APPG Kurdistan

“There is another Iraq, buried under Iraq”. So said the head of the Kurdistan Mass Graves Commission as she explained to me her work during my recent visit to Kurdistan with the All-Party Parliamentary Kurdistan Group. Travelling around Iraq, her job is to try and identify the mass graves of the victims of Saddam Hussein’s genocide against the Kurds. Sometimes using DNA techniques, sometimes through simple ID (like a chain, a wallet or ID Card), the Kurds painstakingly are going through every mass grave they can find, in order to try and bring respite to grieving families and some kind of closure to what happened under the Baathist regime.

So far around 300 mass graves have been discovered, some with hundreds of bodies, some with fifty to sixty. There are also pits with just bones. We saw this for ourselves when we went to the far north area of Garmian. Row after row of baby sized coffins, filled with bones. Incomplete, unable to be identified, but at least given dignity. Whilst there, we were not only greeted by the Mayor and other dignitaries, but also Shazad Hussein, a grandmother whose family was killed in the genocide and who literally played the grandmother in the award winning Iraqi film, Son of Babylon – a moving and tragic account of Iraq’s missing million people.

It is strange that whilst the world knows much about modern genocide: the Bosnians by the Serbs, the tragedy of Rwanda, little is known about the Kurdish story. In fact, their genocide which is known to most as ‘Anfal’, is not even recognised as an international genocide by the United Nations – something that I, chairing a committee of academics, lawyers, and Parliamentarians, am trying to change. The facts are these: if you define genocide as scientifically planned mass murder with various stages of development – notably, marginalisation, demonisation, and eradication, – then the Kurds suffered genocide.

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/platform/2012/03/from-halfon4harlowmp-recognising-the-kurdish-genocide.html

I’ve had a couple of weeks to reflect on the short time I spent in northern Iraq. I am one of those many Labour party members who backed Tony Blair over Iraq. In retrospect, I can see what all the intelligence agencies and governments of the world couldn’t see at the time, that Saddam Hussein did not have stockpiles of chemical or radiological weapons at the time of the invasion. But I don’t care. In 1988 I was handed a leaflet outside the Salford University Students Union by a Kurdish student depicted a mother and baby dead on the ground. They had been killed, along with about 5,000 other civilians, by a combination of VX, sarin and mustard gas, dropped on Saddam’s orders on his own citizens in Halabja, northern Iraq. It was one of many uses of what came to be known as ‘weapons of mass destruction’ by Saddam. So the answer to those who say ‘he didn’t have WMD’ is ‘yes he did, and he used them to kill thousands of his own civilians.’

The people of Erbil, where I was staying, certainly agree with that statement. When Saddam was deposed in 2003, the citizens of Erbil took to the streets and celebrated into the night. Their lives now are immeasurably better than during the Ba’ath regime. Erbil stands on the route between Baghdad and Mosul. It has been continuously inhabited for over 8,000 years, by Babylonians, Assyrians, Romans, Persians, Arabs and Ottomans. It makes Cambridge or Canterbury feel like a Barrett estate. You can’t help but feel connected to ancient civilisations. Colonel Tim Collins’ famous speech was in my mind as I arrived. Iraq, he told his (presumably somewhat bemused) squaddies on the eve of the invasion, is ‘the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birthplace of Abraham.’ It is the cradle of civilisation. Ironic, then, that I spent most of my time in either a brand new international airport, or a brand new five star hotel. Everywhere the builders are constructing the new housing developments, hotels and conference centres which will characterise the next stage in this ancient city’s life. The main employment for young men is on building sites.

I was also struck by the historical footnote that Clement Attlee had fought his way through Iraq in 1917. Having survived the fiasco in the Dardanelles, Attlee took part in the Mesopotamian campaign. Attlee was the last-but-one soldier to be evacuated from Suvla Bay in Gallipoli. The last was General Maude. I imagine a rather English scene with one gentleman offering the place in the rowing boat to the other in the black of night, with Turkish shells landing all around. The two were reunited in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). Major Attlee was wounded commanding Indian troops at the battle of Hannah. Maude, the commander-in-chief, caught cholera and died. Even if Attlee had gone home in 1918 and tended his garden, his life would have been remarkable. His brother Tom was a conscientious objector, and I’ve always thought the tension between them would make a rather good drama.

