A Problem From Hell

by Samantha Power

  Dazed Kurdish men and women clustered around Galbraith and Van Hollen. The refugees pointed with animation to the detailed U.S. government maps of the region and groped for the familiar to tell of their experiences. They compared their sensations to the everyday sights, sounds, and smells that they knew and that they knew the Americans would know. The mustard, cyanide, and nerve gases carried odors so distinct that survivors were desperate to describe them. Abdulressiak Salih described for Galbraith a smell “like garlic and cologne.” Kahar Mikhail Mahmood remembered a whiff of “rotten apples.” And most earnest but least helpful, Asiye Babir recalled “an unpleasant smell, like burnt nylon. Like burnt ants.”93

  Survivors of Iraqi attacks had hidden in caves or plunged into nearby streams to avoid contamination. Although the frenzy of flight made it impossible for them to compare notes, their responses did not vary much by locale. Each remembered a haunting chain of events: Planes and helicopters overhead. Flares released to gauge wind direction. Bombs dropped from the sky. A popping sound. Yellow or brown fumes and mist. Birds falling and tumbling to the earth. Screams. Burning. Vomiting. Bleeding. Slow death of loved ones expedited only occasionally by a hail of follow-up machine-gun fire. Galbraith and Van Hollen documented chemical weapons attacks on forty-nine Kurdish villages, and they spoke only with Kurds who were lucky enough to have made it to Turkey.

  Galbraith knew how skeptically “mere” testimony was received back in Washington. In March he had seen the way public outrage about Halabja had been muted when U.S. officials raised doubts about Iraq’s responsibility. In this instance, although Secretary Shultz had recently condemned Iraq, the administration remained loath to punish its ally. Thus they would likely seize upon the inevitable uncertainty surrounding survivor stories.

  Galbraith hoped he could bring home physical evidence that would elevate the tales to fact. But it was difficult to find refugees who bore physical symptoms of the gassing. Most Kurds who were able to cross into Turkey bore few traces of the gasses. Some had fled not gassing but rumors of imminent gassing; in the five months since Halabja, the Kurdish Hiroshima had become notorious. Others had managed to avoid the deadly fumes but witnessed the result upon emerging from shelters or returning to their villages. “Most of the Kurds who were exposed to nerve gas died on the spot,” Galbraith says, “and many of those who streamed into Turkey wanted to avoid that fate.”

  Around the same time Galbraith was puzzling over the dearth of physical evidence at the border, Assistant Secretary Abramowitz was explaining the evidentiary paradox to the secretary of state. In a September 17 memo, Abramowitz wrote:

  It is prudent to point out that victims of immediate lethal doses of chemical weapons agents obviously would not have escaped Iraq. . . . There is a good chance that on-site inspection in northern Iraq could provide evidence of mustard agent attacks, but there is little chance of finding physical or medical evidence of attacks with non-persistent nerve agent or non-lethal agents. These agents dissipate rapidly, making it difficult to find residual traces in the soil, on a victim’s body, or even on expended munitions. The U.S. Government is convinced that Iraq used chemical agents in the late August offensive against the Kurds, it recognizes it will be difficult in this case to provide physical and medical evidence that will be acceptable in the public arena.94

  Whereas Abramowitz had Iraqi military intercepts to draw upon, the two Senate staffers knew they would have to confirm and reconfirm accounts from as many disparate voices as possible. After they talked to the men, they attempted to speak alone as well with the women and children, who would have been less likely to have been organized in advance by camp leaders. The faces of the Kurdish refugees only rarely bore signs of emotion. “This was just days after the event. People were numb as they told the stories,” Galbraith recalls. “They did not sob or break down.” Virtually all had lost loved ones and had no prospect of returning home.

