Posted on 12/04/2002 11:14:33 AM PST by dead
In the Koran, Anfal means war booty. It is also the name given by Iraqis to their military campaign to bring the Kurds to heel. This report from a Herald special correspondent in Barda Qaraman, Iraqi Kurdistan, captures the plight of a people dealing with dispossession.
On the orders of Saddam Hussein, four-year-old Rekan Abdulrahman is stuck in a hole.
His family of eight has just straggled into this refugee camp from the Iraqi city of Kirkuk, representing another file closed in a persistent campaign by Baghdad to ensure that only Arab feet walk the land under which lie the vast oil riches of northern Iraq.
As Rekan's 15-year-old brother tries to build a windbreak of home-made mud bricks at the front of their tent home, his mother, Hamida, sits in her new kitchen - a log of wood in the open air - and tells a story that can be heard from tens of thousands of Kurdish families.
Picking through a big dish of lentils, she says: "They came to the house three times, threatening us because my husband refused to join the army. Then they demanded that my 15-year-old son join up. In the end they expelled us. We could bring nothing. They just made us walk out of our home and leave it." Yet, as she conducts a "tour" of the tent and a makeshift WC they have constructed nearby, she seems oblivious to the indignity of it all: "It's difficult to live here. Conditions are terrible, but no-one is terrorising us. I'm not frightened any more."
Like every other Kurd, she carries her life story in numbers. Right now, the one she focuses on is 19 - the number of days since she was driven out of her home. And for her neighbour Farhad Mohammad Karim, the figure is 12 - the number of prisoners with whom he shared a 3 by 2.5 metre cell before he was kicked out of Iraq proper.
But there is worse, much worse. Saddam has not been simply evicting the Kurds, who are a distinctly different cultural group in predominantly Arab Iraq. He has been trying to exterminate them. This is a story of how the Arab majority has used appalling violence in an attempt to drive the Kurds into the northern borderlands, in the hope of diluting historic Kurdish claims to the oil fields of northern Iraq and the valleys of the Tigris and its tributaries.
The name given to the campaign - Anfal - is taken from a passage in the Koran that deals with the spoils of war.
The flight of the Abdulrahman and Karim families is the trickle at the end of years of imprisonment, torture and death that has been conducted on a truly horrific scale.
Nasreen Shuker's numbers are seven and 86 - the first is the number of months she has been in Barda Qaraman and the second is the number of members of her extended family that have disappeared.
The Anfal number for Oman Anwar Hassan, who spoke to the Herald at another camp for displaced Kurds in the humpy town of Barislawa, is 11 - a brother, three cousins, the wives of two of the cousins and five nephews, all of whom disappeared on Saddam's death buses.
In an interview in his office at Irbil's Salahaddin University, Professor Saedi Barzinji, whose Anfal number is 11 - all of them nephews, nieces and cousins - said matter-of-factly: "There is not a single person in Kurdistan who has not lost a close relative to Saddam Hussein. People try to get on with life, but there is a sadness that stays with us."
There are shades of Pol Pot here. But Human Rights Watch (HRW), an authoritative American-based human rights group which jointly wrote a 370-page report on the Anfal campaigns, draws comparisons with the Holocaust - it finds disturbing similarities in the manner in which people were rounded up and dispatched; in the benign, euphemistic language used by officials of the regime to discuss the campaign; the concentration camps; and the ways in which the Kurds were executed.
But Salah Rashid, Minister for Human Rights in the east of Iraqi Kurdistan, tallies the Anfal death toll with the bluntness of a sledgehammer: "The families of the 182,000 people who disappeared all have Anfal problems. We still don't know what happened to them. Some families disappeared altogether - not just a father, mother and children, but whole extended families have gone. What happened to them?
"We have been told they were buried alive, that they were used in chemical weapons tests, and that the good-looking women were sent on to the Gulf countries. I say they are dead. And according to Iraqi law, much of which still applies in Iraqi Kurdistan, if the death of someone has not been physically witnessed, they are not legally dead, so it is hard for the families to accept. They can't sell property that was in the father's name; the widow cannot remarry. It's like a leaden blanket on our society."
Driving around rural Iraqi Kurdistan, the remains of the thousands of villages that were dynamited and bulldozed can still be seen on the landscape, like crumpled sheets on a bed.
