As I've cited before, the ex-Trotskyist, Kanan Makiya in, Cruelty and Silence, " and his Harvard based Iraq Documentation Project, mentioned below, has documented the al-Anfal campaign against the Iraqi Kurds.
The repression against the PKK, PUK and DKP by the Turkish state is undeniable. The silence of some sectors of the left, on the greater levels of repression by the Ba'athist regime in Baghdad on Iraqi Kurds in the 80's, is squalid.
Gerard Chaliand, a press officer for the Algerian FLN in the 50's, has a Zed Press book on Kurdistan, well worth a look.
Also see the interview with HRW staff researchers, Joe Stork, formerly of MERIP and Reed Brophy, author of, "Contra Terror in Nicaragua, "
for South End Press, in, "Rethinking Marxism, " last yr. Michael Pugliese http://www.hrw.org/reports/world/iraq-pubs.php
Human Rights Watch Reports by Country
Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan
Iraq's Brutal Decrees Amputation, Branding and the Death Penalty eginning in June 1994, the government of Iraq issued at least nine decrees that establish severe penalties, including amputation, branding and the death penalty for criminal offenses such as theft, corruption, currency speculation and military desertion. These new decrees greatly impinge on individual human rights and constitute violations of several international human rights conventions and standards. The government of Iraq attempts to deflect international criticism of this cruelty by maintaining that the decrees were enacted to combat rising crime which, it says, is due to the poverty and desperation brought on by international economic sanctions. By implying that if sanctions are lifted and the situation improves the decrees could be repealed, Iraq appears to use these abuses as leverage for the lifting of sanctions. While arguing that the decrees serve as a deterrent to crime, the government has offered no information that they are serving this purpose. June 1995
Iraq’s Crime Of Genocide: The Anfal Campaign against the Kurds Iraq’s 1988 Anfal campaign of extermination against the Kurdish people living within its borders resulted in the death of at least 50,000 and as many as 100,000 people, many of them women and children. This book, co-published with Yale University Press, investigates the Anfal campaign and concludes that this campaign constituted genocide against the Kurds. The book is the result of research by a team of Human Rights Watch investigators who analyzed eighteen tons of captured Iraqi government documents (10 of these documents are reproduced in the appendix) and carried out field interviews with more than 350 witnesses, most of them survivors of the Anfal campaign. It confirms that the campaign was characterized by gross violations of human rights, including mass summary executions and disappearances of many tens of thousands of noncombatants; the widespread use of chemical weapons, among them mustard gas and nerve agents that killed thousands; the arbitrary jailing and warehousing of tens of thousands of women, children, and elderly people for months, in conditions of extreme deprivation and without judicial order; the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of villagers to barren resettlement camps after the demolition of their homes; and the wholesale destruction of some two thousand villages along with their schools, mosques, farms, and power stations. The book is a searing indictment of the Iraqi government’s carefully planned and executed program to destroy a people, harrowing in its detailed and objective recounting of crimes against innocents. May 1994 Purchase online ISBN: ISBN 0-300-06427-6
Bureaucracy of Repression: The Iraqi Government in Its Own Words In two separate shipments in May 1992 and August 1993, eighteen tons of official Iraqi state documents captured by Kurdish parties in the 1991 uprising arrived in the U.S. for safekeeping and analysis. Our team has conducted research on these documents and catalogued a large percentage. This is the first report that discusses these documents, most of which had never before been made public, and serves the broader effort to provide evidence that the Anfal campaign by the government of Iraq against its population of rural Kurds in 1988 amounted to genocide. February 1994
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