|
|
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
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.
This fifty-four-years-old woman wears the scars of
Halabj a, an Iraqi town that was annihilated by posion
gas in 1988. Twenty-five of her relatives died in the
attack, and now her daugther attends to wounds that
contin ue to burn three years later [Photo: Ed Kashi,
"When the Borders Bleed"].
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
In the mid- and late
1970s, the regime again moved against the Kurds,
forcibly evacuating at least a quarter of a million
people from Iraq's borders with Iraq and Turkey,
destroying their villages to create a cordon sanitaire
along these sensitive frontiers. Most of the displaced
Kurds were relocated into mujamma'at, crude new
settlements located on the main highways in
army-controlled areas of Iraqi Kurdistan.
KDP revived its
alliance with Tehran after the Iranian revolution of
1978; in 1983 they had a joint action to capture a
border town, an event that led immediately to
retribution by the regime in Baghdad: in an operation
against the complexes where the Barzanis Kurds were
relocated, Iraqi troops abducted five to eight thousand
males aged twelve or over. None of them have ever been
seen again. In September 1983, Saddam Hussein gave the
clearest indication regarding the fate of the Barzanis:
'They betrayed the country and they betrayed the
convenant,' he said, 'and we meted out a stern
punishment to them and they went to hell.' In many
respects, the 1983 Barzani operation anticipated the
techniques that would be used on a much larger scale
during the Anfal campaign. No doubt, the absence of any
international outcry encouraged Baghdad to believe that
it could get away with an even larger operation without
any hostile reaction. In this respect the Ba'th Party
seems to have been correct in its calculations and
judgement of the international inaction.
Since 1975, over
4,000 Kurdish villages had been destroyed; by a
conservative estimate more than 100,000 rural Kurds had
died in Anfal alone; half of Iraq's productive farmland
is believed to have been laid waste.
The destruction
campaigns of April 1987 - April 1989, which MEW rightly
calls the Kurdish genocide, had the Anfal campaign as
its centrepiece. The Anfal campaign should by no means
be regarded as a function or by-product of the Iraq-Iran
war, since it was a rational, pre-planned enterprise in
which modern techniques of management and expertise were
effectively co-ordinated. The Iran-Iraq war provided the
crucial element with which Baghdad could cover-up its
opportunity to bring to a climax its long-standing
efforts to bring the Kurds to heel. The Iraqi regime's
anti-Kurdish drive dates back to more than fifteen
years, well before the outbreak of that war.
Another Holocaust
Theoretically,
Genocide in Iraq attempts to locate the Kurdish genocide
of 1987-1989 within a paradigm presented by Raul Hilberg
in his book on the history of Holocaust (12). The
reasoning presented in Genocide in Iraq is both complex
and subtle, a fact that does not allow for a short
synopsis to do the book and the victims of Anfal
justice. Despite that, the basic argument can be
summarised fairly briefly. The Kurdish genocide 'fits
Hilberg's paradigm to perfection,' which is summarised
in the following key concepts: "definition -
concentration (or seizure) - annihilation."
The process of
defining those who would be targeted by Anfal began
shortly after Ali Hassan al-Majid, one of Saddam
Hussein's cousin, was granted 'special powers' as the
secretary general of the Northern Bureau of Iraq's
ruling Ba'th Arab Socialist Party, in March 1987. At the
first stage, al-Majid decreed that 'saboteurs' would
lose their property rights, suspended the legal rights
of all the residents of prohibited villages, to be
followed by the execution of first-degree relatives of
'saboteurs' and of wounded civilians whose hostility to
the regime had been determined by the intelligence
services.
In June 1987, the
process of drawing irreversible boundaries - the red
line between 'us' and 'them' - was legalised by issuing
two sets of standing orders, which were based on a
simple axiom with a result few, if any, of the Kurds
could comprehend: in the 'prohibited' rural areas, all
Kurdish residents were coterminous with the peshmerga
insurgents (Kurdish guerrilla), and they would be dealt
with accordingly.
