Galbraith took up Hamdoon’s offer to visit Iraq in early September 1987, joining the U.S. embassy’s Haywood Rankin on an eight-day fact-finding trip. Travel for diplomats and journalists anywhere in Iraq was severely circumscribed. Those diplomats who wished to leave Baghdad had to apply forty-eight hours in advance to the Iraqi Foreign Ministry. They were sure to be followed. Western journalists were granted visas to the country only rarely, and if they wrote critically, they knew they would be barred from return. But the biggest obstacle to intelligence gathering was fear—fear for one’s own life and fear of endangering Iraqis. Rankin traveled beyond Baghdad more than any other Western diplomat, but he never lost sight of the risks. “Getting killed in an ambush or running over a land mine weren’t high on anybody’s list of things to do,” Rankin recalls. “I guess it took people either as curious or as dumb as Peter and me to go wandering into the north.” Even once they were out of Baghdad, Rankin notes, “we had to be careful not to let our desire for information interfere with the desire of ordinary people to stay alive.” A 1984 amendment to the Iraqi penal code prescribed the death penalty for anyone who even “communicated” with a foreign state if it resulted in “damage to the military, political or economic position of Iraq.”20 Like their counterparts in the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia, Iraqis deemed critical of the regime would rarely escape with their lives. Indeed, the paranoia of the regime was such that a British civil engineer was arrested, beaten, and tortured for accidentally causing a picture of Saddam Hussein to fall to the ground when he leaned against a wall at a construction site.21 The Kurds were so frightened by Iraqi officialdom that there was only so much a pair of American sleuths were going to learn as they roamed the countryside. But they could gather stark visual impressions.
Since Galbraith’s previous trip, more deadly signs of the war with Iran had cropped up—children disfigured by shell fire and coffins draped in the Iraqi colors strapped to the tops of the country’s trademark orange-and-white taxis. Black flags also flapped in the wind, bearing the names of dead soldiers and the dates and locations of their passing. As if to compensate, even more monuments to Saddam had sprouted—Saddam as general, as businessman, as Bedouin Arab in headdress, as comforter of children, as man in prayer, as cigar-smoking politician, and even decked out in traditional pantaloons, as Kurd.22
On September 6, 1987, several days into their trip, Galbraith and Rankin left Baghdad and headed north in a Chevy S10 Blazer. Because he had visited three years before, Galbraith could conduct an informal, before-and-after comparison. In 1984 he had been able to drive undiverted up to a town called Shaqlawa. But the very same checkpoints and military fortifications along the road that had then been largely deserted were now bustling with forbidding military guards. It seemed the prohibited zones were suddenly being strictly enforced.
Driving through a dust storm, the Americans reached a checkpoint outside Jalawla, the last sizable Arab town on the road north. Jalawla lies fifteen miles from the Iranian border. They were told to turn back. When they presented their travel permit signed by the Iraqi deputy prime minister, the soldier at the checkpoint was flabbergasted. Finally, after two hours making dozens of confused, frantic phone calls and against his better judgment, the Iraqi guard allowed the pair to proceed under heavily armed escort. An army truck led the way with one soldier holding a rocket-propelled grenade, six other helmeted men in the back, two more in the front. Behind them a handful of soldiers and an antiaircraft gun completed the caravan.
While Rankin drove, Galbraith tracked their route on the map. Once they proceeded a few miles up the road, he began to fear that they had taken a wrong turn. Nothing on the map appeared before them. He scanned the horizon for the next village but spotted no sign of life. This became the rule. Kurdish village upon Kurdish village that appeared as specks on the map and that had once stood on the road from Baghdad to Jalawla to Darbandikhan to Sulaymaniyah to Kirkuk had vanished. “On the right-hand side,” Galbraith recalls, “you’d see nothing but rubble. On the left side you’d see empty buildings waiting for destruction. It was chilling.” No more than a handful of villages were left standing along the main road, and these straggler villages looked doomed, as bulldozers hovered nearby, expectantly. Occasionally a few stray electric poles offered a hint of past life. In the 1990s these lifeless, rubbled scenes would become familiar to journalists, diplomats, and aid workers in Bosnia, but in 1987 neither Galbraith nor Rankin had heard of “ethnic cleansing” or seen anything comparable. In certain areas the Iraqis were knocking down the villages and all traces that the villages—many of which had been inhabited since the beginning of civilization—had ever existed. Even cemeteries and orchards were mowed to bits.