The orgy of Anfal killings and disappearances was packed into 1987 and 1988, when Saddam gave his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid extraordinary powers to terrorise the Kurds of the north. In a meeting with al-Majid in 1991, Kurdish leaders challenged him with their claim that more than 180,000 people had disappeared. Apparently not appreciating the extent of the horror he was confirming, al-Majid angrily denied it, claiming the Anfal death toll "could not have been more than 100,000". After the brutal thrust in 1987-88, the regime kept up a systematic Arabisation program, relocating entire communities, but then shifted into a slower gear. Under the new name of "nationality correction", it is still happening - a family here, a family there suddenly gets a knock on the door and in the space of a year thousands more have been driven out of Iraq proper.
The objective is to Arabise the regions around the Kurdish cities of Kirkuk and Khanaqin, driving people from their homes and land and replacing them with poor Arab families from the south.
Before the Iraqi Kurds won quasi-independence after the 1991 Gulf war, the Kurds who were not exterminated were dumped in the wastelands of the north or the south of Iraq.
Their villages were bombarded and they were denied supplies; they were denied all legal rights and entitlements and anyone who helped Kurds on the run faced death. The attacks were planned several villages at a time so that those who fled would be funnelled into areas that were convenient for the convoys of buses and trucks that carted them to prison and death.
In the camps they were segregated by sex and age and stripped of their possessions. A village woman told HRW investigators: "I saw piles of watches, belts and money taken from villagers and heaped on the floor. You could weep." Mothers had their babies torn away from them, and all of them suffered the torment of watching their menfolk, handcuffed and blindfolded, being taken away to death. A man who escaped and was recaptured was beaten to death in front of his fellow prisoners.
At Nugra Salman, a disease-ridden prison in the south in which elderly Kurds were held, the words "Welcome to Hell" were written over the main gate; and at a rear entrance, a sign read: "It is rare for anyone to survive three months in this place."
Another woman told HRW: "After a few weeks my husband died in my arms. His body lay in the prison hall for one day. The guards did not let me bury him, and I had to beg them. The guard said the body had to remain in the prison until it rotted." And, finally, when they were allowed to bury their dead, the graves were so shallow that wild dogs would come in the night and dig up the corpses. Only six people are known to have escaped from the death convoys - mostly because the Iraqi executioners were gunning them down in such numbers they failed to notice these few had not been fatally wounded.
Today there is an army of Kurdish women who are known as the Anfal widows. They number possibly more than 100,000 and they are the wives of the men who were carted away in 1987-88.
At Shorsh, a town that is only hundreds of metres north of the border between Kurdistan and Iraq proper, where an estimated 70 per cent of people are said to be Anfal survivors, Khawer Fathalla, 51, speaks with little apparent emotion: "All the men in the village were ordered to the Ba'ath Party headquarters - 35 of them. We don't know what happened to them and in all these years we have had no news."
Her sister-in-law Asamar: "We don't have a life. We lost our life when we lost our men." And crying quietly beside her, 62-year-old Kadam Khir said: "The horrible thing is knowing nothing. All we have heard is that they were buried alive with their hands tied." Now when the regime identifies a family it wants to move on, it demands that they sign papers in which they admit that, after all these years as Kurds, they have come to the sudden realisation that they are, in fact, Arabs.
When 70-year-old Hamid Hussein arrived at Barda Qaraman from Iraq proper a few weeks ago, he was lucky enough to grab a ready-built shack being vacated by a family that had moved on. Plugs of rags and paper are shoved into holes in the walls to keep the wind out. With incredible restraint, this patrician old man tells his tale: "They insisted that I become an Arab. But I asked them if they thought I was an Arab, and they said 'No'. So I refused.
"They asked my sons to join the Ba'ath Party - they refused. So they took one of my sons to jail for four months and we had to pay a bribe to have him released - the equivalent of $US250. They made another son join the Jerusalem Army, so the two boys fled to Iraqi Kurdistan."
Once the spotlight of Saddam's Ba'athist Party officials is on a Kurdish male, life for the women of his house becomes hopeless. As each family to be moved on is selected, a calculated program of escalating harassment means that they can no longer go to the bazaar in comfort or confidence; they know that it is only a matter of time before they will have to flee or be expelled.
The dilemma for Hamid Hussein was that when he revealed to the authorities that he was amenable to paying bribes, they started dragging him in regularly, threatening to expel him if he did not pay.
Each shack in Barda Qaraman has its share of sadness. But the story of Nashen, old Hussein's 35-year-old daughter-in-law, has condemned her to living with a head and a heart filled with pain. Despite their wretched poverty and the fact that it is the fasting month of Ramadan, she insists on making cups of hot, sweet tea for this correspondent and a translator before bracing herself to tell her own story.
"Twenty-five members of my family were Anfalised - my father, my brother and 23 cousins. The soldiers came in the dawn; they attacked with artillery and then brought in the trucks to round us up." At the time there had been great excitement in the family, because preparations were well under way for Nashen's marriage.