Through a policy of
shoot-to-kill, the first of al-Majid's directives was to
ban all human existence in the 'prohibited areas.' The
second constitutes an unmistakable inducement to mass
murder, spelled out in the a chilling clear language. In
clause 4, army commander are ordered "to 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
these prohibited zones. (13)"
In clause 5, al-Majid
ordered that, "All persons captured in those
villages shall be detained and interrogatedby the
security services and those between the ages of 15 to
70 shall be executed after any useful information
has been obtained from them, of which we should be duly
notified." (14)
While still engaged
in this phase of definition, the Iraqi authorities did
not hesitate to test their chemical capacity. Within the
range of at least forty documented chemical attacks on
Kurdish targets over a period of eighteen months, Iraqi
aircraft dropped its first poison gas on the undefended
civilian villagers in mid-April1987, killing more than a
hundred people, most of them women and children. These
attacks were the first signs of the degree to which the
regime was prepared in killing large numbers of Kurdish
civilians without discrimination.
In order to create a
buffer zone between 'us' and 'them', between the
government and the peshmerge-controlled areas, a
three-stage programme of village clearances or
'collectivisation' was embarked on in mid-April 1987.
During this programme's firs two phases, between 21
April-20 May and 21 May-20 June, more than 700 villages
were burned and bulldozed, most of them along the mains
highways in government-controlled areas. Due to the war
efforts on the Iranian frontiers, the third phase was to
be postponed, but accomplished by Anfal.
In terms of defining
the target group for annihilation, the national census
of 17 October 1987, was the most important single
administrative step of the Iraqi regime in the desired
direction. Having created a virtual buffer strip between
the government and the peshmerge-controlled zones by the
village clearances, the Ba'th Party offered the
inhabitants of the prohibited areas an ultimatum: either
you 'return to the national ranks' - that is, abandon
your home and livelihood and accept compulsory
relocation in a sordid camp under the eye of the
security forces; or you lose your Iraqi citizenship and
be regarded as military deserter. This second option was
subject to an August 1987 decree of the ruling
Revolutionary Command Council, imposing the death
penalty on deserters. Not choosing the 'national ranks'
was, in effect, tantamount to a death sentence, to be
carried out by Party organisations. Prior to the census
date, proper measures were taken by security and
intelligence agencies to prevent any contact or movement
between the two sides, other than on the regime's terms.
'Definition'
In the period leading
up to the census, al-Majid encircled the target group
further. He ordered intelligence officials to prepare
detailed case-by-case dossiers of 'saboteurs' families
who were still living in the government-controlled
areas, on which countless women, children and elderly
people were forcibly transferred to the rural areas to
share the fate of their peshmerge relatives. This
technique of sieving of the population was also crucial
to the decisions made during the Anfal on the question
of who should live and who should die.
Concomitant with this
phase of definition was also the military operations to
destroy the habitat of the rural population that roughly
followed the same pattern. These operations started
characteristically with chemical attacks from the air on
both civilian and peshmerge targets, accompanied by a
military blitz against the Kurdish military bases. After
this initial assault, ground troops and jash
(pro-government Kurdish militias) enveloped the target
areas from all sides, destroying all human habitation in
their path, looting household possessions and farm
animals and setting fire to homes, before calling in
demolition crews.
In areas of greater
peshmerga resistance brutal government harassment in all
the forms familiar in the rest of Iraqi Kurdistan was
followed - punitive jash incursions, burning and
looting, shelling from artillery, rocketing and
occasional bombing from the air.
As the definition
processes proceeded, so did the phase of the
concentration or seizure of the target group. By now,
convoys of army trucks stood by to transport the
villagers to holding centres and transit camps. To
prevent anyone from escaping, the jash had to comb the
hillsides at the first stage, while the secret police
had to search the towns, cities and complexes to hunt
fugitives at a later stage. In several cases those who
still managed to hide had to be lured out with false
offers of amnesty and 'return to the national ranks'.
The processing of the
detainees took place in a network of camps and prisons
that followed a standard pattern. Men and women were
segregated on the spot. The process was brutal and did
not spare the elderly. A little later, the men were
further divided by age - small children kept with their
mothers, the elderly and weak sidelined to separate
quarters, and men and teenage boys considered to be able
to carry a weapon herded together, without rigorous
check of identity documents.
