Ananova Saturday August 3, 2002 11:52 AM Kurd News ... Sat 3 Aug 2002. Turkey's Parliament abolishes death penalty, grants rights to Kurds in EU-bid Canada Dot Com (AP/Burhan Ozbilici) Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit ... http://www.kurdishdaily.com/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/shows/saddam/index.html http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/shows/saddam/resources.html Are Iraq's chemical and biological weapons attacks on Kurdistan part of a larger agenda of terror?
Excellent documentary, marred, to say the least by the post-documentary interview by husband of Christianer Amanpour of CNN, ex-Sec. of State spokesperson, James Rubin, with the Prince of Darkness, Mr. Perle.
Kanan Makiya, Cruelty and silence: war, tyranny, uprising, and the Arab world.
Extensive material on Anfal and the uprising in '91. http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2000/04.20/iraqiproject.html
Kanan Makiya, "The Anfal: Uncovering an Iraqi Campaign to Exterminate the Kurds," Harper's Magazine, May 1992; Raymond Bonner, "Always Remember," The New Yorker, September 28, 1992 http://www.hrw.org/reports/1992/iraqkor/KOREME1.htm Human Rights Watch, Middle East: Iraq's crime of genocide: the anfal campaign against the Kurds, New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1995. http://www.gendercide.org/genocideinkurdistan.html Genocide in Kurdistan
A dissertation presented in partial fulfillment of the Diploma in Legal Studies at the University of Auckland
By Heval Hylan ongman, Albert J. (Hg.): Contemporary Genocides. Causes, Cases, Consequences, Leiden: PIOOM, 1996; darin: Bloom, Mia: "The Case of Iraq: The Glorious Anfal Campaign to Eradicate and Eliminate the Kurds".
http://www.iraqifd.org/MEI-2000-09-18.html
>...Anfal campaign against the Kurds 1987-88 carried out by Ali Hassan Al Majeed documented by Human
Rights Watch Report which estimates the total dead between 50,000 to 100,000 constituting the crime of
Genocide
Killing between 30,000 to 60,000 Iraqis following the March 1991 uprising following the end of the
Gulf War.
Execution of 10,000 shia clergy
A total of 281 separate chemical attacks on a population of 4.0 M Iraqi Kurds during the 2 year Anfal
campaign.
http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/kurdish/htdocs/his/Khaledtext.html
Anfal: The Kurdish Genocide in Iraq
by Khaled Salih
Gvteborgs Universitet
>...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.
Michael Pugliese