Anfal: The forgotten genocide in Iraqi Kurdistan
What was the Anfal genocide?
In 1988, a campaign of terror was carried out against the Kurdish population and other minorities in northern Iraq by the regime of Saddam Hussein, under the command of his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid.
With the Iran-Iraq war still ongoing, and the international community seemingly unwilling to take any serious actions against the clear violations of international law, Saddam came to realize that he essentially had a free pass to carry out human rights abuses and extreme acts of violence as he saw fit without repercussion.
It was upon this notion that he began his campaign of extermination against essentially anyone in northern Iraq who didn’t identify as being ethnically Arab, this process was occurring on a smaller scale throughout most of the country under a policy that would become known as “Arabization”.
This was Saddam’s goal to establish ethnic and cultural homogeneity in an effort to more easily control the population without the threat of minority groups rising up in resistance to the central government, not far off from what is currently happening in China.
Considering the Kurd's were a large, culturally independent ethnic group occupying some of the most oil rich regions of Iraq, their lack of total loyalty to Baghdad was seen as a potential threat to Saddam which he sought to eradicate before it even had the chance to establish itself.
Getting away with murder
Although Saddam knew it was unlikely that the international community would physically intervene in the event that he violently began to go after the Kurd's, he knew that if it escalated into a mass extermination without justification, the international community would indeed be forced to react.
However, he inevitably found a justification which enabled him to begin a campaign of ethnic cleansing in the name of protecting the sovereignty of the state. What was the justification, and how did it relate to defending Iraqi sovereignty?
With the Iraq-Iran war still raging, and Kurdistan being along the border between the two countries, Saddam considered military action in Kurdistan as just part of the ongoing war between states as opposed to the targeted eradication of a civilian population. And while the United Nations Security Council was focused on ineffective resolutions condemning the Iran-Iraq war, the victims of genocide in the north were just looked at as inevitable casualties of war.
Now it must be recognized that Iranian Kurdistan had a significant number of troops who were fighting against Iraq, and there was a rebel force within Iraqi Kurdistan which fought against Saddam although not necessarily under the control of the Iranian government.
This is why Iraq continued its genocidal campaign against Kurdistan even after the official ceasefire (July 20th, 1988) and the last battle between Iraq and Iran (July 29th, 1988).
This Kurdish rebel force may make it seem that Saddam did indeed have a reason to initiate military action against Kurdistan in 1988, however, the persecution of people living in Kurdistan had begun long before, which is why the rebel force came to fruition in the first place.
And despite this appearing as a domestic conflict which doesn’t legally justify international intervention, in reality this was not really an internal dispute in which intervention would be a violation of Iraq’s sovereignty. This was a clear cut example of ethnic cleansing and genocide of a minority population which should have warranted at least international recognition and preferably some sort of physical protection offered to the civilians being massacred by Saddam's forces.
Did the UN have the legal justification to intervene?
The United Nations Convention on the prevention and punishment of the Crime of Genocide specifically outlines the definition of genocide and the obligation of states to do whatever it takes to stop it. However, there was a reluctance at the time to apply the label of genocide to what was happening in Kurdistan by the international community.
The US house of representatives did propose legislation in 1988 to apply this UN convention to what was happening in Kurdistan, however it didn’t pass because of the overwhelming reluctance to ultimately label Saddam's actions as genocide.
Although intervention in the case of genocide wasn’t necessarily discussed in depth until the 1990’s following the violent breakup of Yugoslavia and the later genocide in Rwanda, there was legal justification in place to physically intervene in Iraq to protect the Kurd's. Especially if we take into account the sheer amount of people who were killed (50,000–100,000+) in such a short period of time, as well as the brutal methods in which they were rounded up and exterminated.
The criteria outlined in the Convention on Genocide of 1951 specifically defines genocide as:
“any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
© 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.”
Considering this definition of genocide is internationally accepted, then what Saddam did meets every criteria required to necessitate the implementation of preventative measures and punish the parties responsible.
The problem was the reluctance of the international community to specify what was going on as genocide, despite it meeting every legal definition of genocide as outlined by the United Nations. And although the convention on genocide has no specific guidelines for how to prevent genocide, it does not place any limit on the application of force, and considering it was implemented shortly after World War Two and specifically geared towards preventing another holocaust, it can be assumed that the use of force wasn’t out of the question to those who drafted and accepted the original document.
Surely the use of concentration camps, and the singling out of ethnic and religious groups for extermination would have been enough for the drafters of the convention to label the incident as genocide.
War crimes
On the other hand, genocide isn’t the only violation which occurred in Kurdistan, as Saddam used chemical weapons on a scale not seen since the first world war, and against civilians on a scale never seen before in human history. He established a reputation for using chemical weapons throughout the Iran-Iraq war, not just against troops, but also against civilians in Iran with the largest attack killing between 3000–5000 people, mostly civilians.
In Kurdistan, chemical weapons were used by Saddam’s cousin, General Ali, to such an extent that he acquired the nickname ‘chemical Ali’, who was subsequently hung for a variety of crimes by the Iraqi government following the 2003 invasion and toppling of the Ba’athist party. And while Ali was using banned chemical weapons against a civilian population in Kurdistan, the international community expressed little interest in stopping him.
Ultimately, the international community failed in its entirety to protect the Kurd's in the face of clear cut genocide for purely political reasons. The reluctance to totally condemn Iraq for its significant amount of human rights violations can be seen as a political game which resulted in the death of thousands. There was no real commitment or desire to end the human rights violations, or the war itself, just empty words which did nothing to protect the people who were suffering.