Back in modern Iraq, I spent time with a group of 11 MPs, conducting a fairly standard media interviews training course (albeit in Arabic). They reflected the diversity of the country: more women than men, Kurds, western dress and traditional Arab robes. One MP spent his youth in the mountains of Kurdistan fighting Saddam’s forces. Then he lived in London for 10 years, and still has a house in Hayes. From freedom fighter in the mountains to catching the bus and going shopping Middlesex is quite a journey. He is one of three members of the Iraqi parliament who hold British passports. The MPs were like British MPs. They spent their breaks from my training course gossiping and plotting. They were passionate about their constituents and their country. They wanted to learn new skills. They were proud of what they have achieved. Imagine Stella Creasy in a hijab, or Rachel Reeves speaking Kurdish. That’s what the women were like. It was a privilege to spend time with them.

I am in no doubt that democracy in Iraq is genuine, vibrant and will develop and grow. I know the depth of feeling that Britain’s involvement in Iraq generated among Labour people. But I cannot understand how anyone can doubt a democracy, which is what Iraq now is, is not better than a dictatorship, which is what the people suffered for decades. Surely the job of progressives now is to develop links with the trade unions, women’s groups, civil rights organisations and democratic parties, to help democracy flourish, and to bring Iraq into the mainstream of modern states? Raking over old ground, or endlessly apologising, helps no one, and certainly not the people of Iraq.

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Paul Richards writes a weekly column for Progress, Paul’s week in politics. He tweets @LabourPaul

http://www.progressonline.org.uk/2012/05/11/democracy-in-the-cradle-of-civilisation/

Report Of The Sixth Fact-Finding Delegation To Iraqi Kurdistan – By The All-Party Parliamentary Group In February 2012.

This report is released on 16 May.

Click here to download the report

It has been announced today that the British Parliament will debate a motion calling for formal recognition of the mass murder of Kurdish people in Iraq as genocide. The news follows a tireless campaign for recognition, supported by more than 27,500 British citizens, who have all signed an e-petition demanding justice for the murdered Kurds.

The debate will take place in the main chamber at 2.15pm on the 28th February. It will be based on a votable motion, the successful end result of which would be that Parliament will have recognised the genocide.

The debate itself represents a significant victory for the campaign e-petition, sponsored by Nadhim Zahawi MP, which was launched in March last year in a bid to urge the British Government to debate the mass killings and recognize the truth. The campaign has since been supported throughout the year by the Kurdish community, the Kurdistan Regional Government UK Representation, and British MPs from all political parties, especially those who are members of the highly supportive All Party Parliamentary Group for Kurdistan including Robert Halfon MP, and Meg Munn MP. Together, they recently made a successful presentation to the Back Bench Business Committee which allocates time for debates in Parliament.

During the presentation, Nadhim Zahawi MP told the Committee that his father was forced to flee Iraq simply because he was Kurdish and he was not willing to join the Baath party. He said that Britain has been heavily involved with the Kurdish people going back to Sykes-Picot, but more recently with Sir John Major who saved the Kurdish people with the no-fly zone and Tony Blair who is seen as the liberator of the Kurds. Robert Halfon MP said that unless the genocide is recognised internationally, people cannot be brought to justice. Meanwhile, Meg Munn MP said that the debate would have a wider resonance given events in Syria, and Fabian Hamilton MP cited good cross-party support for a debate. Jason McCartney MP, who served as a Royal Air Force officer in the no-fly zone in Zakho, said it would be a fitting tribute to have the debate on the 25th anniversary of the chemical weapons attack on Halabja.

The Kurdistan Regional Government High Representative to the UK, Ms. Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman said, “The genocide brought unimaginable suffering to our people: families were torn apart, sons and fathers killed en masse or simply buried alive, women and children bombed with poison gas. We believe that this suffering needs to be acknowledged, not just by us Kurds and Iraqis, but by our friends too, so that the victims’ families and the survivors can reach closure and a message is sent out to any other regime oppressing its people or considering using chemical weapons. Imagine how heartened the survivors who are now British citizens would feel to be in the chamber, listening to such a debate.”

Ms. Rahman also told the committee in a letter how the Swedish and Norwegian parliaments recently debated the genocide and the Kurdish community is wondering why Britain had not yet done the same.

In January, the British Government issued a response to the e-petition which acknowledged that no group suffered more than the Iraqi Kurds. However, the Government response went on to say that It remains the Governments view that it is not for governments to decide whether a genocide has been committed in this case, as this is a complex legal question.

