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By. Jay_Burgga_Woods From: Richmond Virginia, United States "CHESTICALS arent just 4 food?!" Send Message

Map of Kurdistan

In the wake of World War I, with U.S. President Woodrow Wilson's call for "self-determination" echoing loudly, the Kurds were promised a homeland -- Kurdistan -- in the Treaty of Sèvres (1920). However, the victorious allies backed away from their pledge in an attempt to court the new Turkish regime of Kemal Ataturk, and in fear of destabilizing Iraq and Syria, which were granted to Britain and France, respectively, as mandated territories. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne thus reneged on Kurdish independence and divided the Kurds among Turkey, Iraq, and Syria. Ataturk's discrimination against Turkey's Kurdish population began almost immediately, with Kurdish political groups and manifestations of cultural identity banned outright. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the Kurds of Iran, with Soviet support, succeeded in establishing the first independent Kurdish state (the Kurdish Republic of Mahabad). But this was quickly crushed by Iranian troops.

In 1946, an Iraqi Kurd, Mustafa Barzani, founded the Kurdistan Democratic Party - Iraq (KDP). Barzani died in 1979, but the KDP remains one of the most prominent Kurdish resistance organizations. Its more radical rival, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), was founded in 1975 by Jalal Talabani. It was the PUK that would bear the brunt of the Anfal campaign in 1988.

Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Saddam HusseinThe ascent to power of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in 1968 (though he did not become president until 1979) at first seemed to augur well for the Iraqi Kurds. In 1970, Saddam's Ba'ath Party reached a wideranging agreement with the Kurdish rebel groops, granting the Kurds the right to use and broadcast their language, as well as a considerable degree of political autonomy. But the agreement broke down when the Ba'ath Party "embarked on the Arabization of the oil-producing areas in Kurdistan, evicting Kurdish farmers and replacing them with poor Arab tribesmen [and women] from the south, guarded by government troops." In March 1974, the KDP rose up against Saddam, sparking a fullscale war the following year, when some 130,000 Kurds fled to Iran. "In March 1975," writes Khaled Salih, "tens of thousands of villagers from the Barzani tribes were 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." (Khaled, "Anfal: The Kurdish Genocide in Iraq".)

It was these displaced populations of Barzani tribespeople who, after the onset of the Iran-Iraq war in 1980, would fall prey to one of the largest gendercidal massacres of modern times. Martin van Bruinessen writes:

In [July-]August 1983, Iraqi security troops rounded up the men of the Barzani tribe from four resettlement camps near Arbil. These people were not engaged in any antigovernment activities. ... Two of Barzani's sons at that time led the Kurdistan Democratic Party and were engaged in guerrilla activities against the Baghdad government, but only a part of the tribe was with them. ... All eight thousand men of this group, then, were taken from their families and transported to southern Iraq. Thereafter they disappeared. All efforts to find out what happened to them or where they had gone, including diplomatic inquiries by several European countries, failed. It is feared that they are dead. The KDP [Kurdish Democratic Party] has received consistent reports from sources within the military that at least part of this group has been used as guinea pigs to test the effects of various chemical agents. (van Bruinessen, "Genocide in Kurdistan?," in George J. Andreopoulos, ed., Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions ([University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994], pp. 156-57, emphasis added.)

One Barzani woman described the roundup of the menfolk: "Before dawn, as people were getting dressed and ready to go to work, all the soldiers charged through the camp [Qushtapa]. They captured the men walking on the street and even took an old man who was mentally deranged and was usually left tied up. They took the preacher who went to the mosque to call for prayers. They were breaking down doors and entering the houses searching for our men. They looked inside the chicken coops, water tanks, refrigerators, everywhere, and took all the men over the age of thirteen. The women cried and clutched the Qur'an [Koran] and begged the soldiers not to take their men away." In 1993, Saddam Hussein strongly hinted at the final fate of the Barzani men: "They betrayed the country and they betrayed the covenant, and we meted out a stern punishment to them, and they went to hell." As Human Rights Watch noted, "In many respects, the 1983 Barzani operation foreshadowed the techniques that would be used on a much larger scale during the Anfal campaign." (Human Rights Watch, Iraq's Crime of Genocide, pp. 4, 26-27.) Khaled Salih notes that "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'ath Party seems to have been correct in its calculations and judgement of the international inaction." (Khaled, "Anfal: The Kurdish Genocide in Iraq"; see also "Who was responsible?," below.)

Aftermath of Iraqi chemical attack on Halabji, March 1988. Aftermath of chemical attack on Halabji.Among the most horrific features of the Iraqi campaigns against the Kurds in the 1980s was the regime's resort to chemical weapons strikes against civilian populations. On April 16, 1987, a chemical raid on the Balisan valley killed dozens of civilians; in its wake, "some seventy men were taken away in buses and, like the Barzanis, never seen again. The surviving women and children were dumped on the plain outside Erbil and left to fend for themselves." (Jonathan C. Randal, After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness?, p. 230.) Less than a year later, on March 16, 1988, a far more concentrated chemical attack was launched on the town of Halabji, near the Iranian border, which had briefly been held by a combined force of Kurdish rebels and Iranian troops. Thousands of civilians died, and with the town still under Iranian occupation after the raid, journalists and photographers were able to reach the scene. "Their photographs, mainly of women, children, and elderly people huddled inertly in the streets or lying on their backs with mouths agape, circulated widely, demonstrating eloquently that the great mass of the dead had been Kurdish civilian noncombatants." (Iraq's Crime of Genocide, p. 72.) Although it took place during the Anfal campaign, however, the attack on Halabji is not normally considered part of that campaign.

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