The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  The Kurds saw the implications of this. They could not stop the Americans leaving, but they could purge what was left of Baath party rule from the towns that were to be included in the “safe haven,” and this they did with their usual ruthlessness. Many of Saddam’s acolytes were murdered or driven from their homes, their police stations taken over and their torture chambers opened for the first time in more than two decades.

  Deep in the underground dungeons of Dahuk secret police headquarters, the young Kurdish women who were raped and murdered by the Iraqi mukhabarat had left their last record on the filthy walls. One drew a portrait of herself with large eyes and long hair flowing over her shoulders, a pretty girl wearing a high-collared blouse. Another drew a rose, above it the words: “I am going to die. Please tell the others.” Yet another, whose name appears to have been Nadira, wrote on her cell wall just four words: “This is my fate.”

  The Kurdish peshmerga and several hundred of the local Dahuk population had stormed the police station, almost too late to prevent the Iraqi plain-clothes men burning files containing the names of the prisoners—and their tormentors—in a concrete sentry box at the main gate. They were still smouldering when we arrived there, watched uneasily by twelve Iraqi policemen who were now, in effect, hostages of the Kurds. The last young woman to be imprisoned here had died in these foetid cells just two months earlier. The peshmerga said they found three of the women’s bodies, naked and with their hands bound, in the cells. One of the girls was twelve years old. Another, older woman had been gang-raped and died later. Anyone who wanted to know why a million and a half Kurds fled their homes in March 1991 had only to visit the Dahuk police station.152

  On the face of it you might have expected the Americans to have taken a look at this evidence of Saddam Hussein’s barbarism. The Dahuk secret police offices, housed in a large two-storey villa, stood only a few kilometres from the new U.S. military headquarters. Here at last was proof that the servants of the dictator so often compared by President Bush to Hitler really could behave like Nazis. Were not some of the Allies once demanding war crimes trials?

  Not any more, it seemed. At least two of the most senior police officers in Dahuk—men who must have known of the terrible secrets beneath that villa— were now meeting daily with senior U.S. army officers to discuss the return of Kurdish refugees to the town. Colonel Moakdad and Colonel Jamal were now instrumental in ensuring there were no clashes between armed Iraqis and allied troops in Dahuk. Each morning, driven by chauffeurs in Oldsmobile limousines, they would turn up at the new hotel which the Americans took for their headquarters, occasionally saluting the U.S. troops.

  How much longer could this hypocrisy continue? On 25 May, Colonel Moakdad even arrived with a peshmerga representative, turning to an American colonel who greeted him and twining his two forefingers together. We are friends now, the gesture said. The Iraqi police and the Kurds were supposed to be in alliance while their leaders negotiated in Baghdad. Once those talks were complete, the Iraqis would guarantee democracy to the Kurds, or so we were supposed to believe. And then, of course, the Western allies could go home. Any price, it seemed, was worth paying for a withdrawal, even indifference to the secret police headquarters.

  There was a neat perfumed garden in front of the building, rose bushes neatly planted beside the path. The portico of the headquarters had been tastefully decorated with small brass Arabic lamp shades. It was as pretty as the garden outside the Savak torture chamber in Tehran in 1979. But a few metres to the right were some stairs. With the local peshmerga leader, Tassin Kemeck, we pulled open a steel door nine inches thick and descended. Water dripped down the staircase. At the bottom were a series of narrow cells and several large rooms. They were strewn with excrement and dirty blankets. “This is where they brought the women,” Kemeck said. “They were not wives of peshmerga, just pretty women. They tortured them, raped them and killed them. Some were very young. The Iraqi army used to come to the women in this cell”—here he pushed open a heavy iron door— “and rape them one after the other.” On the floor was a stained mattress and some women’s clothes. The walls were covered in graffiti. “Sometimes they wrote their names in blood,” Kemeck said.