  By coincidence, after joining the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Galbraith had taken his first official trip abroad in March 1980 to the Thai-Cambodian border. There, he had heard refugees describe atrocities carried out by the Khmer Rouge. He had also heard skeptics claim that the refugees were exaggerating. Some foreigners probably brought an innate snobbery about the capacity of uneducated Kurds to truth-tell. “We tell ourselves these are people who are not thoughtful,” says Galbraith. “There is a certain racism and classism here that tells us that we should not take seriously the words of peasants or that we should look down on them.” But he had seen the doubters proven wrong once outsiders visited Cambodia in the early 1980s. “The real lesson of my experiences in these camps over the years is that refugees don’t lie,” Galbraith reflects. “This is not to say that we should accept one account from one refugee, but in the case of the Cambodians, the Kurds, and later the Bosnians, there were thousands and thousands of witnesses to the crimes. We must learn to believe them.”

  Amnesty International had learned its lesson in Cambodia as well. Whatever its internal skepticism about Kurdish claims, instead of publicly casting doubt on refugee reports, the organization did something no nongovernmental group had ever done: It appealed directly to the UN Security Council to act immediately to stop the slaughter of Kurdish civilians. It made what was then a radical, new argument: When a state committed massacres inside its borders, the killings constituted “a threat to international peace and security” and thus, according to the UN charter, became the responsibility of the Security Council. The organization did not invoke the genocide convention. It argued only what it could prove definitively. Researchers did not want a debate over the aptness of the genocide label to distract policymakers from crimes that were undeniable.

  With the sanctions bill pending back in Washington, Galbraith went scavenging for proof besides the refugees’ consistent oral accounts. One day, driving along the Turkish border, he and Van Hollen met some Turkish beekeepers who invited them to a dinner of homemade bread and home-grown honey. The beekeepers’ Spartan settlement boasted a single electric wire that led directly to a 27-inch television set, where the Americans were treated to an episode of All in the Family in Turkish. The beekeepers also supplied them with something that they were sure would prove Iraqi chemical weapons use once and for all—dead bees that they said had died as a result of Saddam Hussein’s gas attacks nearby. Galbraith brought the bees back home for analysis. Realizing that clearing customs with Ziploc bags of bee corpses might be tricky, he secured special clearance from the secretary of agriculture himself. Galbraith found himself checking the “yes” box by “animal products” on the U.S. customs declaration for the first and last time. On the plane back to the United States, with plastic baggies of dead bees tucked into his briefcase, he happened upon a short blurb in the International Herald Tribune that reported the emergence of a mite that was killing southeastern European bees. Undaunted, Galbraith handed over several of the bags to the CIA. Not trusting the intelligence services, he kept one sample for himself, which he stored in the same refrigerator at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee where his colleagues stored their lunches. Only a year later, long after the CIA results had come back negative, did somebody throw out Galbraith’s moldy bee corpses.

  Assistant Secretary Murphy and others at the State Department who were highly critical of Galbraith’s sanctions effort to begin with greeted the news of his bee corpses as proof that he had gone mad. “I never saw the bees myself,” remembers Murphy, “but when we heard he had come back with these baggies, we all just groaned and thought, ‘There’s Peter, at it again.’”

  On the plane back to the United States, Galbraith drafted a report on his trip, including testimony from some thirty-five refugees. He was haunted by his memory of the old men who stoically described the deaths of their children and grandchildren and the families seated by tiny bundles that now constituted the sum of their lives’ possessions. Surely Congress would punish Hussein, even if it meant resisting the pressure of the State Department an
d White House.

  Analogy and Advocacy

  Galbraith was not without his supporters. As in Cambodia, the most outspoken U.S. officials were those on Capitol Hill not required to adopt the administration line. They, too, invoked Holocaust imagery. When Senator Pell, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, introduced the law imposing sanctions, he declared:

  For the second time in this century a brutal dictatorship is using deadly gas to exterminate a distinct ethnic minority. . . . There can be no doubt but that the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein intends this campaign to be a final solution to the Kurdish problem. While a people are gassed, the world is largely silent. . . . Silence, however, is complicity. A half century ago, the world was also silent as Hitler began a campaign that culminated in the near extermination of Europe’s Jews. We cannot be silent to genocide again.95

