Kurdish Genocide

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Thursday 28th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention. He is quite right. I do not think that the Kurdish people can get closure on the horrific crimes that were committed against them in Iraq, but if Parliament today recognises that what took place was genocide, they will be one step closer. We will also send a clear message to all those countries that might at some point be tempted to attack their own people because of their ethnicity to think twice. I thank him for being here and for supporting the motion.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate and on his speech, which will do a great deal to create greater understanding of the plight of Kurdish people in all countries. Will he reflect for a moment on the fact that, although what happened in 1988 was genocide and was appalling, this country, to its shame, continued to sell arms to Iraq, and indeed took part in the Baghdad arms fair less than a year later, and that the weaponry it continued to supply might well have been used in the oppression of the Kurdish people?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. As I said in my opening remarks, Saddam Hussein’s spin machine and many instruments of power were available to him, including a number of people who lobbied this Parliament and the Government very hard at the time to continue to do business with him. At this point, I must recognise John Major’s contribution to safeguarding the Kurds in ’91 when Saddam used his helicopter gunships to attack the Kurdish people after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. This country decided to put in place a no-fly zone to protect the Kurdish people and the Shi’a people in the south of Iraq, who were coming under similar attack.

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[Meg Munn]

I thank my hon. Friend for bringing that partnership to the attention of the House. It is true that in the UK there are very many doctors of Iraqi and Iraqi-Kurdish origin. While they have continued to serve and provide support for our community, they are also doing such things as my hon. Friend described and doing what they can at a time when the health services in Iraq still need a great deal of investment to develop to serve an ordinary population, let alone one that has suffered the kind of trauma, torture and chemical attacks that have been suffered in Iraq, particularly in Kurdistan.

Alongside the physical impact of repression on the population, we must not underestimate the psychological effects: living with the grief of lost family members, remembering the terror of attacks and, above all, the constant fear. As a woman says in one of the DVDs I mentioned, Iraqi people had no dignity because they had to sell out their consciences to Saddam Hussein to stay alive.

Thirty-five years of dictatorship are not easily forgotten, but there have been positive moments since the 2003 invasion. We remember the TV pictures of the purple-stained fingers shown with pride when the Iraqi people were able to exercise the right to vote—something that we take for granted. They were excited about being able to take part in the first democratic elections. But of course voting is only the first act; building the institutions and democratic habits are much more difficult—all the more so when people have not been allowed to make their own decisions, and acting on their own initiative was a risky thing to do.

My involvement with the Kurdistan regional and Iraqi national parliaments has shown me just how difficult this task is, but it is a task to which many brave Iraqis are committed. To take on these tasks and build a new society is complex and demanding; it will take time, dedication and determination. We should continue to support them in this. An important way to do that is formally to recognise what happened to them. Former French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner argues that

“human rights should mean that people are protected within their own countries”.

When these rights are violated, it is the duty of the international community to honour victims and to ensure that history cannot repeat itself. If democratic Governments cannot be clear about genocide and say that such crimes must be stamped out, then who will?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I thank my hon. Friend for the interesting points she is making. Does she accept that there is systematic discrimination against Kurdish people, culture and language in all the neighbouring countries—it is a product of the break-up of the Ottoman empire at the end of the first world war—and that those countries have to reckon with a multicultural, multilingual and multi-ethnic society if there is to be long-term peace in the region?

[Meg Munn]

Building the kind of society described by my hon. Friend, which recognises people’s rights to their own language and culture and to celebrate their background, is enormously important and very much part of this process. Although building democracy in Iraq and working with Iraqi parliamentarians is difficult, it is encouraging to see Iraqis across all political groups and backgrounds working together. The services and reconstruction committee of the Iraqi Parliament will visit us next week. It is chaired by a Kurdish-Yezidi woman and is comprised of people from different backgrounds who are working together to try to build things for the Iraqi people. I agree with much of what my hon. Friend has said.