  But America’s desire to call Saddam to account had receded as its desperation to withdraw from Iraq increased. No one was more clear-cut in his determination to get out than the commander of the 15,000-strong coalition army in Kurdistan that now controlled 13,000 square kilometres of northern Iraq, Major General Jay Garner. Twelve years later, Garner would be the first of the American proconsuls in occupied Iraq—a man who so alarmingly mismanaged the task that he was replaced within months—but in 1991, no one could have been keener to negotiate with the Iraqi authorities. “We’ve told the Kurds from the first day that we’re here for two things,” he said. “To stop the dying in the mountains and to create an environment in which they could resettle. We never signed up to be a north Iraq security force . . . We were sent here to do one thing and we’ve done that pretty well. I don’t think the Kurds will go back to the mountains unless they’re under attack. And if they are, that’s a problem for the United Nations and world leaders, and they’ll have a tough decision to take. That’s what leaders get paid for—tough decisions.”

  Garner, a short, stocky man who talked in clipped, carefully punctuated sentences, was deputy commander of the U.S. Fifth Corps in Europe. But in Kurdistan, he was playing politician. “I don’t think you should keep forces here. The Kurds are Iraqi citizens. I don’t think you should keep forces to protect citizens from their own government. I agree this is a vicious leader [in Baghdad], a vicious regime. But if you want military forces to stay here, you’ve got to change the mission and got to change the rules . . . They [the Kurds] were dying at four hundred a day in the Turkish mountains. They weren’t Turkish citizens so something had to happen there. Right now, their own leaders are close to signing an agreement with Saddam . . . they live here. The fact that we came here gave them a better bargaining position.”

  Garner was a little like an unhappy policeman who has to invent his own laws while walking the beat. If UN Security Council Resolution 688 allowed humanitarian intervention in a foreign country, it afforded few guidelines to the U.S., British, French, Spanish and Dutch staff officers who met the general each evening for their daily briefing. “My worst fear,” Garner confided, “is getting our people in the middle [of a battle] and then getting hurt. The Iraqis and the peshmerga have been fighting ever since we got here . . . We’re not an occupation army. No one’s under martial law. There’s no legality . . . ”

  In the corner of Garner’s office was an old bolt-action rifle bearing on its stock the coat of arms of the Pahlavi dynasty. The bolt was rusted and the wood had cracked but the Shah’s lion was plain to see on the royal insignia. For Garner, the Iranian firearm—turned in by an Iraqi soldier when the Western armies arrived in Kurdistan—was a souvenir of the “civil war” that Garner’s president believed had been going on “for ages,” the conflict which the two-star general intended to keep out of. It all seemed so simple. The Kurds would patch things up with Baghdad. The Kurds were Iraqi citizens, not Turkish citizens—clearly, Turkey’s concerns were high on Garner’s list of priorities—and if Saddam came back to persecute them, well, that was the UN’s problem.

  Garner did admit to a private uneasiness in talking almost daily to Iraqi officials who might well have been responsible for torturing civilians before and during the Kurdish uprising in Dahuk. But he said that his job did not involve such emotions. “In meetings with me, they are polite. You have a few who’re tough. They’re pretty hard. Those who come to the meetings in civilian clothes have been a bit more direct. They’ll stand up and give you a long political lecture and reflections on the way you do things. We listen to them and say: ‘Thank you for your comments.’ ”

  So this is what it had come to. Thank you for your comments. The Beast of Baghdad was no longer to be feared. He was to be placated, work
ed with, relied upon to treat his Kurds—“Iraqi citizens”—fairly. The end was surely not far away. Summer was coming to northern Iraq in a lazy way, a warm breeze rippling the hundreds of square kilometres of wheat fields around Dahuk. Anticipating the effects of United Nations sanctions in 1990, Saddam had ordered Iraqis to plant wheat on all available land. The American humanitarian groups, the U.S. military and the UN were now encouraging the Kurds to harvest the crop that was sown to beat UN sanctions.

