The following are selected remarks by Ali Hassan al-Majid,
Secretary General of the Ba'ath Party's Northern
Bureau, from a number of meetings with senior Ba'ath
officials in 1988 and 1989. Audiotapes of more than
a dozen of these meetings were recovered from Iraqi
government offices and from al-Majid's home in
Kirkuk during the failed Kurdish uprising in March
1991.
1. Meeting with members of the Northern Bureau
and governors of the Autonomous Region of Iraqi
Kurdistan, April 15, 1988.
By next summer there will be no more villages
remaining spread out here and there, but only
complexes. It'll be just like the hen when she puts
the chicks under her wing. We'll put the people in
the complexes and keep an eye on them. We'll no
longer let them live in the villages where the
saboteurs can go and visit them. Emigration from the
villages to the city is necessary in the north of
Iraq.
From now on I won't give the villagers flour, sugar,
kerosene, water or electricity as long as they
continue living there. Let them come closer to me to
hear me, so that I can tell them the things I
believe and want in ideology, education and common
sense. Why should I let them live there like donkeys
who don't know anything? For the wheat? I don't want
their wheat. We've been importing wheat for the last
twenty years. Let's increase it for another five
years.
I will prohibit large areas; I will prohibit any
presence in them. What if we prohibit the whole
basin from Qara Dagh to Kifri to Diyala to
Darbandikhan to Suleimaniyeh? What good is this
basin? What did we ever get from them? Imagine how
much we paid out and lost on those areas. How many
good citizens are there among those people, and how
many bad ones?
What went wrong? What happened? Thirty, twenty,
twenty-five years of saboteur activity. Imagine how
many martyrs we have!.... Now you can't go from
Kirkuk to Erbil any more without an armored vehicle.
All of this basin, from Koysinjaq to here
[Kirkuk]...I'm going to evacuateit. I will evacuate
it as far as Gweir and Mosul. No human beings except
on the main roads. For five years I won't allow any
human existence there. I don't want their
agriculture. I don't want tomatoes; I don't want
okra and cucumbers. If we don't act in this way the
saboteurs' activities will never end, not for a
million years. These are all just notes, but with
the help of God we will apply them very soon, not
more than a month from now. In the summer nothing
will be left.
2. Meeting with Northern Bureau members and
directors of the Ba'ath Party headquarters in
the northern governorates: tape is dated
May 26, 1988, but from context appears to be 1987.
(Response to a question about the success of the
deportation campaign):
As a matter of fact what we have achieved is
something that the party and the leadership never
managed to do until 1987. Some of it was just the
help and mercy of God. Nothing else. Otherwise if
you just go and conduct military exercises for the
troops who were used in the campaign you will have
more casualties than we had. Imagine in such an
exercise how many martyrs and casualties there will
be!....
What happened? Are these the saboteurs? Are these
the people you were afraid of? This is the reality
of the saboteurs, and you have all these facilities
and this capacity. They could not confront you. In
the past they were confronting a division with just
a few machine guns. This time they were just
shelling us from far away with light artillery.
Some of you who were working here at the time when I
arrived, so motivated with this duty, perhaps you
said in your hearts, "OK, wait a minute! Wait a
minute! The people who were here before you said the
same things and then didn't do anything!" You will
be forced to take action. All those years and the
saboteurs still existed. At a time when we had this
huge military! I swear to God it was not done in
that way. All the Iraqi troops couldn't have done
what we did. But this [deportation] hurt them. It
kills them.
(voice identified as Abu Muhammad: Only God can do
more than you. Otherwise you can do anything. This
Ba'ath Party can do anything.)
The saboteurs watch the orders and directives. The
orders are not that strong. The previous ones were a
hundred times stronger. But they were not combined
with a belief on the part of those executing them.
Now that exists. We said that at that date we will
start to implement the deportation campaign. And we
did it everywhere, with the help of God. The same
day [in 1987] they captured Qara Dagh in
retaliation.
Jalal Talabani asked me to open a special channel of
communication with him. That evening I went to
Suleimaniyeh and hit them with the special
ammunition.1
That was my answer. We continued the deportations. I
told the mustashars that they might say that
they like their villages and that they won't leave.
