A Problem From Hell

by Samantha Power

  Senator Nancy Kassebaum hailed from Kansas, which exported 1 million tons of wheat annually to Iraq. But moved by Amnesty International’s report about human rights abuses against children in Iraq and remorseful at the Senate’s tardiness in confronting Hussein, she memorably declared that, farm state or not, Kansas should support the sanctions bill. “I cannot believe that any farmer in this nation would want to send his products . . . to a country that has used chemical weapons and to a country that has tortured and injured their children,” she said.152 The Senate passed the D’Amato amendment 88–12 on July 27, 1990. It prohibited the United States from extending any sort of financial credit or assistance, including CCC guarantees, and from selling arms to Iraq, unless the president were to certify that Iraq was in “substantial compliance” with the provisions of a number of international human rights conventions, including the genocide convention. The Senate tabled an amendment put forth by Texas Republican Phil Gramm that would have allowed the Bush administration to waive its terms if it found that the sanctions hurt U.S. businesses and farmers more than they hurt Iraq.

  A week after the sanctions bill finally cleared the Senate, Iraq invaded Kuwait, and Saddam Hussein named Ali al-Majid (aka “Chemical Ali”) military governor of the occupied province.

  Within hours of Iraq’s invasion, Representative Berman’s long-stalled proposal to deny export-import credits to Iraq passed the House, 416–0. At this point virtually nobody contested the measure. The cross-border invasion trampled the sovereignty of a U.S. ally and threatened U.S. oil supplies. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Fascell scrambled to attach an executive order just penned by President Bush, which called for a total embargo on Iraq and a freeze on its assets in the United States.

  U.S. government-guaranteed loans had totaled $5 billion since 1983. The credits had freed up currency for Hussein to fortify and modernize his more cherished military assets, including his stockpile of deadly chemicals. American grain would keep the Iraqi army fed during its occupation of Kuwait.

  The Kurdish Uprising

  The U.S. bombing of Baghdad began on January 17, 1991. U.S. ground troops routed Iraqi Republican Guards soon thereafter. Galbraith received a phone call from Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, pledging to relay intelligence on Iraqi troop movements. Galbraith arranged for these reports to be radioed out of northern Iraq to Damascus and then faxed in Kurdish to a dentist in Detroit, who translated them and faxed them to Washington. But Galbraith quickly learned there were no takers in the Bush administration. The United States may have been at war with Iraq, but the war had not made the Bush administration any more inclined to deal with the Kurds. State Department officials informed Galbraith that the intelligence the Kurds were gathering would be of little use. When Talabani visited Washington in person, the low-level State Department officials who agreed to see him insisted on meeting him not in the building but at a nearby coffee shop.

  On February 15, 1991, however, President Bush did speak for the first time of changing the Iraqi regime. He gave a speech that Kurds to this day can quote verbatim. “There’s another way for the bloodshed to stop,” Bush said, “and that is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.”153 The Kurds had wanted out of Iraq for so long that they heard the Bush speech as encouragement to launch a full-fledged revolt. On February 27, 1991, Bush declared a cease-fire only 100 hours after the ground war began. Alarmed at the prospect of “another Vietnam,” Bush had deferred to the wisdom of General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in calling off the war before sealing Hussein’s doom. Iraq was left with some 300,000 combat-ready troops and 2,000 tanks. Trusting in allied support and underestimating Baghdad’s resources, however, Iraqi Shiites began a rebellion in southern Iraq on March 2, and the Kurds rose up in the north on March 6.

  Informed by Talabani of Kurdish plans for a revolt, Galbraith got the Senate Foreign Relation Committee’s permission to tour the Middle East on a fact-finding mission. His main aim was to enter Kurdish territory to assess what Washington should be doing to aid the Kurds. But he kept that part of his itinerary to himself, knowing his supervisors would never approve such a dangerous scheme. More intimate than most Americans with the Iraqi dictator’s brutality, Galbraith knew that the current was unpredictable and that Hussein’s fury could be pronounced. The day before he left Damascus, Syria, he scribbled a note to his thirteen-year-old son, Andrew:

  Dear Andrew,

  I hope you never receive this note, but if you do there are some things I want you to know.