  In the middle of the dual carriageway north of Dahuk where six hot and tired U.S. marines were waving returning Kurdish refugees through their wire chicane, there stood a sign with the words “Allied Control Zone” stencilled in black paint. To the east, a battery of marine 105-mm howitzers nestled under camouflage in the heat haze, a little ghost of all those artillery positions that once lay across the Saudi desert 800 kilometres to the south. The world’s conscience was being eased. The epic tragedy of the Kurdish retreat to the mountains had now been ameliorated by return and resettlement. Instead of dying babies and sick children, the fields around Zakho were now filled with thriving families. At night, a necklace of lights moving down the mountains proved that the Kurds were returning home.

  So who could be surprised when General Colin Powell, arriving at Saddam’s private airport at Sirsenk on the afternoon of 30 May, said, in so many words, that there would be no guarantees for the Kurds left behind? The “international community” would be “measuring Baghdad’s actions in the weeks ahead,” he told us. The United States would use “every diplomatic and political means and whatever other means might be appropriate” to convince the Iraqi authorities not to use force against the Kurds.

  Powell’s press conference was weird. He simply wouldn’t mention the name Saddam. The monster who had obsessed the world for months could no longer be spoken of. I even asked Powell about the omission. Here he was, I said, standing on the very tarmac of Saddam’s personal airport—black marble tiles lining the unfinished terminal building—and within sight of Saddam’s winter palaces on the surrounding mountains, yet the name of Saddam would not cross his lips. Why? And he replied with an evasiveness that was truly courageous. “It would not be in the interests of the leadership in Baghdad to return to this area in force or in an aggressive way which would threaten these people and cause them to fear for their lives again.” He talked, too, about “the government in Baghdad” as if this was some vast democratic bureaucracy. And that was it. Saddam had been erased from the discourse.

  When an American reporter asked Powell if the United States had really won the 1991 Gulf War despite the massive oil fires in Kuwait, the ecological damage in the Gulf, Saudi Arabia’s unwillingness to assist American security plans, the Kurdish catastrophe and the deadlock in the Middle East “peace process,” Powell reminded his audience that the invasion of Kuwait had been reversed and the emirate had now been restored to its legitimate (if undemocratic) government. “Our closest friends in this region are no longer threatened by the fourth-largest army in the world.” This was a victory. The strategic situation in the region had entirely changed. What had not changed, of course, was the continued presence of Saddam in Baghdad. But that was a name General Powell would no longer mention.

  There were times when even history could not be mentioned in Kurdistan. In Zakho there was a fine Roman bridge, and the locals would tell visitors that the low, grass-covered hills that protect the town were trodden by Xenophon’s Greek thousands. Fifteen kilometres farther west, on the banks of the Habur River, history was too recent to be addressed. The locals do not mention that nine thousand Armenians were massacred here during the 1915 Armenian genocide. Because the Kurds were the murderers.

  So Zakho was a town with secrets. It kept them even from the allied armies. In 1919, it was notorious for the assassination of British army officers, killed by Kurds who were demanding independence during the British Mandate. British soldiers were shot dead in the same year in the neighbouring village of Amadia— currently governed by the Royal Marines. No wonder Zakho hid its past as it hid its present. Opposite the Iraqi police station, I would be told, was the mantaqa jehudi—the “place of the Jews”—where Zakho’s substantial Jewish community lived until they departed for the new state of Israel in 1948. The houses there were poor, single-storey, mud-and-brick affairs. The old Jewish cemetery lay beneath the foundations of the Ashawa Hotel on the other side of town. Saddam’s men saw to that.