I said I cannot let your village stay because I will
attack it with chemical weapons. Then you and your
family will die. You must leave right now. Because I
cannot tell you the same day that I am going to
attack with chemical weapons. I will kill them all
with chemical weapons! Who is going to say anything?
The international community? Fuck them! The
international community and those who listen to
them.
Even if the war with
Iran
stops and the Iranians withdraw from all occupied
lands, I will not negotiate with him [Talabani] and
I will not stop the deportations.
This is my intention, and I want you to take serious
note of it. As soon as we complete the deportations,
we will start attacking them everywhere according to
a systematic military plan. Even their strongholds.
In our attacks we will take back one third or one
half of what is under their control. If we can try
to take two-thirds, 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,
but I will continue to attack them with chemicals
for fifteen days. Then I will announce that anyone
who wishes to surrender with his gun will be allowed
to do so. I will publish one million copies of this
leaflet and distribute it in the North, in Kurdish,
Sorani, Badinani and Arabic. I will not say it is
from the Iraqi government. I will not let the
government get involved. I will say it is from here
[the Northern Bureau]. Anyone willing to come back
is welcome, and those who do not return will be
attacked again with new, destructive chemicals. I
will not mention the name of the chemicalbecause
that is classified information. But I will say with
new destructive weapons that will destroy you. So I
will threaten them and motivate them to surrender.
Then you will see that all the vehicles of God
Himself will not be enough to carry them all. I
think and expect that they will be defeated. I swear
that I am sure we will defeat them.
I told the expert comrades that I need guerrilla
groups in Europe to kill whoever they see from them
[the saboteurs]. I will do it, with the help of God.
I will defeat them and follow them to Iran. Then I
will ask the mujaheddin to attack them there.2
3. Meeting with unnamed officials,
August 1, 1988.
...Any Arab who changes his ethnicity to Kurdish is
doing so to avoid serving in the army. This is a big
problem. What shall we do about it?.... Why did
Mosul [governorate] register them as Kurds? We asked
them to deport every Kurd who lives there and send
them to the mountains to live like goats. Fuck them!
Why do you feel embarrassed by them?
We deported them from Mosul without any
compensation. We razed their houses. We said come
on, go, go! But those who are already fighters, we
tell them from the beginning that they must go and
settle in the complexes. After that we will tell
them to go to the Autonomous Region. We will not get
into any arguments with them. I read the pledge for
them and they must sign it. Then wherever I find
[passage unclear], I will smash their heads. These
kind of dogs, we will crush their heads. We will
read the pledge for them: I the undersigned admit
that I must live and settle in the Autonomous
Region. Otherwise I am ready to accept any kind of
punishment including the death penalty. Then I will
put the pledge in my pocket and tell the Amn
director to let him go wherever he wants. After a
period of time, I will ask where is he? They will
tell me, here he is. The Ba'ath Party director must
write to me saying that the following people are
living in that place. Immediately I will say blow
him away, cut him open like a cucumber.
Do you want to increase the Arab population with
these bloody people?.... We must Arabize your area
[Mosul]--and only real Arabs, notYezidis who say one
day that they are Kurds and the next that they are
Arabs. We turned a blind eye to the Yezidi people
joining the jahsh in the beginning, in order
to stop the saboteurs from increasing. But apart
from that, what use are the Yezidis? No use.
4. Northern Bureau meeting to review the
campaigns of 1987 and 1988; the tape is undated, but
is in a batch dated January 21 and 22, 1989.
The most dangerous stage of the threat to Iraq was
between August 1987 and April 1988. It was a
dangerous situation. We started to do serious work
on the military front from February 18 to September
4, 1988.
All the successive commanders of the First Corps and
the Fifth Corps: Lt. Gen. Nazar [al-Khazraji] and
Sultan Hashem of the First Corps and Tali'a al-Durri,
the martyr al-Hadithi, Muhammad and Ne'ama Fares and
Ayad of the Fifth Corps... All these men that I
mentioned are commanders who have been serving in
the north of Iraq since they were lieutenants. The
first one among them to join the Ba'ath Party was
Tali'a al-Durri.
When we made the decision to destroy and
collectivize the villages and draw a dividing line
[i.e. the so-called "red line"] between us and the
saboteurs, the first one to express his doubts to me
and before the President was 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 that
time. 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?
