"Why, I ask myself, am I spending more time than ever in 25 years covering the Middle East, cataloguing the barbarity, torture, hangings, head-chopping and human rights abuses of the region? No, I'm not talking about Israel's death squads, its vile torture apparatus at the Russian compound in Jerusalem and its shoot-to-kill army, some units of which are turning into an indisciplined rabble. I'm talking about the blind, cruel, vindictive Muslim regimes of the Middle East. Because I'm beginning to ask myself if there isn't something uniquely terrible about the way they treat their people, the way they kill their people, the way they abuse them and flog them and string them up..."
It is perhaps revealing that Saddam Hussein, despite the hundreds of thousands of deaths he is responsible for, continues to be a hero to millions of Muslims across the Islamic world. I know the following passage will not make any converts, but let me quote from the preface to Samir Al-Khalil's book (published in 1989) "Republic of Fear":"Since I finished writing Republic of Fear, the chamber of horrors that is Saddam Hussein's Iraq has mushroomed into something not even the most morbid imagination could have foreseen. The war with Iran ended in the summer of 1988 on favourable terms for Iraq. But did the violence stop, or even abate? On the contrary, it turned in on itself...
"The day after the ceasefire came into effect, Iraqi warplanes went into action with chemical weapons against Kurdish villages. Between August 25 and 27, several thousand helpless civilians died. The attacks continued on a systematic basis through September. It had of course been done before, in the town of Halabja in March 1988 where around 6,000 perished... How many died in these attacks? We may never know. Tens of thousands of army deserters had collected since 1980 in the marshes region of southern Iraq. They were given an ultimatum. What happened to those who handed themselves in? We know only what happened to those who didn't; they were gassed."
Al-Khalil goes on to lament the silence that greets such viciousness outside Iraq: "Western governments looking toward lucrative markets... are not doing enough. They turn a blind eye to the worst excesses when these do not involve them directly. More ominous is the active support Saddam Hussein's regime receives from the Arab world - from regimes in particular but also from public opinion... Not a word of condemnation of the indiscriminate use of poison gas to eliminate a civilian population has appeared in the Arab press..." Nor in the press here, one might add.
It is not the widespread use of systematic violence in our part of the world that is as disturbing as its easy acceptance at every level of society. Defenders of the system point to the blood on the hands of other civilizations at different points in history. But actions are judged in the context of their times: just because other societies destroyed statues in earlier times is no justification for the Taliban to blast the magnificent giant Buddha carvings in Bamiyan. Similarly, Halaku Khan's trail of terror does not give his successors the licence to kill.
Nevertheless, the blood-letting does not stop: in Algeria, tens of thousands of innocents have been slaughtered, many by having their throats slit, in an unending civil war. Thousands of Kurds have been killed in Iraq, Turkey and Iran over the years. We Pakistanis have the blood of an unknown number of Bengalis on our hands. Iranians and Iraqis bled each other white for a decade. And everywhere in the Muslim world, torturers and hangmen go about their grisly task every day.
Back to Fisk: "Down in Saudi Arabia, where public execution is a fine art, they're well on their way to meeting last year's rich crop of 113 beheadings... Our friends the Saudis are second only to the merciless Saddam when it comes to butchering their people in public... Then there's the other refinement of Saudi sadism: "cross amputation" (the chopping off of right hand and left foot for supposed crimes)..."
Apologists for these regimes seek refuge behind concepts like "Muslim traditions" and "deterrent punishment" as if the world had not moved forward from the days when cruelty was built into statecraft. But now fundamental human rights are at the heart of constitutions around the world. For a modern state to indulge in such barbarism on a daily basis is to deny the progress humanity has made over the centuries.
For believers, here are some words from Fisk's article to ponder over: "What does it represent, this behaviour by the states of the Middle East? Yes, I know the Americans are poisoning, frying or shooting their condemned at a ferocious rate. And of course I know about 'sharia' law. I've heard more than I want to about its severity. But what about the mercy and compassion that are among the first words of the Quran? In Arab and Iranian homes, Muslim families exhibit infinitely more compassion and love than westerners. They don't send their elderly and incurably sick to die in nursing institutions. The old and the fatally ill spend their last days in their family homes, cared for to the end by relatives. Shame on us. But how come the same men and women can stand on a rooftop to scream at a woman strangling on a rope?"
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/5735.html http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~irdp/ The Iraq Research and Documentation Project (IRDP) website is a collection of resources documenting the government, politics, and society of modern Iraq. IRDP is engaged in the gathering of information of diverse content and format (official government documents, maps, citizen testimonies, reference sources, chronologies, bibliographies, notable articles, human rights reports, photographic and other images, audio and video materials). This online collection is made available to the public to provide a window into the inner workings of the repressive state system evolved under the aegis of the Iraqi Ba'th Socialist Party in Iraq since 1968. http://216.167.199.58/index.htm The North Iraq Dataset is a collection of documents generated by various Iraqi security and political agencies in localities in northern Iraq, mostly from the 1980's.
Anfal: The Kurdish Genocide in Iraq
http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/kurdish/htdocs/his/Khaledtext.html
>...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.
>..."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)."
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.
Michael Pugliese