A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (33 page)

Amnesty did circulate photographs of the victims as well as the names of those it could confirm had disappeared. But as Curt Goering, AmnestyUSA deputy director, says, "The problem then, as now, was getting our grassroots base to have any actual influence in Washington"

U.S. officials claimed that the proof of Iraqi responsibility was inconclusive and blamed "both sides."4f' U.S. officials cited "indications" that Iran had also used chemical artillery shells against Iraq, although they had to concede that the evidence was unconvincing. State Department spokesman Charles Redman issued a forward-looking, even-handed proclamation. He said, "We call upon Iran and Iraq to desist immediately from any further use of chemical weapons, which are an offense to civilization and humanity."47 Nearly three weeks after the Halabja attack, the Washington Post ran a frontpage story citing Defense Department claims that "it wasn't a one-way show"" At the UN Security Council, the United States blocked an Iranian attempt to raise the question of responsibility for the Halabja attack.'''

Whatever the surface confusion, Kurdish refugees were adamant about what they witnessed and experienced. David Korn, a State Department Middle East specialist who later interviewed dozens of Kurdish survivors, recalls, "The facts were available, but you don't get the full facts unless you want the full facts."The facts of the larger campaign of destruction were undeniable. A Defense Intelligence Agency cable, dated April 19, 1988, reported that "an estimated 1.5 million Kurdish nationals have been resettled in camps"; that "approximately 700-1000 villages and small residential areas were targeted for resettlement"; that "an unknown but reportedly large number of Kurds have been placed in `concentration' camps located near the Jordanian and Saudi Arabian borders.""' But these horrors captured no headlines. Thus, U.S. officials never hurried to gather details on the conditions in the camps or the welfare of the men they knew had been taken away.The story of Halabja died down as quickly as it had popped up, and the State Department maintained full support for Iraq.

Mass Executions

Iraqi gas attacks received the public attention, but most Kurds who died in the Anfal were killed in mass executions. U.S. officials knew throughout the 1987-1988 offensive that Iraqi men who were captured were led away and imprisoned. It is unclear when these officials learned of the ritualized mass killing. Senior Reagan administration officials had made it plain that the fate of the Kurds was not their concern, so it would not be surprising if U.S. intelligence officers did not attempt to track the prisoners' condition at the time the massacres were happening. Several Kurds who survived Iraqi firing squads later came forward to describe the horror that befell those who ended up in al-Majid's custody.

Some Kurds who were rounded up in the prohibited zones during the Anfal campaign were dumped at the sprawling Topzawa detention center near the oil-rich town of Kirkuk. Survivors said that some 5,000 Kurds occupied Topzawa at one time, but the turnover was rapid, as busloads of men were removed and arrived daily. Through the barred windows, women and children watched the men in the courtyard outside being handcuffed and beaten savagely. Usually after no more than a day or two, the guards read off a list of names, and the men were packed, stripped to their shorts, bound together, and forced into windowless green-and-white vehicles, which reminded many of ambulances. The elderly (those between fifty and ninety) were driven twelve to fifteen hours to the Pit of Salman, or Nugra Salman, an abandoned, lice-infested fortified prison, where an average of four or five men died each day from starvation, disease, and physical abuses' The men of fighting age met fates even more sinister.

In April 1988 Ozer, an unmarried, twenty-five-year-old construction worker, had ended up in Topzawa after Iraqi shelling and bulldozers forced him from his home for a second time. At about 8:00 one morning, he and several hundred others were dragged onto sealed vehicles that were thick with old urine and human feces and steamy hot. After a full day on the road, Ozer's nine-vehicle convoy made its way onto a dirt path, ahead of which he spotted only desert and darkness. Ozer and the other men knew the end was near and began to pray, to weep, and in keeping with the Islamic tradition, to ask one another for forgiveness.''- The prisoners could hear the steady melody of nearby gunfire, the sounds of screams, followed by the groan of bulldozer engines. The driver of Ozer's bus turned on his highbeams so the Iraqi police would have an easier time killing the men in the bus ahead. Ozer and his fellow prisoners watched as Kurdish men were dragged in front of the light, pummeled by a uniformed firing squad, and pulled into a freshly dug pit.