The women and
children were also suffering grievously in their own
ways. After a short time the guards dragged the older
women away violently from their daughters and
grandchildren and bundled them away to yet another
unknown destination. In at least two cases, soldiers and
guards burst into the women's quarters during their
first night at a camp and removed their small children,
even infants at the breast. All night long the women
could hear the cries and screams of their children in
another room. But above all the women and children in
one camp endured the torment of seeing their husbands,
brothers and fathers suffer, beaten routinely in front
of their female relatives, and, in the end, disappear.
Concentration
The first temporary
holding centres were in operation, under the control of
military intelligence as early as mid-March 1988;
peaking in mid-April and early May, the mass
disappearances had begun in earnest shortly thereafter.
At this stage most of the detainees were transferred to
a place called Topzawa, a Popular Army camp on the
outskirts of Kirkuk; others were trucked to another
Popular Army barracks in Tikrit. Women and children were
trucked on from Topzawa to a separate camp in the town
of Dibs; between 6,000 and 8,000 elderly detainees were
taken to an abandoned prison called Nugra Salman in the
southern desert, where hundreds of them died as a result
of neglect, starvation and disease.
During the last stage
of Anfal villagers from Badinan were detained in a huge
army fort at Dohuk. The women and children were
transferred later from Dohuk to a prison camp in
Salamiyeh close to Mosul. Although the majority of the
women, children and elderly released after an official
amnesty to mark the end of Anfal on 6 September 1988,
non of the Anfal men were never released. Only six
people, all from the Third and the bloodies Anfal - aged
between 12 and 38, have managed to escape in order to
tell the true story of what happened to tens of
thousands of Kurds who were driven away in convoys of
sealed vehicles from the camps to southern Iraq.
The process of
defining those who were actually to be killed, if they
managed to survive indiscriminate chemical attacks,
harsh conditions of the transit camps and occasionally
torture, was under way long before the actual killing by
the firing squads. Two days before the national census,
that is to say 15 October, 1987, army and intelligence
agencies were ordered to compile lists of the Kurds from
the 'prohibited areas' and the case-by-case of
'saboteurs' families. During Anfal, the captives were
registered by name, sex, age, place of birth and place
of residence. Accoringly, men between ages 15 and 50
years old from the 'prohibited areas' and families of
'saboteurs,' were sent to death in the south.
Annihilation
The method of
executing the Kurdish men by firing squads is, according
to the MEW, 'uncannily reminiscent of another', that of
the Einsatzkommandos, or mobile killing units, in
Eastern Europe occupied by the Nazis.
"Some groups
of prisoners were lined up, shot from the front and
dragged into pre-dug mass graves; others were shoved
roughly into trenches and machine gunned where they
stood; others were made to lie down in pairs,
sardine-style, next to mouths of fresh corpses, before
being killed; others were tied together, made to stand
on the lip of the pit, and shot in the back so that they
would fall forward into it - a method that was
presumably more efficient from the point of view of the
killers. Bulldozers then pushed earth or sand loosely
over the heaps of corpses. Some of the gravesites
contained dozens of separate pits, and obviously
contained the bodies of thousands of victims.
Circumstantial evidence suggests that the executioners
were uniformed members of the Ba'th Party, or perhaps of
Iraq's General Security Directorate (Amn)."
Rigid bureaucratic
norms were governing this annihilation process. Those
who were executed were not murdered because they were
condemned for committing a specific crime; rather their
only crime was to be born in a place declared by a
central government as 'prohibited,' that is to say,
Kurds in areas outside government control.
The locations of at
least three mass gravesites have been pinpointed through
the testimony of survivors. Ramadi, al-Hadar and
Samawah. (see map)
Genocide in Iraq
quotes Raul Hilberg saying, 'There are not so many ways
in which a modern society can, in short order, kill a
large number of people living in its midst. This is an
efficiency problem of the greatest dimensions...' The
captured Iraqi documents demonstrate 'in astonishing
breadth and detail how the Iraqi state bureaucracy
organised the Kurdish genocide.'