  First, I traveled to Kurdistan because I believe in helping the victimized. The Kurds are in rebellion against an evil regime and their people need help, including above all food and medicine. By going there I thought I could help convince the Congress to provide the help.

  Second, I am most sorry I won’t see you grow up. Your Mom and I divorced when you were a baby and so you and I never really were a family. But I love you very much and know you will be a fine, loving man. Live a good, kind, caring life.

  Love,

  Dad

  Galbraith traveled the first part of the journey with a Newsweek journalist. The pair came under sporadic mortar fire as they crossed the Tigris River in a small boat. Galbraith filmed his ungraceful entrance and the vast destruction of Kurdish lands on a Hi-8 video camera. He found a celebration among Kurds. It was March 30, 1991, and the Kurds had been in rebellion for nearly three weeks. They had taken control of nearly all of Iraqi Kurdistan. In Zakho the streets were crowded and loudspeakers proclaimed, “We liberated Kurdistan!” Kurds used earth-moving equipment to drag abandoned Iraqi trucks into repair sheds. They brandished documents and videotapes they had captured from the Iraqi secret police archives. At an evening celebration with Talabani, Galbraith offered a toast, declaring, “President Woodrow Wilson promised the peoples of the world self-determination, and the Treaty of Sèvres gave that right to the Kurds. I am pleased to be the first American government official to stand on territory governed by the Kurds themselves.” Yet at 6:15 a.m., Galbraith was awoken and told simply, “It’s time to go.” Hussein was crushing the rebellion.

  The Kurds had banked on U.S. military support and overestimated the damage already inflicted on the Iraqi army by the allied attack. A brutal Iraqi counteroffensive involving tanks, armored vehicles, heavy artillery, and aircraft was under way, and virtually the entire Kurdish populace had taken flight.154

  When the United States had negotiated its cease-fire with Iraq earlier in the month, it had not insisted upon banning Iraqi military helicopter flights. U.S. commander Norman Schwarzkopf later said he had been “suckered” into permitting their limited use for liaison purposes only. It was these helicopters that now became Iraq’s ultimate terror weapon against the Kurds. Because the helicopters had delivered poison gas against the Kurds in 1987 and 1988, many Kurds fled ahead of Iraqi counterattacks.

  Although theirs was an oil-rich region, after eight months of economic sanctions and two months of war, the Kurds had little gasoline to fuel their flight. Most refugees walked in long, winding columns. Some 1.3 million Kurds streamed into the Iraqi mountains bordering Iran and Turkey. The Iraqis had systematically dynamited and bulldozed Kurdish villages along the way, so refugees could find no shelter en route. Galbraith met one man on the road who was carrying a bag of grain that had earlier been coated with rat poison. This was all his village had to eat, and he was attempting to wash the poison off the grain.

  After a stay of only thirty-six hours in “liberated” Kurdistan, Galbraith made his way back to the Syrian border, which was under heavy artillery fire. As shells landed all around him, he dashed across the mudflats to a sandbagged position at the edge of the river. From there a small boat took him to Syria. The Iraqis seized the border crossing the next day.

  Although Galbraith was teased for the unsteadiness of his camera work, his Hi-8 images, the first of the colla
pse of the Kurdish uprising, led U.S. news programs on April 1, 1991. It took Kurdish refugees several more days to reach the Turkish border, but Galbraith telephoned Morton Abramowitz, the former INR assistant secretary who had since become U.S. ambassador in Turkey, to warn him that close to a million people would soon be at his doorstep. On April 2 Galbraith prepared a detailed memo for Senators George Mitchell and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, reporting that the Kurds were in danger of being massacred. Perhaps the most significant outcome of Galbraith’s unsuccessful 1988 effort to get sanctions imposed against Iraq was that by 1991, when the Kurds again faced slaughter, people in Washington had at least heard of the unlucky minority. Having raised the genocide issue in 1988, Senator Pell also had greater authority warning that if the allies did not act, the Kurds could be wiped out.

