Kurdish Genocide

Ann Clwyd Excerpts

Thursday 28th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi) on securing this important debate, which, of course, has particular significance around this time. For years, I have chaired meetings in the Grand Committee Room of the House of Commons and we have commemorated Halabja year after year. Indeed, in 1988 along with Members from across the House, I took a group of women to a hospital in London where some of the survivors of the Halabja incident were recovering. There were women who had been badly burned by chemicals, and some could not speak because the chemical weapons had harmed their windpipes. I hope that those people survived, and I was glad that at least some of them had the opportunity to be brought to London for treatment.

In 1988-89 my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), who was in the Chamber earlier, attempted to protest at the Iraqi embassy about the use of chemical weapons against the Kurds. At the time, the ambassador told us that he knew nothing about it; it was all a mystery to him. He said, “Would you like to visit Baghdad?” We said, “No, we’d actually like to go and visit Kurdistan where the chemical weapons attack has taken place.” He continued to say, “I don’t know anything about it but I will get in touch with Baghdad and see what we can do.” He played a cat and mouse game with us for six months, at the end of which I sent a letter to the Financial Times saying that it was obviously just a game. However, it was not a game for us politicians who had followed the Kurds for many years. We protested in this House in 1988, 1989 and throughout.

I first became involved with the Kurds as early as 1977, before I was a politician, when many Kurds were students at Cardiff university. One, of course, was Barham Salih, and many prominent Kurds were at that university. There were also Iraqi students, and they told us what was happening in Iraq. It was difficult to get an accurate picture at that time, and it was not until the chemical weapons attack that the public in the west were made aware of the kind of weapons that Saddam Hussein was prepared to use against his own people. The charge of genocide was proved in the tribunal in Iraq, and many prominent Iraqis were tried. Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as Chemical Ali, was subsequently sentenced to death. The charge of genocide was made against him and it was proved.

Some of us have campaigned over a long period. I chaired the Campaign Against Repression and for Democratic Rights in Iraq—CARDRI—which many Kurds and Iraqis living in London were members of at that time. We continually published records of what was happening to the Kurds and Iraqis, and what was going on in the prisons. We had good but horrific accounts of the kind of torture being used against the people of Kurdistan and Iraq. Some of the kinds of torture were horrific. Later, I opened the genocide museum in Kurdistan, and I remember relatives of those who had been killed during the Anfal campaign coming up to me. It was a memorable day—it was snowing; it was grey—and going into that museum of torture and seeing where so many Kurds had perished left a lasting impression on us all.

Women were coming towards me with photographs of their relatives who had died. They were elderly women carrying photographs wrapped in cling film, and they showed me which of their relatives had died in that torture centre in Sulaymaniyah. CARDRI collected a lot of evidence. We had photographs and witness statements, and a few years later when Indict was set up, for several years it collected evidence of Iraqi war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. I am glad to say that the evidence was used in the trials that subsequently took place in Baghdad.

Many knew, or thought we knew, what was happening in Iraq, but things were not fully explained until after 2003. I first went to Kurdistan in 1991 and returned every two or three years after that. There were constant stories of disappearances and sightings of people in prisons. Nobody knew where their loved ones were.

The Anfal campaign was horrific. I have looked again at a Human Rights Watch report published in July 1993, entitled, “Genocide in Iraq: The Anfal Campaign Against the Kurds”, which states:

“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 during 1988 alone. The…Anfal, the official military codename 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 have emerged, this name has seared itself into popular consciousness—much as the Nazi German Holocaust did with its survivors. The parallels are apt, and often chillingly close…In…February 1990, Human Rights in Iraq, Middle East Watch reconstructed what took place from exile sources, with what in retrospect turned out to be a high degree of accuracy. Even so, some of the larger claims made by the Kurds seemed too fantastic to credit. As it transpires, this has been a humbling, learning process for all those foreigners who followed 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.”

The report goes on to say that Middle East Watch

“can now demonstrate convincingly a deliberate intent on the part of the government of…Saddam Hussein to destroy, through mass murder, part of Iraq’s Kurdish minority…Two government instruments…the…1987 national census and the declaration of “prohibited areas”…were institutional foundations of this policy. These instruments were implemented against the background of nearly two decades of government-directed “Arabization”, in which mixed-race districts, or else lands that Baghdad regarded as desirable or strategically important, saw their Kurdish population diluted by Arab migrant farmers provided with ample incentives to relocate, and guarded by government troops…The logic of the Anfal, however, cannot be divorced either from the Iran-Iraq War. After 1986, both the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), the two major parties, received support from the Iranian government and sometimes took part in joint military raids against Iraqi government positions”.

The report goes on to describe the link, but it does not make any difference to what Saddam Hussein did to his own people.