Modern Genocide
The book demonstrates
convincingly that the Kurdish genocide of 1987 -1989 had
a distinct modern flavour, to paraphrase Zygmunt Bauman
(15). Although mass murder is not a modern invention,
contemporary mass murder within the perimeters of the
modern territorial state is. It is 'distinguished by a
virtual absence of all spontaneity on the one hand, and
the prominence of rational, carefully calculated design
on the other. It is marked by an almost complete
elimination of contingency and chance, and independence
from group emotions and personal motives.' (16) Modern
genocide is thus a genocide with a purpose. It has
initiators and the managers with a particular view of
the society.
The purpose of the
modern genocide is 'a grand vision of a better, and
radically different, society.' Here a 'gardener's
vision', projected upon a society is involved. As in the
case of the gardeners, the designers of the perfect
society hate the weeds that spoil their design. The
weeds surrounding the desired society must be
exterminated, it is a problem that have to be solved;
the 'weeds must die not so much because of what they
are, as because of that the beautiful, orderly garden
ought to be.' (17)
The Ba'thist rulers
in Iraq have always desired to create a harmonious,
conflict-free society, orderly, controlled and docile in
their hands. The Kurds have constituted the main
challenge to this vision based on the rhetoric of
pan-Arabism. The Kurds have been viewed as the weeds
disturbing the Ba'thist vision of the Arab Iraq. But the
Ba'thists have been patient in materialising their
vision. They have advanced their position by
consolidating their power step by step, under more than
twenty years. They have never given up their dream.
'When the modernist dream is embraced by an absolute
power able to monopolise modern vehicle of rational
action, and when that power attains freedom from
effective social control, genocide follows.' (18)
That is exactly what
happened in the case of Iraq under the Ba'th Party. Five
factor identified by Sarah Gordon are important in
producing a modern genocide, which is also true in the
case of Kurdish genocide of 1987-1989.
1. There was a
radical anti-Kurdish drive.
2. The drive was
transformed into the policy of a powerful, centralised
state.
3. The state was in
command of a huge, efficient bureaucratic apparatus.
4. A 'state of
emergency' was called - an extraordinary, wartime
condition, which allowed government and bureaucracy it
controlled to get away with things which could,
possibly, face more serious obstacles in time of peace.
(19)
5. The population and
the international community (20) at large, (21) reacted
with non-interference and passive acceptance of those
things.
Given the
circumstances, the mass killing of the Kurds was
presented as a bureaucratic task to be implemented by
different state organisations. The violence was turned
into a technique of solving this bureaucratic mission.
The bureaucrats within the Party, the army, numerous
intelligence agencies, and civilian administration were
presented with meticulous functional division of labour
without any moral responsibility. Having presented with
a definition of the task, the bureaucracy in Iraq
carried out the task to its end with a remarkable degree
of rationality and efficiency. At the end of its task,
only the bureaucracy's ability to refine its methods and
efficiency could sufficiently explain why not even a
single soul managed to escape from the Final Anfal's
firing squads.
Once set in motion,
refined and honoured and glorified, the machinery of
murder developed its own impetus: after accomplishing
its task faithfully in Kurdistan, it sought new
territories where it could exercise its newly acquired
skills. (22) Is it not possible to view the invasion of
Kuwait, and the killing of the civilians their as the
externalisation of the Iraqi bureaucracy's 'domestic
style of rule to foreign policy', a modern skill,
efficiency and capacity seeking by now territories
outside Iraq? A close examination of the language,
symbols and circumlocations used in Iraq's propaganda
war to justify the occupation of Kuwait might reveal
that the Kuwaits were presented as yet another kind of
weed to be removed from the Ba'thist vision of a united
Arab world under that particular leadership.
Khaled Salih
1 This article was
published in Digest of Middle East Studies, vol. 4, no.
2, Spring 1995, pp. 24-39.
2 International
Herald Tribune, 7.10.1988, p. 6; emphasis added.