So we started to show these senior commanders on TV
that [the saboteurs] had surrendered. Am I supposed
to keep them in good shape? What am I supposed to do
with them, these goats? Then a message reaches me
from that great man, the father [i.e. Saddam
Hussein], saying take good care of the families of
the saboteurs and this and that. The general command
brings it to me. I put his message to my head.3
But 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. I said,
"Weren't you satisfied by what you saw on television
and read in the newspaper?" Where am I supposed to
put all this enormous number of people? I started to
distribute them among the governorates. I had to
send bulldozers hither and thither...4
5. Meeting to welcome Hassan Ali al-Amiri, his
successor as Secretary General of the Northern
Bureau,
April 15, 1989.
I would like to admit that I am not and will not be
the right person for the current stable situation in
the North....For this current peaceful and stable
situation, Comrade Hassan Ali is the right person. I
am ready to come back and do whatever you think is
necessary, though I would like to remain a member of
the Northern Bureau.
I hope that the comrades in the North will not ask
Comrade Hassan Ali to take administrative measures
and do other things that he cannot do. Because that
stage is finished. It will no longer be allowed for
a member of the leadership to have power over the
army, because the exceptional situation is over.
These powers are not being withdrawn from Comrade
Hassan Ali because he is not up to the task, but
because that stage has now finished.
In my first meeting in April 1987 with the army
corps commanders, Amn and police directors,
governors and Ba'ath Party directors, we decided to
deport all the villagers in order to isolate the
saboteurs. We made it in two stages. The first stage
started on April 21 and ran until May 21. The second
stage ran from May 21 to June 21. From June 22
anyone who was arrested in those areas was to be
killed immediately without any hesitation, according
to the directives which are still in force.
In one of the meetings with the army chiefs of staff
I was asked to postpone the campaign for a month by
one of our best commanders. I said no, not even for
one day. From now on our slogan will be to wipe out
saboteur activity. That is our objective. That is
the objective of this stage. Anyone who thinks he is
not capable of implementing this must tell me now,
One of the best commanders, the commander of the
FifthCorps, was reluctant, despite me providing him
with more facilities than the First Corps. The
result now is that the saboteurs are finished, and
they had frozen 40 percent of Iraqi power.
When the [September 1988] amnesty was announced, I
was about to get mad. But as a responsible party
member I said OK. I said probably we will find some
good ones among them [the Kurds], since they are our
people too. But we didn't find any, never. If you
ask me about the senior officials of the Kurds,
which ones are good and loyal, I will say only the
governors of Erbil and Suleimaniyeh. Apart from
those two there are no loyal or good ones.
I cry when I see a tragic show or movie. One day I
cried when I saw a woman who was lost and without a
family in a movie. But I would like to tell you that
I did what I did and what I was supposed to do. I
don't think you could do more than what I could do.
I would like to speak about two points: one,
arabization; and two, the shared zones between the
Arab lands and the Autonomous Region. The point that
we are talking about is Kirkuk. When I came, the
Arabs and Turkomans were not more than fifty-one
percent of the total population of Kirkuk.5
Despite everything, I spent sixty million dinars
until we reached the present situation. Now it is
clear. For your information, the Arabs who were
brought to Kirkuk didn't raise the percentage to
sixty percent. Then we issued directives. I
prohibited the Kurds from working in
Kirkuk,
the neighborhoods and the villages around it,
outside the Autonomous Region....
Kirkuk is a mixture of nations, religions and
doctrines. The people we deported from May 21 to
June 21, not one of them was from the prohibited
areas. But they were under the control of the
saboteurs, whether they were for them or against
them.
1 This presumably
refers to the April 1987 chemical attack on the PUK
headquarters in the Jafati Valley.
2 Following their
expulsion from France in 1986, the People's
Mujaheddin of Iran relocated to Iraq and came under
the patronage of the Ba'ath Party.
3 The sense
conveyed in the Arabic phrase is that Saddam
Hussein's wish is always al-Majid's command--but
not, he goes on to say defensively, in this
instance.
4 The tape is cut
off in mid-sentence at this point.
5 It is unclear
here whether al-Majid is referring to the city or
the governorate of Kirkuk.