The debate on the 28th February may encourage the Government to change its position.

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The APPG, led by its Co-Chairs Nadhim Zahawi and Meg Munn, made a bid before the Back Bench Business Committee for an historic debate on the Kurdish genocide. Our Vice-Chair Robert Halfon stressed that “The principle is to get the support of Parliament before the anniversary.” The full transcript of the exchange can be found at his website: http://www.roberthalfonblog.com/?p=1845

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The untold story of the Kurdish genocide was the subject of a major international conference organized last week by the KRG UK just a stone’s throw from Parliament.

It attracted nearly 300 campaigners, academics, experts, Kurds and Brits to hear 40 speakers, including former French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, the Deputy Speaker of the Norwegian Parliament and the leader of the Kurdish caucus in the Swedish Parliament as well as KRG Ministers for Foreign Relations and the Anfal.

This year sees several milestone anniversaries – ten year since Iraq’s liberation, 25 years since Halabja and 30 years since the murder of 8,000 Barzanis.

The conference was itself on the anniversary of the start of Operation Desert Storm which liberated Kuwait and began a series of events that stopped Saddam from finishing off his genocidal campaign against the Kurds.

The Kurds and the Shia responded to American calls to rebel but were mercilessly crushed, thanks to the inexplicable decision to allow Saddam’s murderous jets and helicopters to fly.

However, the scenes of the Kurds seeking safety in the freezing mountains and dying in large numbers triggered a wave of public revulsion. One woman collected tons of blankets and food and then asked the MP I worked for to persuade Iranian Airlines to transport these offerings. Such outrage and action created the momentum for the no-fly zone which sheltered Kurdistan until Saddam was finally ousted.

The whole conference will soon be on YouTube but several themes stand out. First, few outside Kurdistan yet understand the meticulous and industrial organization of what Dr Mahmoud Osman called “Saddam’s killing machine.” The eye-witness statements of survivors moved the conference and empathy can drive solidarity. Hundreds of thousands of Kurdish stories need telling.

Second, public understanding of genocide can incubate for decades. Next week’s official Holocaust Memorial Day sees events in schools and communities across Britain. School students regularly visit Auschwitz. All this nurtures a continuing understanding of the Holocaust and also aims to combat contemporary racism and connect to new genocides.

But it’s all fairly recent. Initially, Holocaust survivors were traumatized into silence by survivors’ guilt and wanting to protect their children from their nightmares. The modern Holocaust movement took 20 years to take off. This is happening with the Anfal.

Thirdly, we heard of the cynical Cold War machinations of the great powers. Kouchner slammed France for being a friend of Saddam, although many like him and Danielle Mitterand were early friends of the Kurds. Former American diplomat Peter Galbraith, an eye-witness to Anfal, detailed extraordinary American efforts to blame Iran for using chemical weapons to appease Saddam. Such self-serving fictions fuelled what Tom Hardie Forsyth, a former British Army Captain who served in Kurdistan in the early 90s, called “collective selective amnesia.”

Galbraith insisted that recognizing genocide is not just a moral matter for “bleeding heart liberals” but a “strategic necessity.” Unchecked crimes only embolden tyrants whose actions endanger security and stability. We are seeing this in Syria today. Kouchner argued that “human rights should mean that people are protected within their own countries,” which is the essence of the developing but sometimes invisible UN doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect.

Finally, the conference coincided with the formal British Government response to the e petition. It recognizes that Saddam systematically persecuted and oppressed ethnic and religious groups, especially the Kurds. It highlights British friendship and partnership with Iraqi Kurds and the British Diaspora.

But the fly in the ointment is its assertion that “it is not for governments to decide whether a genocide has been committed in this case, as this is a complex legal question. Where an international judicial body finds a crime to have been a genocide, however, this will often play an important part in whether we will recognize one as such.” This needlessly evades the issue and kicks it into the long grass.

KRG High Representative Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman described it as a “a frankly disappointing and weak view that the UK should wait for an international judicial body to act before it decides to define long-running efforts to eliminate the Kurds as a genocide, although the Iraqi High Tribunal, the Iraqi Presidential Council and the Iraqi Parliament have endorsed its definition as genocide. We will continue to urge the UK Government to pull out all the stops and go the whole hog by taking a moral stand in defining our suffering as genocide so it becomes harder for it to happen again in Iraq or elsewhere.”

