Gendercide Watch: The Anfal Campaign (Iraqi Kurdistan, 1988)

[Michael Pugliese]

http://www.gendercide.org/case_anfal.html>...The infrastructure of life in Iraqi Kurdistan, meanwhile, was left almost totally destroyed by the Anfal campaign and its predecessors. "By the time the genocidal frenzy ended, 90% of Kurdish villages, and over twenty small towns and cities, had been wiped off the map. The countryside was riddled with 15 million landmines, intended to make agriculture and husbandry impossible. A million and a half Kurdish peasants had been interned in camps. ... About 10% of the total Kurdish population of Iraq had perished [since 1974]." (Kendal Nezan, "When our 'friend' Saddam was gassing the Kurds", Le Monde diplomatique, March 1998.)How many died?According to HRW/ME, "at least fifty thousand rural Kurds ... died in Anfal alone, and very possibly the real figure was twice that number ... All told, the total number of Kurds killed over the decade since the Barzani men were taken from their homes is well into six figures." "On the basis of extens!
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e interviews in Kurdistan and perusal of extant Iraqi documents, Shoresh Resoul, a meticulous Kurdish researcher ... conservatively estimated that 'between 60,000 and 110,000' died during [al-]Majid's Kurdish mandate," i.e., beginning shortly before Anfal and ending shortly afterwards. (Randal, After Such Knowledge ..., p. 214.) Other Kurdish estimates are even higher. "When Kurdish leaders met with Iraqi government officials in the wake of the spring 1991 uprising, they raised the question of the Anfal dead and mentioned a figure of 182,000 -- a rough extrapolation based on the number of destroyed villages. Ali Hassan al-Majid reportedly jumped to his feet in a rage when the discussion took this turn. 'What is this exaggerated figure of 182,000?' he is said to have asked. 'It couldn't have been more than 100,000' -- as if this somehow mitigated the catastrophe that he and his subordinates had visited on the Iraqi Kurds." (Iraq's Crime of Genocide, pp. 14, 230.)It is impossi!
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e to state with certainty what proportion of the victims of Anfal were adult men and adolescent boys. The most detailed investigation, conducted by HRW/ME, tabulated the number of "disappeared" from the various stages of Anfal, based on field interviews with some 350 survivors. The organization gathered the names of 1,255 men, 184 women, and 359 children - - "only a fraction of the numbers lost during Anfal." This would suggest that some 87 percent of the adults "disappeared," all of whom were apparently executed, were male; and that about 70 percent of all those who "disappeared" were "battle-age" males. (See Iraq's Crime of Genocide, pp. 266-68.) These calculations do not, however, include the large number of Kurdish civilians killed indiscriminately in chemical attacks and other generalized assaults.Who was responsible?The tens of thousands of Anfal deaths, according to HRW/ME,did not come in the heat of battle -- as 'collateral damage,' in the military euphemism. Nor wer!
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they the result of acts of aberration by individual commanders whose excesses passed unnoticed or unpunished by their superiors. Rather, these Kurds were systematically put to death in large numbers by order of the central Iraqi government in Baghdad days or weeks after being rounded up in villages marked for destruction or while fleeing army assaults in "prohibited areas." ... Documentary materials captured from the Iraqi intelligence agencies demonstrate with great clarity that the mass killings, disappearances, and forced relocations associated with Anfal and the other anti-Kurdish campaigns of 1987-89 were planned in a coherent fashion. Although power over these campaigns was highly centralized, their success depended on the orchestration of the efforts of a large number of agencies and institutions at the local, regional, and national level, from the office of the president of the republic down to the lowliest jahsh [pro-Iraqi Kurdish] unit. (Iraq's Crime of Genocide, p!
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 xvii, 9-10. For more on the role of the pro-regime Kurdish forces, which were crucial in the Anfal roundups, see pp. 109- 12, and Kanan Makiya, Cruelty and Silence, pp. 143-45.)Noam Chomsky has called Iraq "perhaps the most violent and repressive state in the world." (Quoted in Makiya, Cruelty and Silence, p. 273; see also the analysis of Iraqi conscription policies elsewhere on this site.) Atop the state structure stands the murderous dictator Saddam Hussein. In classic "patrimonial" fashion, Saddam has constructed a brutal one-party regime consisting largely of his relatives from Tikrit and surrounding areas. (For a powerful description of Saddam's rule-by-terror, see Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq.) The Ba'ath Party's "point man" during the worst of the atrocities in Iraqi Kurdistan was, as noted, Ali Hassan al-Majid. After Anfal, he was transferred from his post, to become -- in August 1990 -- the governor of Iraqi-occupied Kuwait.Saddam Hus!
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in admires portraits of himself.Saddam's dictatorship reaches to the grassroots of Iraqi society through the intertwined institutions of the Ba'ath Party and the Iraqi army and security forces. At every level, its violence exhibits strong patriarchal overtones. Jonathan Randal describes the "perverted form of male bonding" evident in an internal purge that Saddam carried out in 1979, in which "surviving ministers and senior party officials [were obliged] to join the firing squad which executed the condemned men." The "pattern [was] repeated throughout the chain of command: from the lowliest secret-police operative on up they shared responsibility in the executions, thus enforcing loyalty and subservience to Saddam Hussein." Such practices "were also useful in intimidating anyone less inclined to terror and cruelty." (Randal, After Such Knowledge ..., p. 208.)The international community must accept a share of the blame for Saddam's genocide against the Iraqi Kurds. For the du!
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tion of the Iran-Iraq war -- which also witnessed most of the horrors against the Kurds -- Saddam was considered an important bulwark against the spread of Iranian-style Islamic fundamentalism to the strategic and oil-rich countries of the Middle East. Accordingly, the West supplied and armed him throughout his campaigns against both the Iranians and the Kurds, eventually providing the critical intelligence information that allowed Iraq to emerge victorious in the war against Iran. In August 1988 -- with the Anfal campaign nearly over, and in the wake of a year-and-a-half of vicious chemical attacks on civilian populations -- "the United Nations Sub-Committee on Human Rights voted by 11 votes to 8 not to condemn Iraq for human rights violations. Only the Scandinavian countries, Australia and Canada, together with bodies like the European Parliament and the Socialist International, saved their honour by clearly condemning Iraq." (Nezan, "When our 'friend' Saddam was gassing t!
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 Kurds".)The aftermathhttp://www.gendercide.org/case_anfal.html

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