Kurds Finally Get Anfal Reckoning

Rebaz Ghalib Mohammed was just seven years old when Iraqi forces arrested him and nine of his family, deporting them from their small village in Germian province to a detention camp for Kurds in southern Iraq.



There, he ate only bread and water for nearly nine months, was beaten and whipped and watched helplessly as his friends died of hunger and disease.



The Baathist military operation against civilian Kurds in 1988, known as the Anfal campaign, left Mohammed, now 25, without a father and with psychological scars that will probably never heal. His father and more than 50 other family members were taken away by Iraqi forces, never to be heard of again.



"I don't know what a father's love is," said Mohammed. “ I was deprived of that."



After the overthrow of Saddam in 2003, Mohammed and many other victims of the campaign hoped that the former leader and his henchmen would be brought to justice - and these hopes were realised earlier this year when the Iraqi Special Tribunal announced that Saddam was to face charges of genocide and crimes against human for his role in the Anfal campaigns.



Six of Saddam’s aides will also be prosecuted for their involvement, including his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, also known as Chemical Ali because he is widely regarded as having masterminded poison-gas attacks during the Baathist operation.



The trial began on August 20 in a Baghdad courtroom with the prosecution`s opening address.



The Anfal campaign lasted from February to September 1988 and took the lives of at least 50.000, possibly as many as 100.000 Kurds. At least 2000 villages were destroyed and hundreds of thousands of villagers were forcibly displaced, according to Human Rights Watch. The codename, Anfal, taken from the Koran, refers to the battle against infidels and was chosen by the former regime in an attempt to give the operation against the Kurds a semblance of legitimacy.



"I can only cry to express my happiness," said Mohammed. “Seeing that Saddam will be tried for the Anfal case, I feel like we exist."



Today, Mohammad lives in Rizgary, a poor town with houses built of mud, wood and stone about 200 kilometres northeast of Baghdad. About 27,000 people reside in this specially-built settlement where the former regime forcibly accommodated Kurdish Anfal survivors whose villages had been razed during the campaign.



Almost everyone in Rizgary has a story to tell about family members or relatives who were targeted by Saddam's regime. The atrocities were so widespread that the operation is used as a verb in Iraqi Kurdistan to describe the mass arrests and disappearances of the victims.



Many Anfal victims who disappeared are believed to have been killed and dumped in mass graves in the deserts of southwest Iraq, where they were imprisoned.



The campaign included the systematic destruction of settlements, mass deportation and killings.



Mohammed is a primary teacher now, and has pledged to educate his pupils about the Anfal tragedy, "They should learn about the atrocity that this nation suffered and how we were suppressed."



But while Rizgary residents are happy that Saddam will be tried, they are angry at the Kurdish authorities for neglecting the area and for giving government posts to former Kurdish collaborators who worked with the Baath regime during the Anfal campaign.



Rizgary and other towns in Germian area, an area badly hit by the Anfal operation, still lack basic services such as a proper water supply, paved roads and decent schools. The town's electricity is too weak to even run refrigerators. Jobs are almost non-existent: most people rely solely on small stipends from the Kurdish government.



Because many of their villages were destroyed, Anfal victims are stuck in this former internment camp.



Eight members of Nazdar Salih Qadir's family, including her nine-month-old granddaughter, disappeared during the Anfal campaign. She smokes at least 20 cigarettes a day to numb her pain. Her only income is a monthly 100 US dollar government subsidy of which she has to spend half on rent.



Qadir, 71, said she wishes to see Saddam face to face, "If I get him I will bite him, " she said. "Although I don't have teeth anymore, I will manage to take my revenge."



Halabja is the site of a notorious poison-gas attack in 1988 that’s considered one of the Baath regime's worst atrocities against the Kurds - but the case is expected to be tried separately from Anfal.



One 40-year-old Halabja resident, who did not want to be named because of security concerns, lost 22 members of his family during the attack, and said he is prepared to testify against the dictator.



"When Saddam was captured, I was the first one to dance in Halabja," he said. "I hadn’t laughed that much since 1988."



For the past eighteen years, he has dressed in black in mourning for Anfal victims, but when it comes to testify against Saddam, he says he will wear traditional Kurdish clothes.



He also said that he’d long dreamt of being called as a witness to a trial of Saddam, and would relish the chance to look him in the eye, “I might die of happiness after testifying."



Qadir said it is painful for her not to know what happened to her family members.



"I wish they were killed by poison-gas attacks," she said, "because at least we would have known where they are buried."



Mariwan Hama-Saeed is IWPR’s Kurdish editor.