Many will be familiar with the attacks in Halabja in March 1988—the incident caused a brief international ripple—but they might be surprised to learn that the first use of poison gas against the Kurds by central Government occurred 11 months earlier. All told, Middle East Watch recorded 40 separate attacks on Kurdish targets, some of which involved multiple sorties over several days, between 1987 and August 1988. Each of those attacks were war crimes, involving the use of a banned weapon. The fact that non-combatants were often victims added to the offence. In the Anfal, at least 50,000 people—possibly 100,000—many of them women and children, were killed out of hand between February and September 1988. Their deaths did not come in the heat of battle: those Kurds were systematically put to death in large numbers on the orders of the central Government in Baghdad just days, sometimes weeks, after being rounded-up in villages marked for destruction, or else while fleeing from army assaults in prohibited areas.

Two experienced researchers from Human Rights Watch spent six months in northern Iraq between April and September 1992, gathering testimonial information about the Anfal. Previously, one 12-year old boy had been the only known survivor of many accounts of Kurds —men, women and children—being trucked southward to the Arab heartland of Iraq in large numbers, and then ‘disappeared’. It was assumed they had all been summarily executed, but there was no proof.

I have had to stand at the side of many mass graves in Iraq, seeing the bodies excavated, and I remember one particular occasion in Kurdistan when what was assumed to be a mass grave of peshmerga was being uncovered. The relatives stood around as the skeletons were slowly brought out. One old man standing near me recognised his son, who had been a peshmerga, from the wedding ring on his hand. Those of us who have seen mass graves elsewhere in Iraq and Kurdistan will know how terrible it is for families to stand around waiting to identify a piece of clothing or jewellery.

In al-Hilla, I watched a team of British forensic scientists help with the excavation of a mass grave, and they found babies still held in their mother’s or father’s arms. When they could not identify a body, they would put the remains in a plastic bag and put it on the top of a grave. Then people would walk around the graves looking inside the bags to see if they recognised anything. That is an appalling way to have to identify the body of a dead relative, but it is still going on in Iraq and Kurdistan, because—as someone once said to me—Iraq is one mass grave.

I would like to see that work continue, because it is important that people have some closure. At least they would know that their loved one was shot there, died there and was buried there, because a lot of people still do not know. I have seen queues down the streets outside the Free Prisoners Association with people trying to find out if there is any information on a missing person. Many people in Kurdistan and Iraq are still grieving because they have not had closure on the death of their relative.

Based on the evidence we now have, Middle East Watch and other organisations urge the international community to recognise that genocide occurred in the Kurdistan during 1988. The legal obligations to act on the basis of that information, to punish its perpetrators and prevent its recurrence, are undeniable.

As I said at the beginning, many people came to CARDRI and told us what had happened to their relatives. In the 1980s, an Iraqi mother told us about her son who was typical of so many thousands of people who have died in Iraq. He was a medical student who went out one day and never returned. Many months later, she was told to go to the mortuary and collect his body. She was led to a room where his body was to be found. She said:

“When I entered and saw what was inside, I could not believe that there were people who could do such things to other human beings. I looked around and saw nine bodies. My son was in a chair. He had blood all over him, his body was eaten away and bleeding. I looked at the others stretched out on the floor all burnt. One of them had his chest slit with a knife. Another’s body carried the marks of a hot domestic iron all over his head to his feet. Everyone was burnt in a different way. Another one had his legs cut off with an axe. His arms were also axed. One of them had his eyes gouged out and his nose and ears cut off.”

There were so many of these chilling accounts that at times over the years I found it difficult to believe. The horrors of Saddam’s Iraq will continue to shock and to stun the world.

In 1989, Saddam Hussein was still considered a valued friend by this country, and the Government of the day still sent trade missions to Baghdad. As my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North will remember, we were invited to a cultural festival in Baghdad. We protested time after time after time in this Chamber about the fact that our trade links were still in place, and we called for sanctions against Iraq.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

My right hon. Friend raised these issues many times in the 1980s. Does she recall a delegation that she and I went on to both the Foreign Office and the Department of Trade and Industry to suggest that we should not take part in the Baghdad arms fair in 1989? We suggested that they should suspend all arms trade with Iraq and were rebuffed by Ministers on that occasion.

[Ann Clwyd]

I remember that very well. It was not the only occasion we were rebuffed, because we, and many others who are long gone from this House, continued the campaign.

We should recognise that although Saddam Hussein was executed on the basis of a previous trial, the rest of the co-defendants were charged with genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Anfal campaign. As I said earlier, Ali Hassan al-Majid was convicted of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in the Anfal campaign, and sentenced to death. However, he was not executed until 2010. A number of others were sentenced to death, but not on charges of genocide. The case has been well made over a long period of time and I am very happy to support the motion. The Kurds need recognition, and we and others are in a position to recognise genocide.