  But take a walk across the river to the kenaisi—“church”—district and you would be among both Kurds and Armenians, grandsons and granddaughters and great-grandsons and great-granddaughters of the killers and the killed of 1915. Even now you could not ask about the massacres without arousing suspicion. The Kurds would tell you that the Turks were responsible. The Armenians would tell you, correctly, that the Kurds hereabouts were the culprits, on Turkish orders. “We have Kurdish friends,” an Armenian businessman told me. “Of course we talk about what happened. My Kurdish friends and I have coffee together. We have agreed that what the Kurds did was a mistake. They were used by other people— the Turks—to do what they did against us. But, yes, most of my friends are Christian.” There were only about 1,500 Armenians left in Zakho, living among 150,000 Kurds. A few hundred Assyrians and Chaldeans made up the only other Christian communities.

  The Armenians obeyed the law under Saddam. When the Kurds of Zakho fled to avoid military service, the Armenians obediently went to fight for Saddam Hussein. Three Armenian soldiers from Zakho died under allied air attack in 1991—in Kuwait, Basra and Mosul. More than 130 Armenians from the town were killed in the eight-year war between Iraq and Iran. The only Kurds who fought in the 1991 war could be found in the refugee camps outside Zakho, although they were not from the town. One of them lived in a blue-and-white tent with his father and mother, a young man with a moustache who was a member of the Iraqi Rafidain Tank Regiment and survived the American and British attacks on the Mutla Ridge. “I was hiding in the sand when the planes came,” he said, making the usual appeals that his name should never be printed. “I saw all the Iraqi vehicles in the traffic jam and they started blowing up. There was a military petrol lorry and I saw an American plane fire a rocket at the lorry. There was a golden fire and the lorry went to twice its size and then it disappeared. I managed to reach Basra and was given five days’ leave so I travelled up to the mountains here to escape.”

  But the Kurdish revolt did not bring the Kurdish and Armenian communities in Zakho any closer. When the Kurds returned to the town under U.S. protection, they found that the Armenians had not left their homes. “They thought we had taken the side of the government,” an Armenian teenager said. “They did not understand that we could not afford to rebel. We are too few.” Several Armenian families fled to the mountains when the Kurdish rebellion collapsed. Four Armenian babies were among the hundreds who died on the Turkish frontier, sharing their graves with the descendants of those who had massacred their great-grandparents.

  Now the Armenians were interested in a different crisis. “We want to go to the Motherland,” an Armenian engineer said. “The Soviet Union is breaking apart and soon Soviet Armenia will be a free country, our Motherland which will protect us. I don’t hear the Baghdad or the Kurdish radios. I listen to the Armenian radio every night at six-thirty, from Yerevan in the Soviet Union. They say: ‘This is the broadcast of the Armenian Republic.’ They tell us that the Russian soldiers and the Azeris are raping our women like the Kurds did. Will Armenia be free soon? Can we go there?”

  Everyone, it seemed, wanted to leave Iraq. All except the dead. Some would say that 200,000 died in the uprising that followed the liberation of Kuwait—twice the total of Iraqis who were killed in the war according to some estimates—which would mean that well over a quarter of a million souls perished in Iraq in the first half of 1991. Among the dead were thousands of Marsh Arabs, whose fate went largely unrecorded because their homes lay in the ancient Sumerian wetlands of eastern Iraq.

&n
bsp; Back in 1982, in the fleapit shop of one of Baghdad’s seedier hotels, I bought a guidebook to the country. It was published by the Baath party or—as it pompously proclaimed on page 1—by the “State Organisation for Tourism General Establishment for Travel and Tourism Services.” And where did this little booklet advise me to go for some tourism? “And now, off to a unique world, the Marshes, where nature seems to preserve its virgin aspect. Miles and miles of water, with an endless variety of birds, of fish, of plants and reeds and bulrushes, dotted as far as the eye can see with huts, each a little island unto itself.” The first time I saw the Marshes, just east of the Baghdad–Basra highway, the tourist guide was true to its words. For kilometres, thousands of reed huts stood on earth and papyrus islands, each inhabited by the descendants of the ancient Sumerians, a time warp of simplicity which, according to old Arabic scripts, may have begun with a devastating flood around AD 620.