarded by government troops. After the the
Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) fled into Iran after the collapse of the
Kurdish revolt in March 1975, tens of thousands of villagers from the
Barzani tribes forcibly removed from their homes and relocated to barren
sites in the desert south of Iraq, where they had to rebuild their lives by
themselves, without any form of assistance.
Evacuation, Punishment, and Waste
(Continued)
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