Warning
Background: No Friends but the Mountains
The Kurds are a stateless people scattered over Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Iraq. Some 25 million Kurds cover an estimated 200,000 square miles. The Kurds are divided by two forms of Islam, five borders, and three Kurdish languages and alphabets. The major powers promised them a state of their own in 1922, but when Turkey refused to ratify the Treaty of Sèvres (the same moribund pact that would have required prosecution of Turks for their atrocities against the Armenians), the idea was dropped. Iraqi Kurds staged frequent rebellions throughout the century in the hopes of winning the right to govern themselves. With a restless Shiite community comprising more than half of Iraq’s population, Saddam Hussein was particularly determined to neutralize the Kurds’ demands for autonomy.
The Kurdish fighters adopted the name peshmerga, or “those who face death.” They have tended to face death alone. Western nations that have allied with them have betrayed them whenever a more strategically profitable prospect has emerged. The Kurds thus like to say that they “have no friends but the mountains.”
U.S. policymakers have long found the Iraqi Kurds an infuriating bunch. The Kurds have been innocent of desiring any harm to the Iraqi people, but like Albanians in Kosovo throughout the 1990s, they were guilty of demanding autonomy for themselves. Haywood Rankin, a Middle East specialist at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, made a point of visiting Kurdish territory several times each year. “You have to understand,” Rankin says. “The Kurds are a terribly irksome, difficult people. They can’t get along with one another, never mind with anybody else. They are truly impossible, an absolute nightmare to deal with.”
Through decades of suffering and war, Iraqi Kurds have not just had to worry about repressive rule and wayward allies; they have had to keep one eye on each other. They have squabbled and indeed even warred with one another as often as they have attempted to wriggle free of their Baghdad masters. Washington Post correspondent Jonathan Randal dubbed the rivalry between Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) leader Massoud Barzani and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) leader Jalal Talabani as the Middle Eastern version of the Hatfields and the McCoys. As Randal wrote and as many U.S. foreign policymakers would agree, “Kurdistan exists as much despite as because of the Kurds.”2
Iraq’s most violent campaign against the rural Kurds, which began in 1987 and accelerated with the Anfal in 1988, was new in scale and precision, but it was the most forceful manifestation of a long-standing effort by Iraq to repress the Kurds. In 1970 Iraq offered the Kurds significant self-rule in a Kurdistan Autonomous Region that covered only half of the territory Kurds considered theirs and that excluded Kurdish-populated oil-rich provinces. After the Kurds rejected the offer, Saddam Hussein imposed the plan unilaterally in 1974. The Kurds trusted they would receive support from Iran, Israel, and the United States (which was uneasy about Iraq’s recent friendship treaty with the Soviet Union), and they revolted under their legendary leader Mullah Mustafa Barzani (the grandfather of Massoud). In 1975, however, with U.S. backing, Iran and Iraq concluded the Algiers agreement, temporarily settling a historic border dispute: Iraq agreed to recognize the Iranian position on the border, and the shah of Iran and the United States withdrew their support for the Kurds. Betrayed, Barzani’s revolt promptly collapsed. Henry Kissinger, U.S. secretary of state at the time, said of the American reversal of policy and the Kurds’ reversal of fortune, “Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”3 For his part, Saddam Hussein publicly warned, “Those who have sold themselves to the foreigner will not escape punishment.”4 He exacted swift revenge.