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[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.

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[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon (Mr Anderson) and others for their speeches and their contribution to this whole issue. I particularly thank the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi) for his speech. As he pointed out, he is the first Kurdish Member of the British Parliament. He and I have shared platforms at Kurdish events and I have no doubt that we will do so again in the future. He made a very good case for the recognition of what was a genocide of the Kurdish people in Iraq in 1988 and I absolutely support what he said. Next month will be Newroz, the Kurdish new year, which will be celebrated across a wide range of communities both in this country and all over the region.

One hopes that we will be able to draw attention to what happened in Iraq in 1988. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd) pointed out, she and I were both Members of this House at that time and we both frequently raised the issue, including in the British media. Although the lack of knowledge among much of the public is understandable because of how the media failed to report things, we must be honest that it took a long time for most of the media and the political establishment in this country to cotton on to what was happening to the Kurdish people in Iraq. To be honest, a lot of British Government policy was blindsided by their obsession with supporting Iraq against Iran in the dreadful Iran-Iraq war and Britain’s considerable economic interests in Iraq at the time, not least in oil exploration and exploitation and so on. We must have a sense of deep self-criticism about the process. If we do not have that, it does us no favours.

The news finally came out about the use of gas and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Meg Munn) pointed out, how the villages were bombed first to break the glass so that the gas had the maximum effect. That was an evil piece of work in which a large number of wonderful, brilliant people lost their lives. In remembering a genocide, we must work out how it happened, how it came about and how we can prevent it from happening again.

Let me say a few words in general about Kurdistan, the Kurdish people and how we can move on. There is a complicated narrative in world history of equating nations, ethnic communities and languages with nation states, which does not always work. The end of the first world war was a seminal point for the whole region—this is germane to the history of the region. The Kurdish people had been part of and had recognition within the Ottoman empire, and operated with a Kurdish identity and language. They took at face value Woodrow Wilson’s 14 points, as did many people in the region, including Palestinian people and many others, and assumed that they would achieve nationhood as a result. The high point of Kurdish recognition was a sandwich between the treaty of Sèvres and the treaty of Lausanne. Between those treaties there was recognition of a Kurdish state. Modern Turkey was established, the western interests were more interested in a buffer against the Soviet Union and in the mandates that France and Britain achieved further south, and the Kurdish people and their wishes were obliterated. Britain did not have clean hands in this. We took part in the establishment of modern Iraq and the first aerial bombardment of people using chemical weapons was by Britain in northern Iraq in 1922 against Kurdish people. So there is a history of obliteration of the Kurdish people, their language, their culture and identity. What Saddam was doing was the ultimate in oppression of a nation or people, but the treatment of Kurdish people in other countries in the region to this day needs to be examined—in Iran, in Syria and in Turkey.

I have a substantial Kurdish population in my constituency, mainly but not all emanating from Turkey. Indeed, I have visited most parts of Kurdistan over the years. It is sad to report that we still do not have full recognition of Kurdish people in modern Turkey, or mother tongue teaching in all Turkish schools, or indeed in any Turkish schools except those where Kurdish is the first language. It is incumbent on us, if Turkey wants to be a partner in the European Union or anything else, to put a great deal of pressure on it and say, “You have to give greater recognition, linguistic rights, cultural rights and all the other things to the Kurdish people in Turkey.”

It does not particularly help when the mayor of a major city such as Diyarbakir is put on trial for producing information in the Kurdish language, which is the normal language for that part of the country. The break-up of the Ottoman empire led to that situation, and there has been this passion ever since for recognition of the Kurdish. To a huge extent, that has been achieved with the Kurdish autonomous region of Iraq. It is not totally correct to call it independent because in international legal terms it is not an independent recognised state, but in reality it is recognised as a representative place of the Kurdish people.

