| PREFACE
Occasionally, opportunity can grow out of tragedy. For Human rights watch / Middle east, the first opportunity to carry out human rights research in northern Iraq came unexpectedly, in the wake of the tumultuous, heart-wrenching events of early 1991 that are familiar to most of us from our television sets. As Iraqi government troops fell back in the face of advancing allied troops and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters returning with civilian refugees from the Turkish and Iranian borders, it became evident that Baghdad's long-standing ban on access to the Kurdish region by independent investigators had been broken by a force majeure. How long the window of opportunity would stay open no one could predict.
This debilitating uncertainty remains. For the Iraqi Kurds, their future as an often-threatened minority is at risk, as are their lives. At this writing, a severe economic squeeze, from a combination of United Nations sanctions against Iraq and an internal blockade imposed by government forces, threatens to produce mass starvation among the 3.5 million inhabitants of the Kurdish rebel-controlled enclave. Government troops amassed along a cease-fire line could easily reconquer the region before the West could come to the aid of the Kurds.
For the Middle East division of Human Rights Watch, a driving consideration over the past two years has been whether there would be time to gather reliable information both to convince international public opinion and, later, to satisfy a court of law. Although interim reports have been released about the 1988 extermination campaign known as Anfal (see Bibliography), with the publication of this book, the first objective has been accomplished. There is persuasive evidence that virtually all the many tens of thousands Kurdish civilians who disappeared at the hands of government forces in 1988 are dead, yet whether their fate can be definitively settled anytime soon remains to be seen. Much depends on the future course of internal Iraqi politics.
Allegations about enormous abuses against the Kurds by government security forces had been circulating in the West for years before the events of 1991; Kurdish rebels had spoken of 4,000 destroyed villages and an estimated 182,000 disappeared persons in 1988 alone. The phenomenon of the Anfal the official military code name used by the government in its public pronouncements and internal memoranda was well known inside Iraq, especially in the Kurdish region. As all the horrific details emerge, this name has seared itself into the popular consciousness much as the Nazi German Holocaust has in the world's consciousness. The parallels are apt and are often chillingly close.
Fragmented by their mountainous geography, their own political fractiousness, and the divide-and-rule policies of regional governments at the time, few Kurds appreciated the highly organized and comprehensive nature of the Anfal. And for obvious reasons, before October 1991, when Kurdish rebel leaders unexpectedly found themselves the temporary masters of much of their traditional lands, there were few hard facts for external organizations to rely on.
In its February 1990 report, Human Rights in Iraq, HRW/Middle East reconstructed what had taken place from exile sources, with what in retrospect turned out to be great accuracy. Even so, some of the larger claims made by the Kurds seemed too fantastic to credit. In fact, the process of discovery has been a humbling lesson for the foreigners who follow Kurdish affairs from abroad. Western reporters, relief workers, human rights organizations, and other visitors to Iraqi Kurdistan have come to realize that the overall scale of the suffering inflicted on the Kurds by their government was by no means exaggerated.
…
Andrew Whitley
Executive director (1990-1994)
Human rights watch / Middle east
Foreword to the 1995 edition
This book is the result of almost three years of research carried out by Human rights watch / Middle east (formerly known as Middle east watch) in northern Iraq and at the National archives in Washington, D. C., in 1991 - 94. It combines findings from forensic missions (conducted jointly with Physicians for Human rights), eyewitnesses, extensive interviews, and the study of eighteen metric tons of Iraqi state documents in arguing that the 1988 Anfal campaign against the Kurds in northern Iraq constituted genocide.
Between 1992 and 1994, HRW / Middle east published five reports about the Anfal campaign. Genocide in Iraq combines and expands on the information provided in the first three reports: one on land mines, one on mass graves, and the third on two villages that suffered during the Anfal campaign one endured a mass execution, the other a chemical attack. An earlier version of the book was published in the summer of 1993 by the Middle East division under the same title. Appendix E of the present edition includes the documentary evidence of genocide that was published in February 1994 in Bureaucracy of Repression: The Iraqi Government in Its Own Words.
Since publication of Bureaucracy, Human Rights Watch has made substantial progress in the analysis of the Iraqi state files. By the end of May 1994, it had screened close to 70 percent of the documents for evidence of genocide and other human rights abuses by the government of Iraq against its Kurdish population during the 1980s. The project has been scheduled to be completed by the end of September 1994.
Joost R. Hiltermann
Iraqi documents project director
Human rights watch / Middle east |