Hussein promptly ordered the 4,000 square miles of Kurdish territory in northern Iraq Arabized. He diluted mixed-race districts by importing large Arab communities and required that Kurds leave any areas he deemed strategically valuable. Beginning in 1975 and continuing intermittently through the late 1970s, the Iraqis established a 6–12-mile-wide “prohibited zone” along their border with Iran. Iraqi forces destroyed every village that fell inside the zone and relocated Kurdish inhabitants to the mujamma’at, large army-controlled collective settlements along the main highways in the interior. Tens of thousands of Kurds were deported to southern Iraq. In light of how much more severe Hussein would later treat the Kurds, this phase of repression seems relatively mild: The Iraqi government offered compensation, and local Kurdish political and religious leaders usually smoothed the relocation, arriving ahead of the Iraqi army and its bulldozers and guns. In addition, many of the Kurdish men who were deported to the Iraqi deserts actually returned alive several years later. Still, the evacuations took their toll. According to the Ba’ath Party newspaper Al-Thawra (“The Revolution”), 28,000 families (as many as 200,000 people) were deported from the border area in just two months in the summer of 1978. Kurdish sources say nearly half a million Kurds were resettled in the late 1970s.5
When Iraq went to war with Iran in 1980, the Kurds’ prospects further plummeted. The war began after Iraq turned its back on the 1975 Algiers agreement that had briefly settled its border dispute with Iran. In reviving its claim to the entire Shatt al-Arab waterway, Iraq wanted to demonstrate to the new regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini that it was the regional strongman. It also wished to signal its displeasure with Iran for continuing to support Kurdish rebels in Iraq. Iran’s Khomeini in turn began urging Iraqi Shiites to rise up against Hussein. Iraq countered by pledging to support Iranian rebel movements. Border skirmishes commenced. In April 1979 Iraq executed the leading Shiite clergyman, Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Sadr. And on September 4, 1980, Iran began shelling Iraqi border towns. To this day, when Iraqis celebrate the war, they mark its beginning as September 4. But it was not until September 22 that Iraq launched a strike into the oil-rich Iranian province of Khuzistan. Hussein expected that the Iranian defenses would crumble instantly. For neither the first nor the last time, the Iraqi dictator miscalculated. Caught off-guard by the invasion and still reeling from the revolution, Iran did founder at the start, in part because the ayatollah had destroyed the shah’s professional military. But Iran bounced back and counterattacked in what would become one of the most bloody, futile wars of the twentieth century—a war that gave Saddam pretext, motivation, and cover to target Iraq’s Kurdish minority.
U.S. Prism: The Enemy of My Enemy
The U.S. refusal to bar the genocidal Khmer Rouge from the United Nations during the 1980s was an explicit outgrowth of U.S. hostility toward Vietnam. So, too, in the Middle East, the U.S. response to Iraq’s atrocities against the Kurds stemmed from its aversion toward revolutionary Iran. The United States was aghast at the prospect of Iraqi oil reserves falling into the Ayatollah Khomeini’s hands; it feared that radical Islam would destabilize the pro-American governments in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates. Thus, with each Iranian battlefield victory, the United States inched closer to Iraq—a warming that had tremendous bearing on the American response to Saddam Hussein’s subsequent atrocities against the Kurds.
During the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and the Khmer Rouge terror, the United States had been neutral or, eventually, in World War II, at war with the genocidal regime. Here, the United States ended up aligned with one. Unwilling to see an Iranian victory, the Reagan administration began in December 1982 to intervene to offset Iranian gains. In what Secretary of State George Shultz called “a limited form of balance-of-power policy,” the United States provided Iraq with an initial $210 million in agricultural credits to buy U.S. grain, wheat, and rice under the CCC. This figure soon climbed to $500 million per year. The credits were essential because Iraq’s poor credit rating and high rate of default made banks reluctant to loan it money.6 The United States also gave Iraq access to export-import credits for the purchase of goods manufactured in the United States.7 And after Baghdad expelled the Abu Nidal Black June terrorist group, the United States removed Iraq from its list of countries sponsoring terrorism. In November 1984 the United States and Iraq restored
diplomatic relations, which had been severed during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. U.S. officials had detailed knowledge of Hussein’s reliance on torture and executions, but the United States could not allow Iran to defeat him.8
Because both Iran and Iraq were stockpiling weapons and ideological resentments that could hurt the United States, U.S. leaders did not protest much as the two sides destroyed one another. A clear victory by Iraq would not be terribly good for U.S. interests either. Iran might collapse, allowing the brutal Hussein to dominate the Gulf. Americans lapsed into thinking about the conflict (to the extent that they thought of it at all) as one between Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollah Khomeini. They thought little of the poorly trained teenagers being hurled into battle.
