Kurdish Genocide

Robert Halfon Excerpts

Thursday 28th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

It is an honour to sit next to my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi), whom I congratulate on securing this debate and on everything he has done on the all-party group on the Kurdistan region in Iraq, on which I have been very proud to work with him.

During my last visit to Kurdistan, I remember being in a restaurant one evening where, by chance, I sat next to one of the senior members of the Iraqi war graves commission. She told me something incredibly telling, which sums up why I am here this afternoon: “There is another Iraq buried under Iraq.” We had a huge amount of food in front of us, as is the Kurdish way, but after she said that I did not feel like eating again that evening. It summed up the mass murder and terrible crimes of Saddam Hussein. Later, along with my hon. Friend the Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock (Stephen Metcalfe) and others, I went to see some of the graves. The experience left a marked impression on me and it summed up why we have to recognise Saddam Hussein’s genocide of the Kurds as exactly that.

We know that the actions of the Iraqi regime from the 1960s to 2003 were a sustained campaign of genocide against the Kurdish people. We must not make the mistake of thinking that everything started with the Anfal campaign in 1988. Had it not been for “muscular enlightenment” and the military interventions of John Major and, later, Tony Blair, the final solution for the extermination of the Kurds would have been successful. Recognition of the genocide and of the Kurds is important, not just because it is morally right, but because it is a warning to tyrants around the world and helps the survivors to fight for justice in the international criminal courts.

Raphael Lemkin, the Polish lawyer who coined the word “genocide,” defined it in 1944 as

“a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.”

That is a perfect description of the campaign of persecution and murder that Saddam Hussein and his predecessors led against the Kurdish people. The Kurds were repeatedly attacked by the Iraqi military from 1960 to 1970. In March 1970, Iraq publicly announced a peace plan to the world for Kurdish autonomy, but privately it started an aggressive Arabisation programme in the oil-rich regions of Kurdistan, forcibly removing people and seizing their property. In 1974, Iraq began a new bombardment against the Kurds. In March 1975, Iraq and Iran signed the Algiers accord, cutting humanitarian supplies to Kurdistan. Over the next three years, 200,000 Kurds were forcibly deported to other parts of Iraq. During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, the regime implemented anti-Kurdish policies—pogroms, in essence—and a civil war broke out.

Iraq was condemned, but it was never seriously punished. The result was that the genocide accelerated: first, the Kurds were demonised, then they were marginalised, then persecuted, and finally they were massacred—all the stages of genocide. Between 1986 and 1989, the Anfal campaign led to the destruction of more than 2,000 villages and towns, and the murder of more than 180,000 Kurdish civilians. There was cold-blooded use of ground offences, internment without trial, disappearances, aerial bombing, torture and rape as a weapon of war, destruction of whole villages and towns, mass deportation, firing squads and chemical attacks, including, as so movingly described by my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon, the inhuman attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988 that killed 5,000 people almost instantly. We should not forget that just before Saddam Hussein dropped the mustard gas, bombs were dropped to blow up the house windows so that none of the Kurds could escape inside the buildings and retreat from the mustard gas.

After the collapse of the Kurdish uprising in March 1991, 1.5 million Kurds became refugees. It was only then, after decades of escalating violence and genocide, that in April 1991 the United Nations Security Council passed resolution 688, demanding peace in Kurdistan and access for humanitarian agencies. Disgracefully, this was the first international resolution to mention the Kurdish people by name.

In 2004, Human Rights Watch said that

“in the last twenty-five years of Ba‘th Party rule the Iraqi government murdered or ‘disappeared’ some quarter of a million Iraqis, if not more.”

As with every other genocide, the methods of killing became ever more sophisticated—think shooting in the woods by the Nazis and then the concentration camps. My hon. Friend the Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock will remember going to a prison called the “red house”, which was, in essence, a mini-concentration camp that had what were called “party rooms”, where women were raped and their babies and foetuses literally thrown into ovens outside. I had never seen anything like that in my life and I never want to see it again. In fact, on my second visit, I stayed outside because I did not want to see what I had seen before.

