Why I can’t be Iraqi again!!                

By: Dr. Ahmad Mirawdaly 

Mirawdaly@hotmail.com                   

Mar 15, 2005                      

Aziza: was a teen Kurdish girl who survived the attack on her village, Aikmala. With a few other survivors, she painfully went over the mountains, making it to the Turkish border. In doing so, her small fragile body was raked by severe coughing, vomiting, diarrhea and internal bleeding.

 It has hardly been given attention internationally, that five million Kurds living in south Kurdistan (Iraqi Kurdistan) have over the years suffered greatly at the hands of various regimes in Baghdad.

We the Kurds are from the Iranian branch of Indo-Europeans, and practice many religions but mainly Islam. The estimated 40 million Muslims worldwide are spread throughout the mountainous area between Turkey, Iran, Syria, Azerbaijan and northern Iraq. Our languages and traditions are distinct from Persians, Turks, and Arabs who control our country. Within borders of our occupiers in Iraq, Iran, turkey and Syria, we Kurds are the largest minority group.

After the break-up of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, the Kurds were promised self government in (1920) Sevres Treaty. But the treaty was never ratified and it was completely eliminated by the Lausanne Treaty. This treaty set the boundaries of Turkey, Syria and Iraq, dividing Kurdistan among them in 1923. This made Iraqi Kurds rebel in southern Kurdistan now (North of Iraq) against the British mandate government of King Faisal 1 in Baghdad.

Their eyes on the region’s riches of oil and agriculture, Arab regimes in Baghdad are not letting northern Iraq become an independent Kurdistan.

In December 1925, under pressure of the British government, the League of Nations ruled against Kurdish statehood. Baghdad had already said much more; in 1924 the Iraqi governments (with Britain’s help) brutally put down the Kurdish rebellion.

From there on a bloody pattern established, a pattern that intensified after Iraq achieved independence from Britain in 1932. When the Baath Party took power in 1968 they started “resettlements,” or, “Arabization,” and razed towns and villages to the ground while the deportation and mass killing of Kurdish men and women ensued.

To Arabs in general, and to the Iraqi Arabs especially, promoting Kurdish identity was seen as promoting separatism, chauvinism, and racism. This is seen as a traitorous act. That’s whey the Iraqi army and the secret police were ordered and trained to deal with Kurds as such. To paralyze the Kurdish gorilla activities after 1975, the Baathist government started an evacuation program along the borders of Iran and Iraq, and later along Iraq and Turkey also. By the mid 80’s, when Iraq was at war with neighboring Iran, not only were villages in the border areas erased, but also those in the oil-producing regions in the heart of southern Kurdistan.           

The infamous Anfal!!

With the start of the Anfal campaign things got even worse. Simply being a Kurd who lived in an area newly designated as a prohibited for security reasons (which virtually covered all rural areas in Kurdistan), became a death sentence.

Kanan Makiya: The author of The Anfal, (Uncovering an Iraqi campaign to exterminate the Kurds) wrote “Everywhere I traveled during the three weeks I spent in northern Iraq, in large cities and in the smallest villages I heard the word al Anfal.”

In the secret police documents and transcripts of Iraqi military communiqués, the reference is always to the heroic operation of Anfal. I have read of the first, second, and third Anfal operations. There are also documents like this dated later, (1988) of “khatimat al- Anfal”. The phrase means the end of Anfal).

Before the Iraqi campaign, most Kurds like me didn’t know what “al Anfal” meant. To know the meaning, one would have to know a perfect Arabic language, the Koran, and Arab history. The Anfal is the name of the eighth sura, the 75 verse revelation that comes to the profit Muhammad after the great battle of Muslim faith at Bader (A.D. 624). It was in the village of Bader that a group of 319 Muslims routed about 1,000 Meccan unbelievers. This victory was seen by Muslims as a result of intervention by God. In this sura “al Anfal” means spoils of battle.

The revelation sura al- Anfal, is believed by Muslims to have been sent down from God in order to govern booty. In the eyes of Arab chauvinists or at least in the eye of the Anfal architect, the Kurds are unbelievers, embodied now in Pan-Arabism. It is written in the eighth sura. “They shall be punished for their unbelief.”

The Anfal campaign was not born suddenly. The history of oppression and the brutal treatment of non-Arabs in Iraq go back to the very first day of the formation of that state. It is not possible to unveil the brutality of over eighty year’s in the history of that Arab state in an article like this, but it’s worth mentioning. In the spring of 1963 as I remember very well, the Iraqi Army surrounded the city of Sulaimani. Soldiers went door to door and arrested every adult male for no reason, keeping them in under barbed wires and under the sun for weeks. They later executed over eighty prisoners (including my physics teacher) by a firing squad before let the others go!