As Iraq gathered favor with the United States, the Kurds continued to lose favor with Iraq. In 1982 Baghdad began clearing more Kurdish territories, forcing many of those who had been relocated into housing complexes to move again. The prohibited zones were expanded inward from the border and the resettlement policies intensified. Because Iraq wanted to move all Kurds it did not control, any Kurds who did not live along the main roads or in the major towns were targets. This time, when Hussein’s regime deported the Kurds, it paid no compensation to those who left, and it cut off all services and banned trade for those who stayed. Because Iraq was concentrating its military resources on Iran, however, its enforcement of the zones remained somewhat erratic.
The Kurds had always been opportunists, and as the Iraq-Iran conflict wore on, both major Kurdish political parties opted to team with Iran. In 1983 one of the two main Kurdish factions (loyal to Barzani) helped the Iranian fighters capture an Iraqi border town, Haj Omran. Iraqi forces swiftly responded, rounding up some 8,000 Kurdish men from the Barzani clan. Among them were 315 children, aged between eight and seventeen. “I tried to hold on to my youngest son, who was small and very sick,” remembered one mother. “I pleaded with them, ‘You took the other three, please let me have this one.’ They just told me, ‘If you say anything else, we’ll shoot you,’ and then hit me in the chest with a rifle butt. They took the boy. He was in the fifth grade.” The men (and boys) were loaded onto buses, driven south, and never seen again. The women, who became known as the “Barzani widows,” still carry framed photographs of their missing husbands, sons, and brothers and remain, like their spiritual sisters in Buenos Aires and Bosnia, desperate to learn the fates of their men. Saddam Hussein was not shy about admitting what his forces had done. In a speech reminiscent of Turkish interior minister Talaat’s public boastings in 1915, Hussein proclaimed, “They betrayed the country and they betrayed the covenant, and we meted out a stern punishment to them and they went to hell.”9 Although the Kurds attempted to press their case in Western circles, neither the United States nor its allies protested the killings.
The American tendency to write off the region was so pronounced that the United States did not even complain when Hussein acquired between 2,000 and 4,000 tons of deadly chemical agents and began experimenting with the gasses against the Iranians.10 Policymakers responded as if the ayatollah had removed the Iranian people (and especially Iranian soldiers) from the universe of moral and legal obligation. Iraq used chemical weapons approximately 195 times between 1983 and 1988, killing or wounding, according to Iran, some 50,000 people, many of them civilians.11 One Iraqi commander was quoted widely saying, “for every insect there is an insecticide.”12 These weapons instilled such psychological terror that even well-equipped troops tended to break and run after small losses.13
The United States had much to lose from the use and proliferation of chemical weapons. But still the State Department and even the Congress largely let the Iraqi attacks slide. Reports of Iraq’s chemical use against Iran first reached Secretary of State Shultz in late 1983. It was not until March 5, 1984, that the State Department spokesman finally issued a condemnation. And even then he tempered the sting of the démarche by rendering it two-sided. “While condemning Iraq’s resort to chemical weapons,” the spokesman said, “the United States also calls on the government of Iran to accept the good offices offered by a number of countries and international organizations to put an end to the bloodshed.”14 And even this even-handed statement went too far for many in the U.S. intelligence community. On March 7, 1984, an intelligence analyst complained: “We have demolished a budding relationship [with Iraq] by taking a tough position in opposition to chemical weapons.”15 Internal efforts to promote a new international treaty banning chemical weapons production, use, and transfer met with stiff resistance from the Washington national security community and from allies like West Germany, which were profiting handsomely from the sale of chemical agents. The most that the international community mustered was a 1987 UN Security Council Resolution that generally “deplored” chemical weapons use.16
U.S. officials justified their soft response to Iraqi chemical weapons use on several grounds. They portrayed it as a weapon of last resort deployed only after more traditional Iraqi defenses were flattened. Although Iraq carried out first-use attacks, the operations were frequently presented as defensive attacks designed mainly to deflect or disrupt Iranian offensives, not to gain ground.17 This, of course, was a fine line to walk, as proponents of the preemptive, defensive rationale might have applied the same logic to rationalize nuclear first use.
A typical U.S. response to reports of chemical attacks was to demand further investigation. On several occasions the UN dispatched fact-finding teams, which verified that the Iraqis had used mustard and tabun gas. But policymakers greeted their reports with an insistence that both sides were guilty.18 Once Hussein saw he would not be sanctioned for using these weapons against Iran, the Iraqi dictator knew he was on to something.