  In entering Iraq without Senate approval, Galbraith had broken one of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s cardinal rules. After seeing what he saw in Kurdistan, he began breaking others. Staff members were not allowed to make media appearances, but Galbraith appeared on Nightline on April 1, April 4, and again on April 18. He also wrote a cover story for the New Republic on the failed uprising. Senator Moynihan spoke on Galbraith’s behalf on the Senate floor on April 17. He urged that Congress should reward “service above and beyond the call of duty.” Noting that members of the Senate staff usually went unrecognized, he said, “This is no dereliction on our part. It is simply that in two and more centuries we have not seen the likes of young Galbraith: The indifference to his own welfare and safety; the all-consuming concern for the welfare and safety of an oppressed people caught up in a ghastly travail.”155

  Some 400,000 Kurdish refugees had reached Turkey by mid-April, and it was feared an additional half a million were en route.156 Galbraith’s new-found cachet made him less rather than more tactful. He found Washington speaking as if humanitarian aid agencies would solve the problem. Responding to questions about the security of Kurds in Turkey, Secretary of State Baker said, “It is hoped that the presence of humanitarian relief workers will act as a deterrent to future harassment and persecution of these people.”157 At one relief meeting attended by forty to fifty crisis experts, Galbraith exploded. “Are you telling me that a bunch of unarmed Swedes at feeding stations are going to give the Kurds enough confidence to come down from the mountains to face a man our president has likened to Hitler? I suppose your solution to Auschwitz would have been to ensure that some Swedish girls in shorts would have been made available to give the Jews food!” His outburst was met with silence. This was not how business was done. Galbraith was told he had become too emotionally attached to the issue.

  But Galbraith’s proposed alternative—allied military intervention—was gaining support. Prime Minister John Major of Britain began urging the Bush administration to act. William Safire attacked the president for his “loss of nerve.”158 He wrote, “People like the too trusting Kurds now know they can get killed by relying on Mr. Bush.”159 Still, Bush held firm, responding by authorizing $10 million for relief. One top White House aide said, “A hundred Safire columns will not change the public’s mind. There is no political downside to our policy.”160

  But Turkey, a U.S. ally, vociferously disagreed. It needed U.S. help to get rid of the sprawling Kurdish presence in southern Turkey. Secretary of State Baker took a helicopter ride to the Turkish border on April 7 and in a seventeen-minute stopover saw some 50,000 Kurds hugging the surrounding mountains. It was a public relations disaster that he feared would negate all the gains the Gulf War had brought the Bush White House. It was also a humanitarian catastrophe that moved him. Some 1,000 Kurds were estimated to be dying per day. “We can’t let this go on,” Baker said. “We’ve got to do something—and we’ve got to do it now.”161

  On April 16, 1991, the United States joined with its allies and launched Operation Provide Comfort, carving out a “safe haven” for Kurds north of the thirty-sixth parallel in northern Iraq. Allied ground forces would set up relief camps in Iraq, and U.S., British, and French aircraft would patrol from the skies.162

  Provide Comfort was perhaps the most promising indicator of what the post–Cold War world might bring in the way of genocide prevention. Under the command of Lieutenant General John M. Shalikashvilli, some 12,000 U.S. soldiers helped patrol the region as part of a 21,000-troop allied ground effort. This marked an unprecedented intervention in the internal affairs of a state for humanitarian reasons. Thanks to the allied effort, the Iraqi Kurds were able to return home and, with the protection of NATO jets overhead, govern themselves.

  Justice?

  Today women Kurdish survivors crunched into resettlement complexes cling to rumors that their male Anfalakan remain alive in secret jails in the desert. Some inquiries have been met with cold precision, others with evasion. On September 25, 1990, the following directive was issued by Iraqi authorities in Erbil: “The phrase ‘We do not have any information about their fate’ will replace the phrase ‘They were arrested during the victorious Anfal operation and remain in detention.’” 163