What make Anfal different from other heroic Arab operations carried out, was the bureaucratically organized and administered mass killing. It isn’t clear when the campaign began, but a decree signed by Saddam Hussein establishing the legalistic framework for the operation is dated March 29, 1987; and was issued in the name of the Revolutionary Command Council (the twenty two-member Baath junta) which ruled Iraq at the time. 

During the last weeks of August 1988, another 520 Kurdish villages from Balisan and the Bassay Valley were attacked by air with chemical weapons. In Bassay Valley, 200 families were reported as having been wiped out. In a genocide attempt over four thousand Kurdish Villages were razed to the ground by Iraqis.

 In his comments about Anfal, Makiya asks “Is every Arab responsible? Millions of Arabic words have been written about more than 300 Palestinian villages destroyed in the creation of Israel. And justly so; would that I could add a million more words. But why is it that not one Arab intellectual has written about the elimination of more than 3,000 Kurdish villages by an Arab state?”    

The almighty has brought many plagues and catastrophes on his people like floods, hail, locust, slaying of the first born, earthquakes, AIDS, malaria and….ext. Yet none of them were chemical. Did God know about chemicals? That is very unlikely, (perhaps poison weapons seemed so vile, God wished people might never find them, if so the hope has been disappointed).

On April 22^nd 1915 Germans used chlorine gas on French solders, later; all the major powers used it in conflict. As the war continued, additional agents were developed.

By the end of World War 1, chemical agents had caused 1.3 million casualties. This horrible experience prompted efforts to ban the use of chemical and biological weapons.

The Geneva protocol in 1925 prohibited the use of chemical and biological weapons. Although the U.S. had been a signatory, it didn’t ratify it until 1975 (50years later). A decade after ratification, the U.S. recommended an expended research and development efforts on both chemical and biological agents.

In the late 80’s, when the U.S was politically competing on ethical principals, it offered no protest against Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians in the city of Halabja, on March 16, 1988. The instant death toll exceeded 5,000 and over10,000 mostly women and children were injured. Many died later and some are maimed for life. This was the most horrifying criminal act against humanity, since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What makes one want to condemn the U.S more is:

First, the U.S. Administration at the time granted $2.8 billion to Iraq for building its’ arsenals.

Second, the history and current realities suggest the key to preventing chemical and biological weapons (C B W) wares lies in American policy. It is true that, the former Soviet Union contributed significantly, but it is the U.S. that played the dominant role in both the development and regulation of all weaponry since WW2.

Lastly, it was the U.S. who stood in the way of the UN for condemning Iraq, although they had evidence that Iraq was violating every international agreement.

One wonders why humanity is still mute after obtaining 18 tons of written documents, (now in the hands of authorities in the US proving that the Iraqi leadership had conducted genocide against the Kurdish population) and yet they are not considered criminals against humanity. How many more mass graves need to be discovered?

Most of the books I have read on the chemical warfare describe the chemistry, the hardware, and the protective devices and so on, but ignore another significant element. The sensitive and vulnerable, yet adaptable animal that constitutes the primary target of (CBW), yes it was the colonial people like Kurds in third world countries who were the primary target of those weapons. But that was before the tragedy of (9/11), today the target is all of mankind.

One can’t judge precisely the threat that chemical weapons pose, and what the people of Halabja went through, but it is worthy to know very few other methods of waging war are as specific to the target as chemical warfare. It is quite possible to kill all human beings in an area with a volatile nerve agent without damaging plants or any material structure at all. The only weapons that approach the chemicals in selectivity are the Neutron bomb and the Biological weapons.

The question that arises here then is, Is the effect of chemical weapons hereditary and do they have lasting effects like Nuclear weapons?

The only essay I could find about the subject is written by Dr Christine Gosden, a British medical specialist who visited Halabja 10 years after the bombing.

She wrote; “What I found was far worse than any thing I had suspected, devastating problems occurring 10 years after the attack.” She mentioned an increasing number of children are dying each year of Leukemia; the Cancers tend to occur in much younger people in Halabja than elsewhere. There were no women in “normal” labor and no one had recently delivered a normal baby.

Genetic cases occurring in children born years after the chemical attack, suggest that the effect from these chemical agents are transmitted to succeeding generations.

Personally, I was only 14 when they took me out of my class room, tortured and imprisoned me for a year with no charges laid.

Can anyone give me one good reason to become Iraqi again?