A Friend Beyond the Mountains
Peter Galbraith monitored developments in the Gulf from Capitol Hill, where he was a staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Galbraith, the son of Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, was an unusual Washington operator. On the one hand, he earned widespread respect for his conviction and his willingness to explore foreign hot spots in person. On the other hand, he was notorious for arriving late to meetings, for dressing sloppily, and for acquiring tunnel vision on behalf of his causes. I met him for the first time in 1993, five years after the Anfal campaign, at a plush Washington breakfast in honor of Turkish president Turgut Ozal. The guest list was refined, including Pamela Harriman, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell. When Powell arrived at the breakfast, the waters seemed to part before him. He had height, width, grooming, and striking confidence, a marked contrast to the frazzled thirty-something man who rushed into the room after the guests had moved from their breakfast fruit plates to their second cups of coffee. When Galbraith noted that the only empty seat was at the head table, he maneuvered clumsily toward the front of the banquet hall. It was early morning, but his tie was already as loose as one that has freed itself at the end of a draining day. One side of his shirt was untucked in the front. His straight, thinning brown hair stood on end. General Powell eyed Galbraith skeptically as the young Senate staffer plopped down beside him.
In the question-answer session that followed Ozal’s presentation, most of the distinguished guests inquired politely about the future of U.S.-Turkish ties or heaped profuse praise upon the Turkish leader for his country’s cooperation during the 1991 Gulf War. Galbraith quickly assumed the role of spoiler, posing the only taxing question of the morning. “The first goal of Kurds in northern Iraq is independence,” Galbraith said. “Their second preference is some kind of affiliation with Turkey. The last thing they want is to remain part of Iraq. What is your view?”
The audience gasped at what they feared was a characteristically undiplomatic question. In fact, Galbraith knew Ozal to have had a Kurdish grandmother and to be relatively sympathetic. The Turkish president gave an animated, lengthy response.
The Kurdish cause was not the first that had made Galbraith al
ienate official Washington. His first significant contribution to American law and humanitarian relief had been the McGovern amendment, which he drafted in the summer of 1979 to allow U.S. humanitarian assistance to Cambodia after the country had fallen to the Vietnamese. The law had passed, but Galbraith complained so bitterly about the committee’s changes that he was one of the first to be laid off when cutbacks were needed in December 1979. “I was my usual self back then, neither impressing people nor making friends,” he remembers. “They had the rap on me right away—I was concerned with a flaky issue, and I was not really a foreign policy professional. I cared too much about the humanitarian aspect, I didn’t dress particularly well, and I didn’t comb my hair properly.” McGovern intervened personally to have Galbraith rehired, this time to work directly for Senator Pell, who was thought to be similarly concerned with flaky issues. It was not long before Galbraith discovered the Kurds.
Galbraith traveled to Iraq for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for the first time in 1984. Although he would later become the Kurds’ leading advocate in Washington, initially he, like everyone else, allowed his diagnosis of Hussein’s behavior to be affected by what he knew to be the overall U.S. objectives in the region. Galbraith agreed with the Reagan administration’s assessment that America’s highest priority should be making sure that Iran did not win the war, which it seemed on the verge of doing. The young Senate staffer arrived in Iraq knowing nothing about the Kurds and little about the Middle East. He spotted tanned men with baggy pants in the hills, but they barely left an impression. Geopolitics and the interests of the United States dominated his perspective almost entirely.
In 1987 Galbraith made a second committee trip to Iraq. This time he saw scenes that made him more prone to believe subsequent allegations of Iraqi genocide against Kurds. What is surprising, in retrospect, is that Iraq, which had stepped up its brutal counter-insurgency campaign in March 1987, permitted access to American visitors at all. Because Iraq had never been sanctioned for prior atrocities against the Kurds, the regime must have been confident it would pay no price for exposure. In addition, Hussein had become alarmed by recent press reports about American backroom arms deals with Iran.19 The Iraqi ambassador in Washington, Nizar Hamdoon, hoped that by rolling out the red carpet to Galbraith, he would tip the balance back toward Iraq.
A Problem From Hell Page 24
