Iraqi Kurds demand UN intervention to determine fate of missing

ARBIL, (Southern Kurdistan), Oct 29 (AFP) Thousands of Kurds marched in the northern Iraqi city of Arbil Tuesday to press for international intervention to determine the fate of tens of thousands of relatives they say were rounded up by Iraqi government forces in the past three decades.

The marchers converged on the UN office in the town controlled by Massoud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), where they handed officials a petition to UN chief Kofi Annan and international rights and other organizations urging them to help find "tens of thousands of Kurds."

The petition said Kurds' hopes had been dashed after the missing failed to reappear when Iraqi President Saddam Hussein granted a general amnesty to prisoners on October 20 to mark his new seven-year term in office following a referendum in which he was declared winner with 100 percent of the vote.

The petition said an estimated 200,000 Kurds were rounded up by government forces from 1970 until 1991, when the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq came under Western protection and became out of bounds for the Baghdad regime in the wake of the Gulf War that year.

It said most arrests were made in 1987-1988 during the government's "Anfal" campaign which included the destruction of "thousands" of Kurdish villages.

The campaign was apparently in retaliation for Kurdish militias' support for Iranian troops during the war between Iraq and Iran, which lasted from 1980 to 1988.

"My father was arrested in Kirkuk in 1988, two months before I was born," said one of the marchers, 14-year-old Shireen Hedayet, who was carrying her father's picture.

Tuesday's march was organized by a KDP-backed local NGO on the prisoners and missing.

Newspapers speaking for the KDP and Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the other main party sharing control of the Kurdish enclave, had earlier dismissed Saddam's pardon to prisoners as a PR stunt and a "farce."