Confronted with the visual reality of their destiny and unable to take solace in wishful thinking, Ozer's busload did something quite unusual: They attempted forcibly to resist their execution, injuring one of the guards in a scuffle. But the prisoners were outnumbered, and the guards outside simply emptied their guns, again and again, into the bus. Ozer was grazed by a flying piece of shrapnel but lay coiled on the bus floor as dead bodies piled up around him and as he listened to the steady patter of blood dripping from the porous vehicle. Ozer eventually stole away into the safety of the dark desert night. Unable to see clearly, he stumbled into a trench with some 400 bleeding bodies. But he crawled out and found his way to the Kurdish quarter of Kirkuk.

The Iraqis tended to vary their methods. As Middle East Watch later found:

Some groups of prisoners were lined up, shot from the front and dragged into pre-dug mass graves; others were shoved roughly into trenches and machine-gunned where they stood; others were made to lie down in pairs, sardine-style, next to mounds of fresh corpses, before being killed; others were tied together, made to stand on the lip of the pit, and shot in the back so that they would fall forward into it-a method that was presumably more efficient from the point of view of the killers. Bulldozers then pushed earth or sand loosely over the heaps of corpses.51

In some areas women and children who had been removed from their homes also became targets. Taimour Abdullah Ahmad, a twelve-year-old, became the Kurds' most famous survivor. In April 1988 he lived with his parents; eleven-year-old sister, Gaylas; ten-year-old sister, Leyla; and nineyear-old sister, Serwa. Iraqi troops swept through their town and rounded up his family and brought them to Topzawa, where Taimour thought himself fortunate not to be housed with the nien. By peering through a small hole in the compound wall, he saw his father being stripped down to his underclothes, manacled to his nearest neighbor, and dragged out of the compound with the other men. Other women and families were competing for access to the same hole, and Taimour remembered wives, mothers, and daughters screaming, shouting, beating themselves, and pulling at their hair in agony."

Taimour remained in the compound with his mother and sisters for a month, living off a piece of bread per day, until one morning in late May the guards summoned them, checking their names off a list and hustling them onto the green-and-white buses. Tainiour drove with some fifty or sixty women and children who were seated the length of the bus. They drove in sweltering silence-three children died of dehydration on the way-until nightfall.When the guards threw open the rear doors,Taimour, who had removed his blindfold saw that each of the thirty or so vehicles in his convoy had been positioned next to its own desert burial pit, each of which was about fifteen feet square and a yard deep. A mound of mud was stacked precipitously on the far side of each pit. Before Taimour had time to process the grim scene, the guards pushed him and the others into the pits, separating him from his mother and sisters."

When Taimour was hit by a bullet in the left shoulder, he began to stagger toward the man who shot him, reaching out with his hands. He remembered the look in the soldier's eyes. "He was about to cry," Taimour said three years later, mechanically reciting a narrative he had learned to tell and retell, "but the other one shouted at him and told him to throw me back in the pit. He was obliged to throw me back""' The officer ordered the soldier to fire again, which he did, hitting Taimour for a second time, this time on the right side of his back, just above the waist. The boy lay still. When the guards had walked away, he felt a young girl move next to him. "Let's run," he whispered, but she declined, too frightened of the soldiers.

Taimour emerged from the pit and stole one last look behind him, spotting his mother, three sisters, and three aunts piled like cordwood. He inched his way away from the grave, avoiding the sweeping headlights of the guards' land-cruisers. With blood pouring from his wounds, he passed out behind one of the dirt mounds. When he regained consciousness, the pits had been filled and smoothed flat. He escaped and was sheltered by an Arab family for two years. Only with the Kurdish uprising in 1991 was he repatriated to the north. There he learned he had lost twenty-eight relatives in the Anfal.''

A Pair of Iraqi Victories

U.S. and European policyniakers had long refused to meet officially with Iraqi Kurdish leaders for fear of irritating Hussein. But the high-profile gassing of Halabja and the disappearance and suspected massacres of tens of thousands of unarmed Kurds caused Jalal Talabani, the leader of one of the Iraqi Kurds' two main political parties, to believe he might at last gain an audience with Western officialdom. In June 1988 Talabani, a fifty-fouryear-old former journalist and lawyer, decided to test his luck and left the Middle East for the first time in eight years. He traveled to London where, along with Latif Rashid, his party's representative there, he pored over a copy of the genocide convention. "We knew `genocide' was a very sensitive term, and we wanted to be very careful that we were using it correctly," Rashid remembers. After reviewing the text, debating its terms, and comparing it to the facts of the Anfal,Talabani announced publicly that Iraq was "waging a genocide campaign against our people through the daily use of poison gas ."

