ALDE Seminar
The Genocide of kurds in 1988
Organised by ALDE MEP Olle Schmidt from the Swedish Liberal Party in co-operation with the Swedish-Kurdish Gulan Association.
Anfal is an Arabic term meaning ‘the spoils’ and is the name of the eighth sura (verse) of the Quran, where the name of the Anfal operation originated. This verse was allegedly revealed to the Prophet Muhammad in the wake of the battle of Badr in 624 AD. The name was used by the Iraqi government for a series of brutal military operations carried out against Kurdish rebel groups and civilians in the rural areas of Kurdistan in Iraq.
These operations lasted just over seven months, from February 23, 1988 to September 6 of the same year and took place in eight stages. During the campaign, Iraqi Kurds in the targeted areas were subjected to killings and ethnic cleansing described as Kurdish genocide (Human Rights Watch, 1993). The Anfal operation was part of a large-scale and carefully coordinated military campaign that involved a range of actors, including the Iraqi Infantry and Mechanized divisions, the Iraqi Military Intelligence units, the Iraqi Air Force, the Kurdish Light Battalions known as Fursan, and the Iraqi Security Apparatuses
(Hiltermann, 2008). According to Human Rights Watch (HRW) 100,000 Kurds were killed, many of them women and children. Their deaths did not come in the heat of battle, ‘collateral damage’ in the military euphemism, as HRW describe, but ‘these Kurds were systematically put to death in large numbers on the orders of the central government in Baghdad’ (Human Rights Watch, 1993, p. xiv).1 Anfal is an under researched topic, the little available literature can be categorized into: first, the literature on the Anfal operation, and second, the literature on post-Anfal impact on the Kurdish society.
A report by the Human Rights Watch, published in 1993, is perhaps the most comprehensive and detailed study on the topic. The report is a narrative account aimed at investigating the Anfal operation to find facts and evidence in order to establish whether the Iraqi state committed actions amounting to genocide. The HRW used the official documents of the Iraqi state, forensic evidence, and interviews with hundreds of firsthand testimonies of witnesses who survived the campaign. The Human Rights Watch (1993, p. 15) states that for ‘two decades, the Baath-led government had engaged in a campaign of Arabization of Kurdish regions’. To achieve this goal, the report suggests that Iraq planned to terminate the main obstacle to Arabization, namely the Kurdish armed resistance. To overcome this obstacle, the rebels, and all those deemed to be sympathizers, were therefore treated as Kurds who had to be wiped out.
However, there are two shortcomings in the HRW perspective. First, the entire Kurdish region in Iraq was not exposed to the Arabization process and not all Arabized areas were subjected to the Anfal operation. The Iraqi regime mostly, but not exclusively, targeted the Kurdish populated areas in the provinces of Diyala, Kirkuk, Salahaddin and Nineveh for Arabization, that is provinces bordering its self-designated provinces of the Kurdistan autonomous area. Only the Kirkuk province and its surroundings (designated in this article as the Kirkuk catchment) out of these regions faced systematic genocide during the Anfal operation. The rural areas of the provinces of Erbil, Suleimaniyeh and Duhok (within the Iraqi regime’s designated Kurdistan autonomous areas) were not subject to the Arabization process though they were targets of the Anfal operation. Secondly, the HRW fails to distinguish between those Anfal stages that were designed to address security concerns and those to address identity (Arabization) concerns. Thus, the HRW viewed the Anfal operations as one campaign. These two shortcomings led the HRW to provide an incorrect account on the pattern of killings and disappearances. The HRW argues that the
severity of the Anfal campaign and the high number of victims reflects the intensity of the rebel resistance. However, as it will be explained below, over 80 percent of victims of Anfal were from areas that experienced low intensity in terms of rebel resistance. In other words, the number of victims reflects the geostrategic, geoeconomic and geopolitical significance of the Kurdish populated areas and not the nature of Kurdish Peshmerga resistance.
Hiltermann (2008) states that the “bulk of the ‘disappearances’ were from the area of
the third stage Anfal and those families that fled the area of the second stage Anfal and moved to the area of the third stage Anfal.” He adds that “the systematic killing of all Kurds living in the countryside of this oil-bearing region [Kirkuk] … [was carried out] in order to make it ‘Koerden-rein’” (Hiltermann, 2008). Despite this emphasis on the relation between mass-killing in this region and the Arabization policy, he fails to draw a distinction between the Identity Anfal and Security Anfal and support this with available data and statistics as this article has done. In fact, he views all stages of the Anfal operation..
Thursday 2nd April 2009
13.00-18.00
Room ASP1G2
European Parliament, Brussels [1]