The only places along the road that remained intact were the Iraqi Arab villages, which stood untouched, and the newly erected “victory cities,” or ghettos, where the Iraqi soldiers continued to “concentrate” the forcibly displaced Kurds. In a journal he prepared after the trip, Rankin described Kalar, one such city, “as a spectacle of new construction—an ugly beehive, all in cement laid out on a grid pattern, grotesque and squalid.”23 Driving along the road that day, the two Americans saw twenty-three destroyed towns and villages in all. Some were just rubble heaps, with no walls left standing. As they drove further north, the natural bounty that greeted them was considerable: oleander, olive, and pomegranate trees. But the human presence was negligible—they came across not a single herdsman.
The brutality of the Iran-Iraq war and the sight of the Kurdish villages (or absence thereof) made a deep impression on Galbraith. But the different brands of violence and despair—among Iraqis, Kurds, and Iranians—blended together in his mind. As memorable to him as the demolished Kurdish villages was what he had seen in the southern port of Basra, once Iraq’s most glorious city. In the town’s dilapidated Republican Hospital, where some of the sheets were bloodstained and where cats and flies wandered in and out of the wards, corpses were casually wheeled in and out of the compound. Rankin’s journal recorded their encounters. “Most patients seemed passive and fatalistic,” the American wrote. “Some spoke matter-of-factly about the simultaneous death of a wife or child or grandparent, as if it was a daily and expected occurrence.”24 The Iranian attack on Basra had begun in January 1987. By the time the battle for the town had ground to an unceremonious halt that June, analysts estimate that 40,000 Iranians and 25,000 Iraqis had been killed, making it the bloodiest battle in the bloodiest war since World War II.
Peter Galbraith
Peter Galbraith of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee standing with Kurds in front of a destroyed village in northern Iraq.
In its senselessness and savagery, the conflict between Iran and Iraq bore striking parallels with World War I. The Iraqis employed chemical weapons against the Iranians; the fronts remained static for years; and in vicious trench warfare, wave after wave of Iranian soldier went over the top, obliterating a generation of young men and boys. The ayatollah encouraged martyrdom, which gave him spiritual cover to mask the ridiculous losses and the hollow cause.25 He famously deployed Iranian children as mines-weepers, tying them together to walk across fields and across no-man’s-land. He instructed them to wear around their necks plastic keys that would enable them to unlock the gates of paradise. Often the children were sent with no training in full frontal charge across open terrain against enemy machine-gun posts. In this context, the “mere” demolition of Kurdish villages, the displacement of Kurdish civilians, and the implications of prohibiting life in rural Kurdistan did not really stand out.
Although Galbraith had absorbed the human costs of the bloody Iran-Iraq war and the onslaught against Kurdish villages, he devoted his portion of a 1987 report on the conflict—sixteen pages out of forty-nine—mainly to U.S. interests in Iraq. “War in the Persian Gulf: The U.S. Takes Sides” argued that despite Baghdad’s brutality, the United States still could not afford for Iraq to lose the war.
Galbraith recommended that the Unit
ed States pursue economic sanctions against Iran and work through the United Nations to bring the war to a close. He did not urge that Saddam Hussein be punished for his harsh repression of the Kurds. Indeed, he hardly mentioned the Kurds. When he did, they came across not as a people that mattered in their own right but as a group whose rebellion underscored Iraqi vulnerability to Iran. The Kurdish problem might “prove the Achilles heel of Iraq’s defense,” Galbraith worried. “The Kurdish insurgency has gained enormous strength, and now poses a major military threat to Iraqi control of the Kurdish region.”26 The report hinted at the nature of what Rankin and Galbraith had seen, describing the destroyed villages, but it blared none of the alarms that might have alerted readers to the severity of the repression and the potential for further brutality. Galbraith considered the Kurds “rebels,” “insurgents,” and “Iranian allies.” That far more Kurds were unarmed than armed did not alter his perception. And the report made note of the oft-repeated fact that Iraq had, until recently, treated its Kurdish minority better than any of its neighbors. The pressing concern was that Iraq’s Kurdish nuisance was then drawing some 150,000 Iraqi troops away from the Iranian front. Iraq was facing a war of attrition from both south (Iran) and north (Iran plus Iranian-backed Kurds). This was deemed bad for the United States.