A few weeks later,Talabani visited Washington. He claimed that Iraq had destroyed more than 1,000 villages in the previous year alone and offered gruesome accounts of gassing. Wearing a pinstriped suit and a paisley tie, Talabani did not conform to the image of the pantalooned, bullet-laden Kurdish rebel. More politically savvy than expected, Talabani deftly made the case that Hussein's genocide was downright historic. "It's the first time in history a government has used chemical weapons against its own citizens who are not at the battlefront," he told Elaine Sciolino of the New York Times. He also defended the alliance that his forces had made with Iran on the grounds that "when you are facing a war of genocide, it is your duty to fight back in any way you can."

Larry Pope, the State Department's Iran-Iraq office director, favored the Reagan administration's chosen policy of engagement with Iraq. But he was sufficiently revolted by the images out of Halabja that he felt the United States should register its disapproval by agreeing to meet Talabani at the State Department. This meant ignoring the long-standing "self-denying ordinance" that required all contact with the Kurds to occur off U.S. government propertyTalabani was delighted. He and Pope met for an hour in the State Department's fortress at Foggy Bottom. The first burst of outrage came not from the Iraqis but from Turkish president Kenan Evren, who happened to be in Washington to meet with Secretary of State Shultz. Evren, who feared that any encouragement given Iraqi Kurds would embolden Turkey's 10 million Kurds, went ballistic. Shultz knew nothing of the Talabani-Pope meeting and demanded to know, "Who the hell had this bright idea?"The Iraqis, predictably, were also irate. Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz canceled his long-planned meeting with Shultz, accusing the U.S. government of interfering in Iraqi internal affairs. Iraq was most sensitive to U.S. statements and maneuvers. The State Department scrambled to appease Iraq by declaring publicly:"The United States does not interfere in the internal affairs" of those countries with a Kurdish minority"(' Pope was reprimanded, and the department reiterated its policy of meeting with the Kurdish leadership only off-site. "At first, we were so popular. Everyone was so gracious and interested," remembers Rashid, the Talabani aide. "Then suddenly, overnight, the doors closed and we were shut out" In the end Pope believes his gesture-tame as it was-backfired. "Rather than send a message of disapproval to Iraq, we sent the message that our relations with Iraq and Turkey were more important than anything Hussein did internally," he recalls.

Talabani had quickly learned the value the United States placed on its relationship with Iraq. Still, the trip paid some dividends. He got to know several members of Congress and became acquainted for the first time with Galbraith. He also helped nudge along Senator Mitchell's resolution condemning Iraqi chemical weapons use, which passed unanimously (91-0) on June 24, 1988.''' But because no sticks were attached to the resolution and because Hussein could be confident the White House was still on his side, he was not deterred. In late June and July the Iraqis staged chemical weapons attacks throughout Kurdish territory.

The United States had concentrated its diplomatic efforts in 1987-1988 on isolating and securing an arms embargo against Iran. It had also supplied concrete assistance to Iraq. Although it did not sell Baghdad weapons, the United States provided intelligence gathered from AWACS early-warning aircraft, which included damage estimates on Iraqi strikes and reports of Iranian troop movements.'` Partly as a result of U.S. support, Iraq turned the tide in its war with Iran. Iran may have blundered by highlighting the gruesome effects of Iraqi chemical weapons. Instead of mobilizing public opinion, the testimony of survivors convinced potential volunteers to steer clear of the recruiting offices. Khomeini agreed to a cease-fire in July 1988. Teheran radio broadcast a statement in his name that hinted at the role of the poisonous chemicals. "Taking this decision was more deadly than taking poison," the ayatollah said. "I have sold my honor. I have swallowed the poison of defeat.""' More than 1 million soldiers and civilians on both sides had died in the war.''' Not an inch of land had changed hands.