  The entrance to the ravaged town of Halabja is marked by a statue of a father dying as he tries to shield his two sons from the gas attack. More than 70,000 Kurds have returned to the town where VX, sarin, and mustard gas were combined in deadly cocktails. Survivors remain blinded from corneal scarring from mustard gas burns.164 Miscarriages and birth defects such as cleft palates and harelips recur in the maternity ward of the Martyrs Hospital. Christine Gosden, a British geneticist, has attempted to investigate and raise money to treat the ailments. “Not only do those who survived have to cope with memories of their relatives suddenly dying in their arms,” Gosden noted, “they have to try to come to terms with their own painful diseases and those of their surviving friends and relatives.”165 Gosden says infant deaths are more than four times greater than in neighboring Sulaymaniyah. Leukemia and lymphomas are ravaging the community at rates Kurdish doctors claim are four times higher than in unexposed areas. No chemotherapy or radiotherapy is available. More profound, Gosden believes, the congenital malformations in children born after the Halabja attacks suggest that the chemical agents have produced permanent genetic mutations in those exposed. Preliminary medical findings indicate that the occurrence of these mutations is comparable with those who were about one to two miles from the epicenter of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs. The Anfal technically ended in 1988, but Gosden calls it “the persistent genocide.” Succeeding generations will pay a price.

  In their failed revolt against Baghdad in 1991, the Kurds stormed secret police buildings and recovered huge piles of government records. The files had been stuffed randomly into plastic flour sacks, tea boxes, and binders. Others were tied loosely with staples, strings, laces, or pins. Handwritten ledgers were covered with flowered wallpaper, and some of the Arab titles had been penned in psychedelic, calligraphic script filled in with colored felt-tip pens by bored Iraqi bureaucrats.166 The Kurds who gathered the evidence were not thinking about prosecuting Iraqi officials or even documenting a genocide for posterity. Rather, they hoped to learn the identity of informers. Although many of the documents were destroyed or lost in the rebellion, Iraqis were so meticulous about their bureaucratized killing and cleansing machine that an abundance of evidence was recovered.

  In May 1992 Galbraith helped negotiate the transfer of fourteen tons of captured documents to the National Archives in Washington for safekeeping. Human Rights Watch (HRW), the parent organization to all the regional “watch” groups, which itself secured the shipment of an additional four tons from the Kurdish Democratic Party, was granted exclusive access to the documents and launched an unprecedented investigation. The more than 4 million pages covered not only the Anfal but Iraqi repression from the 1960s forward. There were explicit shoot-to-kill orders, such as the June 14, 1987, order from the Ba’ath Party People’s Command in Zakho. “Dear Comrades,” reads the order, “The entry of any kind of human cargo, nutritional supplies, or mech
anical instruments into the security-prohibited villages under the second stage [of the operation] is strictly prohibited. . . . It is the duty of the members of the military forces to kill any human being or animal found in these areas.”167 There were proud tallies of individuals and villages eliminated, minutes of meetings, arrest warrants, notes on phone surveillance, and decrees ordering mass execution.

  Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

  Dr. Clyde Snow, forensic anthropologist, exhumes the blindfolded skull of a Kurdish teenager from a mass grave in Erbil, northern Iraq, December 1991.

  Human Rights Watch dispatched its researchers to Iraqi Kurdistan in 1992 and 1993, where they interviewed some 350 survivors and witnesses to the slaughter. These investigators teamed up with scientists from Physicians for Human Rights who exhumed mass graves and gathered forensic material, such as traces of chemical weapons found in soil samples and bomb shrapnel, as well as the skeletons of the victims themselves. Excavators found rope still tying the hands of the decomposed men, women, and children. One foray yielded a fully preserved woman’s braid.168

  The eighteen-month investigation by Human Rights Watch (aided by Physicians for Human Rights) was the most ambitious ever carried out by a nongovernmental organization. It was the kind of study that a U.S. government determined to stop atrocities might well have attempted while the crimes were under way. The human rights group legitimated the earlier estimate of Shorsh Resool, the amateur investigator into the operation. The group found that between 50,000 and 100,000 Kurds (many of whom were women and children and nearly all of whom were noncombatants) were executed or disappeared between February and September 1988 alone. Hundreds of thousands of Kurds were forcibly displaced. The numbers of those eliminated or “lost” cannot be confirmed because most of the men who were taken away were executed by firing squad and buried in unexhumed, shallow mass graves in southwest Iraq, near the border with Saudi Arabia. The Kurdish leadership claims 182,000 were eliminated in the Anfal campaign. Mahmoud ‘Uthman, the leader of the Socialist Party of Kurdistan, tells of a 1991 meeting at which the Anfal’s commander, al-Majid, grew enraged over this number. “What is this exaggerated figure of 182,000?” he snapped. “It couldn’t have been more than 100,000.”169