Official Knowledge, Official Silence
Although Galbraith’s insight into the destruction of the Kurds was derived anecdotally from his two trips to the country, U.S. officials at the State Department were also systematically monitoring Iraqi troop movements and had a far deeper understanding of Saddam Hussein’s brutal resettlement campaign. “Our reporting from Iraq was very good,” remembers Larry Pope, then State Department office director for Iran and Iraq. “There was a lag of a couple weeks at most. We knew that something dreadful was going on. We knew al-Majid was running the show. We had the satellite overhead that showed the villages razed.” The State Department’s 1987 unclassified human rights report described “widespread destruction and bulldozing of Kurdish villages, mass forced movement of Kurds, and exile of Kurdish families into non-Kurdish parts of Iraq.”27 Yet whatever the broad knowledge of the facts, the U.S. embassy in Baghdad gave the impression that the demolition and population transfers were both justified and likely soon to subside. The embassy argued that al-Majid would soon cease the offensive against the Kurds. Instead of wasting “at least a battalion of soldiers” per village, one April 1987 embassy cable noted, he “will resettle and raze some of them and then slow down or stop such activity in the summer, as part of a ‘carrot and stick’ approach.”28 The U.S. embassy presumed, as usual, that Iraq was run by rational actors who would be so intent on winning war that they would not expend precious resources on inflicting seemingly gratuitous suffering on civilians. Already U.S. officials reporting on the attacks had acquired a matter-of-fact tone, describing the harsh treatment of Kurds as routine. Al-Majid was coordinating “ruthless repression, which also includes the use of chemical agents,” the embassy noted casually.29
The U.S. media did not press the matter. The few correspondents who cared about the region had great difficulty getting inside Iraq. The Washington Post’s Randal had visited in 1985, but he could not persuade his editors that another trip would be worth the expense, the risk, and the hassle. Once, when he tried to get the Post to publish a picture of a gassed Kurd, his editor asked, “Who will care?” Randal maintained contacts with émigré Kurds in London and Paris and urged them to buy themselves a few secondhand camcorders so they could record evidence of the atrocities for the networks. “I told them that even a monkey could take footage of some seriously dead people,” Randal recalls, “but they were proud that they had a telex connection to Cyprus. They were way behind the curve technologically. The people calling the shots had been in the mountains so long that they did not know how the world worked.”
Hussein, by contrast, did know how the world worked. Having seen how effective chemical weapons could be against his external foe, Hussein turned them next against his chief internal enemy. In May 1987 Iraq became the first country ever to attack its own citizens with chemical weapons. Iraqi Kurds who fled to Iran claimed that Hussein’s planes had dropped mustard gas on some two dozen Kurdish villages along the Iranian-Iraqi border.30 The headquarters of the two main Kurdish political parties had also been bombed with poison gas. Similar reports trickled out of the region for the rest of 1987 and into 1988.
Iraq’s destruction of villages by more conventional means was also reported in the media. In September 1987 the New York Times noted that Iraq had dynamited some 500 villages in the previous six months. Still, back in the United States the accounts continued to be processed as if they were an ordinary feature of war. Times reporter Alan Cowell described the onslaught not as an offensive that killed innocent people but as a “ruthless drive to deny sanctuary to Kurdish guerrillas.”31 The absence of protest again seemed to embolden the Iraqis. Al-Majid, whom Kurds later dubbed “Anfal Ali” and who continued to oversee the purge of the rural Kurds, quickly gathered that the United States prized its relationship with Iraq and did not intend to use its leverage to curb his campaign. Transcripts later retrieved of al-Majid’s conversations reveal that he operated with scant fear of consequence. In a May 26, 1988, meeting, al-Majid described a planned gas attack against the Kurds. “I will kill them all with chemical weapons!” he exclaimed. “Who is going to say anything? The international community? Fuck them!” 32 Al-Majid carried on with impunity, ravaging Iraq’s Kurds.