There may yet be a debate in the British Parliament. The year-long campaign and this important conference have done much to increase awareness of the Kurdish genocide and create a positive momentum. It is a long haul but the conference showed that there is a good and growing base in Britain. It will be needed to put the Anfal and Kurdistan more firmly on the map.

* Gary Kent is the Administrator of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG). He writes this column for Rudaw in a personal capacity.

http://www.rudaw.net/english/science/columnists/5675.html

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A former US diplomat has condemned his country’s “silence” about the genocide of Kurds by Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Peter Galbraith was speaking at a conference in London on the Kurdish genocide, which is being attended by senior experts, humanitarians, politicians and survivors.

The genocide began in the 1960s and continued until the late 1980s.

An estimated 180,000 Kurdish people were killed between 1987 and 1988 alone during Saddam Hussein’s genocidal campaign called Anfal. The true scale of the killing is not yet known and mass graves continue to be uncovered.

Mr Galbraith told the conference:

“I want to speak as one of a handful of Westerners who was a witness to the genocide as it unfolded. I want to talk about the silence.”

He was working for the US Senate’s foreign relations committee in 1987 when he was given permission to go into Kurdistan.

“As I crossed into the Kurdish region I was struck by something – the absence of the villages that appeared on the very detailed military maps that I had,” he told the conference.

“You could see then the systematic destruction of the villages – on one side of the road abandoned houses and buildings, on the other side bulldozers in the process of making rubble out of them. And beyond you could see people being located in ‘victory cities’ in other words concentration camps.”

Mr Galbraith said: “It was very clear that Iran never used chemical weapons in the Iran/Iraq war, but the fiction was put out at the time and even perpetrated today that it was the Iranians that did it (gassed Kurdish villages).”

He also recalled how the US Senate unanimously passed a Bill to impose sanctions on Iraq over the genocide.

“We drew up a Bill and called it the Prevention of Genocide Act and got Jesse Helms, a right-wing Republican, to co-sponsor with Al Gore and Ted Kennedy, and got it through the Senate in a day.

“If you know anything about the US Congress the idea anything could happen in a day was amazing.

“Then the special interests went to work. In the House of Representatives it was weakened.

“The Reagan administration – first it said ‘yes Iraq used chemical weapons on the Kurds’. They did not dispute that, in fact they had intelligence intercepts proving it, but their next response was that sanctions, even cutting off the $700m a year that the US was giving Iraq in 1988, that was too extreme a response to Iraq gassing the Kurds.

“Ironically, the very same people who had argued that this response was premature when the genocide was actually taking place in 1988, in 2003 those same people – Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz – said that fact that Saddam had gassed his own people was a reason for the (Iraq) war, that turned out to be a trillion dollar cost to the United States.”

Mr Galbraith added:

“There was something that actually happened at the time and there was a response and the response was not that people ignored it, they decide actively not to do anything about it.”

Conservative MP Robert Halfon told the conference that while he has “few Kurdish people in constituency” the UK Parliament has a “moral duty” to help gain international recognition for the Kurdish genocide.

He said what happened to the Kurds under Saddam was “scientifically planned mass murder”.

“What I have learnt about the Kurds is that they are people who have learnt from the past but don’t live in it, but they have waited too long for justice,” he said.

“The state of Iraq now recognises the Kurdish genocide and it is the duty of the rest of the world to do the same.”

He said his work with the APPGs on Kurdistan and on genocide will is part of an effort “to ensure that all the perpetrators are brought to the international court”. He also advocated a programme of education and remembrance, “so that the true story of Saddam’s brutality will not be forgotten by future generations”.

Mr Halfon said an e-petition calling on the British Government to recognise the murder of hundreds of thousands of Kurds as genocide has attracted more than 25,000 signatures.

Dr Mahmoud Osman, a member of the Iraq Council of Representatives, recalled the attacks on his people in Kurdistan, including attacks on villages and people fleeing the repression with “a cocktail of mustard, sarin and other nerve gases”.

“Almost every Kurd and every Iraqi has a story to tell about Saddam’s brutality,” he said.

He condemned the silence of the international community, but praised “Western media, NGOs and many members of parliament who were very supportive of the plight of the victims”.

The conference also heard contributions from Nadhim Zahawi, the British-Kurdish MP for Stratford upon Avon, Akhtar Chaudhry, Deputy Speaker of the Norwegian Parliament, and Dr Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Medecins Sans Frontieres and former French Foreign Minister.

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