It is more than welcome that over the past few weeks, under pressure following hunger strikes and the dreadful assassinations in Paris a few weeks ago, the Turkish Government have openly admitted that they have to talk to Öcalan as a recognisable leader of the Kurdish people in Turkey. There is a growing sense of unity between Kurdish people within the nation states and a recognition that they have to come together. Does this mean that there is going to be a country called Kurdistan that encompasses parts of the other countries in the future? I do not know. As far as I am aware, none of the Kurdish national movements calls for an independent Kurdistan outwith national borders any longer. They all call for recognition within national borders. We have to understand, welcome and recognise that.

If you oppress people, deny them their language, deny them their cultural rights, drive them into the ground in the way minorities have been treated prior to genocides all over the world, including native Americans, Jewish people and many others in the past 150 years, you end up with the acceptance of the ultimate oppression, which is what happened in that genocide in 1988. So I support the motion that is before us today.

Many have drawn attention to the achievements, such as they are, in modern Iraq with the Kurdish Autonomous Region, and I recognise those. Indeed, I visited the region after the Gulf war in 1991. With colleagues, including my hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon (Mr Anderson), I opposed the Iraq war in 2003, not because I was in any sense ever an apologist for Saddam Hussein or what he did, but because I did not believe that the motives for the war were the right ones—I believed they were more to do with American military power and military resources than anything else—and I thought an awful lot of people would die and an awful lot of money would be spent as a result of the war. Although we will never agree completely on that, I think we all agree that successive Iraqi Governments have an abominable record on their treatment of the Kurdish people. One hopes that the Kurdish Autonomous Region will be recognised universally and that it will be a place where Kurdish people can live.

When we talk of genocides and holocausts, the holocaust against Jewish people in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s is paramount in everyone’s thoughts. Attending Holocaust memorial day ceremonies is an important thing, as is young people understanding what the holocaust was about, but it is also important to understand that there have been other genocides around the world. There is no time to go through all of them or define them all now, but the European treatment of native Americans during the colonisation of north America from the 16th century onward, but particularly later on, was to all intents and purposes a genocide against those people; other examples are Cambodia and Rwanda—an abominable and appalling series of events. Taking place closer to the region we are discussing today was the Armenian massacre in 1915.

Whenever one of us tables an early-day motion recognising and associating that massacre in principle with what has happened to the Kurdish people, we attract great criticism from people in Turkey who, frankly, ought to know better, but who say that we have no right to draw attention to that. It is important that we understand the history of the abominable treatment of people because of racist attitudes and approaches, which end in the vilest abuses of human rights being condoned.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman mentioned Holocaust memorial day. Having been slightly involved in what I consider to have been a holocaust, in Bosnia, whenever I speak at or attend a Holocaust memorial day ceremony, I do not think only of the Jewish holocaust. I certainly think of Armenia, the Kurds and the Cambodians as well. I totally agree with him: when we speak of a holocaust, we must mean more than one particular nation.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for making that point, on which we agree.

I am proud to represent a significant number of Kurdish people in my constituency. I am proud of the contribution they make, whether they came to this country or were born here. In a month’s time, when we celebrate Newroz in Finsbury Park, that will be, as ever, a joyous celebration—hopefully this time with the greatest possible unity between Kurdish people from every part of the Kurdish area.

If we recognise a genocide, that is a big step. We are recognising something that is defined in law as an attempt to obliterate a people because of their identity, their race or their ethnicity. In doing that, we recognise that something awful happened, and we have to examine ourselves and what we as a country or one of a group of countries did or did not do at the time. But doing that helps the next generation to understand that not forgetting puts one in a position to try to influence the future and protect minorities, wherever they are in the world. Tragically, the genocides we have been discussing today were not the first, and although I hope they were the last, I am not sure that they were. It is recognition and understanding of peoples, their rights, their identity, their culture and their traditions that bring about a safer and more secure world. Achieving that is not necessarily about wars, bombs and invasions; it is much more about understanding and a recognition of people and their rights, and sharing resources not stealing them.