States are constantly signaling one another. One can often discern moments before genocide in which outside powers, by reacting timidly or invitingly to initial abuses, reveal a lack of concern about the repressive tactics of a friend or foe. The American responses to Iraqi chemical weapons’ use against Iran, early reports of use against the Kurds, and ongoing Iraqi bulldozing of Kurdish villages was extremely tame.33 Nothing in U.S. behavior signaled Hussein that he should think twice about now attempting to wipe out rural Kurds using whatever means he chose.
Recognition
Kurdish Hiroshima
Galbraith did not recommend that the United States change its policy after he toured the wasteland of northern Iraq in 1987, but the images of destruction stayed with him. He had a nagging suspicion that Saddam Hussein’s bulldozing campaign was more sinister and widespread than he initially thought. If Hussein only wanted to keep irksome armed Kurds at bay, Galbraith wondered, why was he targeting places inhabited mainly by civilians? Galbraith’s fears deepened in March 1988 when Iraqi forces gassed the Kurdish town of Halabja.
The Iraqi demolition of villages around Halabja in 1987 had caused the town’s population to swell from 40,000 to nearly 80,000. Halabja constituted a special source of irritation and rage for Northern Bureau chief al-Majid. Kurdish rebel peshmerga had made it a stronghold of sorts, frequently teaming up with Iranian Revolutionary Guards who seeped across the nearby border. Halabja also lay just seven miles east of a strategically vital source of water for Baghdad.
In mid-March 1988, a joint Kurdish-Iranian operation routed Iraqi soldiers in Halabja. Overnight Iranian soldiers replaced the Iraqis in the border town. Kurdish civilians, the pawns in the struggle between the neighborhood’s two big powers, were gripped by a wave of chilling apprehension. On March 16, Iraq counterattacked with deadly gases. “It was different from the other bombs,” one witness remembered. “There was a huge sound, a huge flame and it had very destructive ability. If you touched one part of your body that had been burned, your hand burned also. It caused things to catch fire.”34 The planes flew low enough for the petrified Kurds to take note of the markings, which were those of the Iraqi air force. Many families tumbled into primitive air-raid shelters they had built outside their homes. When the gasses seeped through the cracks, they poured out into the streets in a panic. There they found friends and family members frozen in time like a modern version of Pompeii: slumped a few yards behind a baby carriage, caught permanently hold
ing the hand of a loved one or shielding a child from the poisoned air, or calmly collapsed behind a car steering wheel. Not everybody who was exposed died instantly. Some of those who had inhaled the chemicals continued to stumble around town, blinded by the gas, giggling uncontrollably, or, because their nerves were malfunctioning, buckling at the knees. “People were running through the streets, coughing desperately,” one survivor recalled. “I too kept my eyes and mouth covered with a wet cloth and ran. . . . A little further on we saw an old woman who already lay dead, past help. There was no sign of blood or any injury on her. Her face was waxen and white foam bubbled from the side of her mouth.”35 Those who escaped serious exposure fled toward the Iranian border. When reports of the attack reached the outside world, the Iraqi government attributed the assault to Iran.
Halabja quickly became known as the Kurdish Hiroshima. In three days of attacks, victims were exposed to mustard gas, which burns, mutates DNA, and causes malformations and cancer; and the nerve gases sarin and tabun, which can kill, paralyze, or cause immediate and lasting neuropsychiatric damage. Doctors suspect that the dreaded VX gas and the biological agent aflatoxin were also employed. Some 5,000 Kurds were killed immediately. Thousands more were injured. Iraq usually justified its attacks against the Kurds on the grounds that it aimed to destroy the saboteurs aligned with the Iranians. But in Halabja most of the Kurdish peshmerga who had worked with Iran had obtained gas masks. It was unarmed Kurdish civilians who were left helpless.
A Problem From Hell Page 25