3 London Review of
Books, 7 March 1991, p.7.
4 In 1988, Edward
Said wrote the following lines: 'In education, politics,
history and culture there is at the present time a role
to be played by secular oppositional intellectuals, call
them a class of informed and effective wet blankets, who
do not allow themselves the luxury of playing the
identity game... but who more compassionately press the
interests of the unheard, the unrepresented, the
unconnected people of our world, and who do so not in
the 'jargon of the authenticity' but with the accents of
personal restraint, historical scepticism and committed
intellect.' See Edward W. Said, 'Identity, negation and
violence', in New Left Review , 1988 no. 171, p.60.
5 Ofra Bengio,
Saddam speaks on the Gulf crisis: a collection of
documents. Tel-Aviv: The Moshe Dayan Centre for Middle
Eastern and African Studies. The Shiloah Institute,
Tel-Aviv University, 1992, p.34.
6 Middle East
Watch, Genocide in Iraq: The Anfal Campaign Against the
Kurds. New York: Human Rights Watch, July 1993.
7 Middle East
Watch, Bureaucracy of Repression: The Iraqi Government
in Its Own Words. New York: Human Rights Watch, February
1994.
8 Frederick
Axelgard, New Iraq? The Gulf War and implication of U.
S. policy. New York: Praeger with CSIS, 1988
9 For example,
Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett, Iraq since
1958. London: Kegan Paul International, 1987
10For example,
Samir al-Khalil (pseudonym for Kanan Makiya), Republic
of Fear. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1989
11 For the first
attempt see particularly part one in Kanan Makiya,
Cruetly and silence: war, tyranny, uprising, and the
Arab world. London: Cape, 1993
12 Raul Hilberg,
The Destruction of the European Jews. New York: Holmes
and Meier, 1985 student edition, p.267.
13 Emphasis added.
14 Emphasis added.
15 Zygmunt Bauman,
Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity Press,
1989, p. 88.
16 Bauman, 1989,
p. 90
17 Bauman, 1989,
p. 91-92.
18 Bauman, 1989,
p. 93-94.
19 Recall Edward
Said's attempt to create uncertainty about the events
and Viorst's justification of repression by describing
the Kurds as those 'who fought at Iran's side.'
20 How much
Washington may have known about the Kurdish genocide as
it was happening? Documents obtained through the Freedom
of Information Act by MEW and the National Security
Archive throw scanty light on this contentious issue.
One Defence Department cable, dated April 19, 1988,
notes that 'an estimated 1.5 million Kurdish nationals
have been resettled in camps'; that 'approximately
700-1000 villages and small residential areas were
targeted for resettlement;' that 'an unknown but
reportedly large number of Kurds have been placed in "cowncentration"(sic)
camps located near the Jordanian and Saudi Arabian
borders'; and that 'movement by the local population
throughout the north has been severely restricted. The
long section that follows is heavily deleted. [Genocide
in Iraq, p. 204, note 19] How much did the Saudi, the
Kuwaiti and the Jordanian authorities know about the
mass graves near their borders? In a document titled
'Guidelines for U. S.-Iraq Policy,' prepared by the Bush
transition team in January 1989, the new administration
outlined its intention to develop relations with
Saddam's Iraq. 'It is up to the new Administration to
decide whether to treat Iraq as distasteful dictatorship
to be shunned where possible, or to recognize Iraq's
present and potential power in the region and accord it
relatively high priority. We strongly urge the later
view.' Even though they described Iraq's human rights
records as 'abysmal', Bush's foreign analysts concluded
that 'in no way should we associate ourselves with the
60 year Kurdish rebellion in Iraq or oppose Iraq's
legitimate attempts to suppress it.' As quoted in James
A Bill and Robert Sprinborg, Politics in the Middle
East. New York: Harper Colllins College Publishers, 4th
Edition, p. 387-388.
21 Bauman, 1989,
p. 94 and Sarah Gordon, Hitler, Germans, and the 'Jewish
Question.' Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984,
p.48-49.
22 These lines of
argument are drawn on Bauman.
|
|