She said: "Mohammed, my fiance, was one of the cousins who were Anfalised. It was horrible to see them all being taken away. We were held in a camp for women, but we escaped after two nights and went to relatives in Kirkuk." Tears welling up, she goes on: "I was hopeless. After eight years, Mr Hussein came and asked me to marry Jumah, one of his sons. It was a hard decision to make after seven years of waiting and hoping for Mohammed to come back to me. But what was I to do?"
And as she retreats into her sorrow, Hamid Hussein tots up his Anfal numbers: "I have been in prison four times for the crime of being a Kurd. I have lost four cousins and a brother-in-law in the Anfal campaigns, one son was forced into the army and the other was jailed ... we feel real pity for the US because of September 11, but for us tragedy is constant."
Farhad Mohammad Karim, 46, has been stuck in Barda Qaraman for more than two years. In his shack there is one single bed and he has tried to seal the interior with plastic sheeting to keep out snakes and scorpions.
He has seven children - six of them sleep on the floor and the youngest shares the bed with him. And for his household of eight, I counted only 10 articles of clothing in the family "wardrobe". Karim, whose wife left him because as a Turkman she does not have to suffer the hardship inflicted on Kurdish households, had worked as an Iraqi ambulance driver for 24 years, but was sacked when he refused to join the Ba'ath Party.
"I lost the sight of my left eye because of the torture in prison," he said; and asked about his injuries, he retrieves a roll of X-rays from behind one of the roof timbers in his shack.
He said: "They demanded that I change my nationality - they wanted me to say I was an Arab and to join the party if I wanted to keep my government job. When I refused, party officials with guns took me to prison where they put electrodes on my toes and testicles and pulled out my toenails.
"The cell was so crowded - 13 of us were in a cell about 3 metres by 2.5 metres - that we had to sleep sitting up. Then they moved me to a big hall that held 480 prisoners where there was enough room for all of us to lie down, as long as we curled up. And if we paid money to the guards they would allow us to have more room." As Karim crossed into Kurdistan the last indignity was to be stripped of the family's ration card by the Iraqi border guards and to be ordered to sign a document stating that he was leaving of his own free will.
Kurdish authorities say more than 140,000 families are internally displaced. Sitting in the sunshine of an autumn afternoon in the refugee camp of Barislawa, five men in their 50s and 60s tell their tales of upheaval.
Garfour Mohammed Fadah: "After their first visit to my home, the boss told me I no longer had a job; and after four more visits, they just threw me out - now there are Arabs in my house and on our family farm." Oman Anwar Hassan: "The troops landed by helicopter. They surrounded our village and then went home by home, capturing all 300 people. I was out of the village, so I was able to hide. And when I went home in the night everything was destroyed - the entire village was gone. As best I know, I'm the only survivor. I resettled in Kirkuk, but this year they ordered me - I watched the bulldozers demolish my home."
But at Barislawa, the story that 34-year-old Ibrahim Mohammed Ahmad tells is truly appalling. It is the story of his Anfal number - 18: his wife and two children, his father, six brothers, a sister, three brothers-in-law and four sisters-in-law. The only close relative he has left in the world is a brother who at the time of the Anfal attack on their village was two years old, and who survived only because he was in the care of an aunt who lived away from the village because of the death of his mother. Ahmad was planting wheat on the day his village, Tokin, was attacked. He said: "It was raining when the helicopters, tanks and ground-troops surrounded the village about noon. I went to the mountains and stayed there for three months; we knew such an attack would come so we had hidden food in the caves.
"After about a month of bread and water in the mountains, I went back to the village in the night - all 150 houses, the mosque and the school were gone."
The Kurds tell their stories in clipped, matter-of-fact language, but Ahmad's piercing brown eyes water as he speaks: "We have been able to work out that about 200 villagers survived, which means that about 380 are still missing. I was told that in prison my father went for 10 days at a time with no food, and up to 15 days confined in a small, crowded cell."
The two brothers now live in a single barracks room, with Ibrahim taking very good care of 17-year-old Hussein: "I'm so happy to have a brother with me still; I have to love him a lot."
During the Kurdish uprising in 1991, the Kurds controlled Kirkuk for long enough to capture masses of documents from regime offices. Combined with others they gathered up when they took over regional centres like Irbil and Suleimaniyeh, they were able to send 18 tonnes of documents to the US that are being used to prepare war crimes charges against Saddam and officials of his regime.
I wonder who will write the Gulag Archipelago of the Baathist regime.
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