  The analogy was made all the more resonant by Hussein’s choice of lethal weapon. The next day Pell noted that although the sanctions bill would hurt some American businesses, Americans should be prepared to make sacrifices for a “moral issue of the greatest magnitude”:

  To do the right thing the American people have in the past been willing to pay the price. After the holocaust that consumed Europe’s Jewish population, the world said “never again.” Sadly, it is happening again in Iraqi Kurdistan. We must do whatever we can to let the Iraqi dictatorship know that the United States will not stand idly by while they massacre the Kurds. This bill sends that message.96

  Having read Galbraith and Van Hollen’s account of their interviews with refugees, Pell grew impatient with those still demanding physical evidence of the gassing. The senator mentioned the dead bees, but when reporters kept pressing, Pell snapped, “They did not bring back a corpse, if that’s your question.”97

  In the House, Representative James Bilbray (D.–Nev.) rejected the argument that because U.S. allies would not sanction Hussein, the United States should not do so either. He wondered aloud if his colleagues would have allowed Hitler to proceed just because others chose not to confront him. “Are we going to show our children and our grandchildren we sat by while an entire race was exterminated?”98

  Naturally, the bill also got some help from Senator Proxmire, who called upon colleagues to act on behalf of this “forgotten people” that had “little or no constituency in the West.” Proxmire noted the double standard of U.S. policy and the importance of responding to genocide wherever it occurs:

  Mr. President, if Nicaragua were using chemical agents against its own population or a neighboring state, the outcry by the public, politicians, and our own Government would drown all other news. The president would be speaking out about such barbarity as would the Secretary of State and certainly the Defense Department would not remain silent. We would be pounding the doors of the United Nations and the world community. We should expect no less when genocide is being conducted against a people far away, of faint familiarity, who do not touch our daily lives, but who are no less victim to the inhumanity of chemical warfare.99

  Editorial writers teamed up with these outraged senators and representatives. The Kurdish people had acquired a few prominent friends in the media over the years. William Safire of the New York Times and Jim Hoagland of the Washington Post performed the role that syndicated columnists Jack Anderson and Les Whitten had played describing Khmer Rouge terror. Safire lambasted the United States government for its passivity. In a September 5, 1988, op-ed, Safire wrote angrily, “A classic example of genocide is under way, and the world does not give a damn.” Singled out for special opprobrium were television journalists, who he knew would be indispensable to sparking and sustaining public support for American reprisals. Although some 60,000 Kurds had gathered in tent cities on the Turkish border and though Saddam Hussein “may yet pass Pol Pot in megamurders,” Safire wrote, the media was absent. Film crews were ignoring a “genocidal campaign against a well-defined ethnic group that has been friendless through modern history and does not yet understand the publicity business.” He argued that “inaccessibility” was “no excuse for ignoring the news.” Indeed, he wrote, “the ability of color cameras to bring home the horror of large-scale atrocities imposes a special responsibility on that medium to stake out murder scenes or get firsthand accounts from refugees.”100 Safire was concrete. The United States should gather additional testimony from the refugees, launch a Security Council investigation, threaten to pull out American ships from the Persian Gulf, and if all else failed, “slip Stinger missiles to [Kurdish rebel leader] Massoud Barzani in the hills to bring down the gassing gunships.”101 The New York Times editorial board agreed: “Not just a whiff but the stench of genocide” drifts from Kurdish territory, it said, “sovereignty cannot legitimize genocide. . . . Enough silence.”102