Saddam and the Ba’athists were determined to vacuum the Kurds from Iraq, partly because of Arab nationalism and partly through a desire to gain full control of the Kurdish lands and oil. If one defines genocide as scientifically planned mass murder, the Kurds suffered genocide. I know that there is always a debate about definitions, but the Anfal campaign was the murder of 182,000 people and the displacement of 1.5 million people just because they were Kurdish.

How is that any different from the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica, which has been ruled to be a genocide by the International Criminal Court? How is it different from Rwanda, where 800,000 Tutsis died in 1994, which the UN rightly recognises as a genocide? How is it different from Darfur, for which the ICC issued an arrest warrant in 2010 for the President of Sudan on genocide charges, after 300,000 people were murdered and millions displaced? The UN recognises formally that Yugoslavia and Rwanda have had genocides. Former US Secretary of State Colin Powell said that the massacres in Darfur were a genocide. Since that time, however, no other permanent member of the UN Security Council has followed suit.

I accept that the Minister will feel hemmed in by the definitions. However, to the man on the street, how are the scientific murders of Darfur, Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia any different from what happened in Kurdistan? In 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide. It legally defined the crime of genocide as:

“any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

That definition is plain and clear. It describes exactly what has happened to the Kurds in Iraq over the past 50 years. It is worth remembering, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon noted, that in December 2005, a court in The Hague ruled that the Kurdish people had faced genocide in the 1980s.

What stopped the genocide was NATO intervention or what I have termed “muscular enlightenment”. In April 1991, John Major and his western allies established proper safe havens inside Iraqi borders and a no-fly zone. It is good to see Lord Archer in this place given that he was so instrumental in making that happen. Kurdish guerrillas recaptured Irbil and founded the Kurdistan Regional Government, which was ultimately recognised by the new Iraqi constitution in 2005. By the beginning of 2006, the two Kurdish administrations of Irbil and Sulaymaniyah were unified.

Kurdistan is now one of the most moderate and democratic regions of the middle east. It disproves the argument that the middle east is not ready for democracy. People always say that the middle east is just not ready yet and that it will take hundreds of years to build democracy there, but despite what they have suffered, the people of Kurdistan have built a democracy. It is not perfect, but it is a good democracy with the rule of law, property rights, equality towards women, religious tolerance and elections—all the requirements that we understand to be the values of freedom. It is no accident that Christians across the rest of Iraq go to Kurdistan when they are being persecuted. They know that they will be treated fairly and equally there, as is right.

We must finally recognise Saddam Hussein’s actions for what they were. Recognition is morally right. It acts as a warning to other dictators around the world and will help Kurds to fight for justice in the International Criminal Court. Unlike the case of Nazi Germany, where many of those who were responsible for the holocaust were tried, little has been done to bring justice to those who caused the Kurdish genocide. It is a frightening thought, but it is said that some of the organisers of the Anfal campaign and the pilots who dropped the chemical weapons remain at large and may even be in Europe. Others are in positions of responsibility in Iraq’s military and Government. To be fair, Iraq has now officially recognised the genocide. It is the duty of the rest of the world to do the same to ensure that all the perpetrators are brought to the ICC and to help with education and remembrance so that what happened is never forgotten by future generations.

We can argue about dodgy dossiers and disagree about UN resolutions. I am sure that we will be debating whether the Iraq war was justified until the next millennium. However, one matter that is indisputable is that the removal of Saddam Hussein not only saved the Kurdish nation from being destroyed by genocide, but brought about an independent, progressive and free nation in the shape of Kurdistan.

I am a Jewish MP and have very few Kurdish constituents. Because I am Jewish, because I am steeped in learning about the holocaust and because some of my family were in Bergen-Belsen, I have come to this place believing that it is my moral duty to help other nations that have suffered from genocide. One of the worst slogans that we ever hear is, “Never again.” One never imagines that what happened in the second world war could have happened all over again only 25 years ago, but it did. The mustard gas reminds me of that all too clearly. If we want to make “Never again” more than just a slogan, we have to really mean it.

We have to ensure that the Kurdish genocide is recognised as one of the world’s greatest crimes. That is why, as I said, I am very proud to be here today. This is an historic moment for our Parliament, which has such close relations with Kurdistan, and I hope very much that we will support the motion to recognise the genocide and the evil crimes of Saddam Hussein.