  Hoagland’s September 8 editorial in the Washington Post was entitled “Make No Mistake—This Is Genocide.” Hoagland noted that the “Iraqi version of genocide . . . does not have the maniacal pace or organization of Hitler’s Germany or Pol Pot’s Cambodia,” but urged that the United States stop shrinking “from branding Iraq’s actions with the horrible word.” The State Department’s low-key “expressions of concern” to the Baghdad government would do little to comfort the Kurds, who he wrote were being dynamited, bulldozed, and gassed to oblivion.103 In a later editorial, Hoagland stuck with the Holocaust theme. Hussein’s attack on the Kurds was “the most ghastly case of the use of poison gas since the Nazi death camps.” The Reagan administration’s endless search for “evidence” provided a familiar fig leaf for inaction. “Reports of massive gassing of Jews by the Nazis were regularly dismissed because they lacked ‘evidence,’” he wrote. “Those who did not want to know, or act, in World War II were always able to find the lack of proof at the right moment.”104 The Washington Post editorial board followed Hoagland’s lead. “In a world in which many things are muted, this one is clear,” the Post said. “If gas is not to be considered beyond the limits, then there are no limits.”105

  Galbraith maintained periodic contact with Safire and Hoagland during this period because he knew that a single editorial would be more valuable in the legislative fight than an entire committee report.

  Galbraith also invoked the Holocaust when possible. He named the report from his trip “Iraq’s Final Solution.” But Gerald Christianson, staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wanted to shy away from the controversy that Galbraith seemed to court and insisted that the committee report title be changed to “Iraq’s Final Offensive.” Christianson thought that the Holocaust analogy would alienate some members of Congress and that those it moved would not need such blatant cues. He argued that the combination of gas, haggard refugees, and destruction would be enough to stir the association.

  Special Interests, National Interest

  Galbraith found bedlam on Capitol Hill on the day of his return from Turkey. Some eighty yellow message slips lay scattered on his desk. The sanctions bill faced steep opposition from the White House and State Department, which he had expected, but also from the House. Most disappointing, many of the senators who had supported the measure a week before had since been clued into its contents and consequences. They were now reconsidering.

  Some of the opposition on the Hill was structural. The House Foreign Affairs Committee leadership tended to be more deferential than the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to the foreign policy prerogatives of the executive branch, which opposed sanctions in this case. Representative Bill Frenzel (R.–Minn.) testified to this concern, asking, “How can our government provide effective leadership, moral and otherwise, if the administration must always be second-guessed by a Congress which wants to make its own foreign policy with splashy headlines?”106 The White House blanched every time Congress went about making foreign policy. Similarly, the House Ways and Means Committee, which has jurisdiction over trade, frowned upon using trade as a political tool and thus generally objected to sanctions bills.

  But the real oppositio
n derived from an excessive faith in diplomacy and, more fundamentally, from a desire to advance U.S. economic interests. First, the Reagan White House could not accept that years of investment in Iraq would not create a kinder, gentler dictator. “They were sure they were going to convert Saddam Hussein and make him ‘my fair lady,’” says David Korn, the former State Department Middle East specialist. Some genuinely believed carrots would achieve more than sticks. They spoke of Iraq’s assurances as if they were reliable. Iraq was coming around. “If [our objective] is to prevent the further use of chemical weapons in Kurdistan in the immediate future, this may no longer be an issue,” one analyst wrote on September 9, 1988. “We have been told in Baghdad that the campaign against the Kurds is coming to an end, and as a practical matter, there will be little or no need for continued Iraqi use of chemical weapons once the Kurdish insurgence has been suppressed.”107 Private overtures were paying dividends. Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz said on September 17 that Iraq “respects” its obligations under international law. In the weeks ahead, the administration repeatedly referred back to Aziz’s single, incomplete statement as evidence that Washington’s gentle persuasion was working. Aziz’s credibility had apparently not suffered for having repeatedly denied that Iraq had used poison gas in the first place.108 U.S. officials even filled in the blanks left open in Iraq’s renunciation. “We take this statement to mean that Iraq forswears the use of chemical weapons in internal as well as international conflicts,” State Department spokesman Charles Redman said.109 The United States would neither punish past use of chemical weapons nor threaten punishment for future use. The farthest it went was to warn that additional attacks would cause the department to “reconsider” its opposition to sanctions.110 Representative Tom Lantos (D.-Calif.), a Holocaust survivor, declared: “I am intrigued by the logic which views a criminal act, sweeps it aside and focuses on the intent of the criminal to engage in further criminal acts.”111