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INTRODUCTION

The report that follows does not record the full horrors of the 1988 Anfal campaign.1 Such an account would describe the destruction of hundreds of Iraqi Kurdish villages and their inhabitants, which this report does not attempt.

Instead this is a case study of the disaster that befell a single Kurdish village, Koreme, and its population during the Anfal campaign. It aims to show, in the greatest detail, the nature of the crimes committed in 1988 by the government of President Saddam Hussein against one remote mountain village in northern Iraqi Kurdistan.

Middle East Watch (MEW), a division of Human Rights Watch, (HRW) and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) believe the experience of Koreme is representative of what happened to thousands of Kurdish villages in the northern mountainous provinces of Iraq before and during the Anfal campaign. Subsequent MEW reports will document how the Anfal campaign was carried out across all of Iraqi Kurdistan. These reports will also analyze Iraqi government and army documents captured by Kurdish forces in the March 1991 Kurdish uprising in order to reveal the planning and intentions underlying Anfal.

The importance of Koreme's experience is not only the cruelty that occurred there but also that it was apparently characteristic of the practices against other villages -- large-scale murders, disappearances, forcible relocations, and destruction with the intent to destroy the village population of Kurds as such. If ongoing research confirms this pattern, the destruction of Koreme would emerge as a genocidal act, part of a genocide undertaken against the Kurds across all of Iraqi Kurdistan. Koreme would thus represent a genocide-in-miniature and would stand for the experience of thousands of other destroyed villages, the sufferings of whose inhabitants cannot be reported in such detail.

MEW/PHR do not suggest that the experience of Koreme, without more, proves genocide. Proof of genocide requires a showing of genocidal intent as well as a serious attempt to carry it out.2 Crimes against a single village, no matter how vicious, cannot prove genocide. Nonetheless, research increasingly leads to the conclusion that the Iraqi government's Anfal campaign amounted to the crime of genocide within the meaning of the Genocide Convention. MEW/PHR will, as appropriate, formally make that case in future reports.

MEW/PHR are aware that genocide has been a much-used --perhaps over-used -- word in recent months. Armed conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, the former Soviet Union, and other places have caused journalists, commentators, politicians, and diplomats to struggle for terminology with which to convey the terrors of ethnic conflict, ethnic cleansing, and violent ethnic chauvinism. Genocide is however a juridical term, with a legal definition established by treaty. It seeks to describe perhaps the greatest crime in the human canon. It is not a term ever to be used lightly or imprecisely. For that reason, we withhold definitive judgment on whether or not the Anfal campaign was genocide until our research is complete, although our research points steadily in the direction of a finding of genocide.

Although MEW/PHR withhold final judgment on the Anfal campaign as genocide, we have no hesitation in concluding that the events described in this report, constituting murder, forcible disappearance, involuntary relocation, the refusal to provide minimal conditions of life to detainees, chemical weapons attacks against civilians, and the physical destruction of Koreme, Birjinni, and other Kurdish villages are crimes against humanity within the meaning of customary international law. Crimes against humanity are a recognized international crime, for which defendants were tried and convicted at the Nuremberg Tribunal. The elements of crimes against humanity, set forth with greater specificity at Appendix 5 of this report, are murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation or other equally serious inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds including equally seriousinhumane acts or crimes, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated, and committed on a mass basis.3

Unlike genocide, crimes against humanity does not require proof of intent, based on the racial, religious or ethnic identity of the victims, to destroy a people as such, and it is thus easier to prove than genocide. The events described in this report include murder, extermination, deportation and such similarly inhumane acts as forcible disappearance constituting murder. These acts took place in the context of racial persecution of the Kurds in Iraqi Kurdistan, although it remains for further research to determine conclusively that those persecutions were intended to destroy the Kurds "in whole or in part...as such" within the meaning of the Genocide Convention.

The determination that the crimes described in this report constitute crimes against humanity is based in part on their mass scale. MEW/PHR have obtained hundreds of eyewitness interviews in addition to secondary press, and governmental accounts of such atrocities as chemical bombardments of villages, the destruction of thousands of Kurdish villages, and the murder, forcible disappearance, and involuntary relocation of hundreds of thousands of Kurds during the Anfal campaign. The evidence of these atrocities overwhelmingly fulfills the "mass scale" requirement. Accordingly, MEW/PHR charge the government of Iraq, the Ba'ath Party, and the Iraqi army with crimes against humanity and we call upon the international community to undertake appropriate measures to see that prosecution and punishment are carried out.

Although the purpose of this report is to trace in detail the plight of one set of Anfal victims, the residents of the village of Koreme, the events at Koreme are not just another sad story in the history of human rights violations. What happened at Koreme are crimes, international as well as domestic. In offering conclusions of fact and law, MEW/PHR point out that the Iraqi government by the scope of its actions made itselfvulnerable to legal action by the international community. Our descriptions of the events at Koreme are formulated here as statements of crimes, and as a call to the international community to indict, prosecute and punish their authors.

Anfal's Pattern of Destruction Across Iraqi Kurdistan

The methods and patterns of destruction generally followed during the Anfal campaign across the northern region of Iraqi Kurdistan are summarized below; they were implemented in the microcosm of Koreme.

Anfal was a campaign of the Iraqi government and army carried out against the village Kurdish population of Iraqi Kurdistan in 1988, the year during which the Iran-Iraq War came to an end.4 Anfal was a name used by the Iraqi army. Taken from a Koranic verse, it refers to "the plunder of the infidel," and evidently was intended to give the campaign the veneer of religious justification, though the Kurds themselves are Muslim and Iraq is a secular state.5

The Anfal campaign began in the southernmost Kurdish zones of Iraq. The Kurdish zones are located in northern Iraq; those borderingTurkey and Iran are largely mountainous with villages in the valleys.6 Over a period of months during 1988, the campaign moved northward. By late summer 1988, Anfal had reached the rural villages of the northernmost governorate of Dohuk, catching the inhabitants of those zones in a pincer movement between troops pushing northward and troops along the Turkish border pushing southward.

The broad pattern of destruction was similar throughout the campaign and the affected region, although there were variations from place to place, particularly between southern and northern Kurdistan; Koreme lies in northern Kurdistan. A village was often first shelled or bombed, sometimes with chemical weapons, evidently of the type used in the Iran-Iraq war. The inhabitants, attempting to flee, were trapped by troops enveloping the village. In two instances documented by MEW/PHR, Koreme and Mergatou (both in Dohuk Governorate) men and boys among the captured villagers were executed on the spot. Surviving villagers were then taken under guard, using a combination of regular Iraqi army troops, military police, and the reserve forces of the National Defense Battalions, to a local fort run by the Iraqi army or to a Ba'ath Party building, usually in the town nearest the village.7

At the fort, virtually all of the remaining men and older boys disappeared at the hands of security agents; the whereabouts of many tens of thousands of Kurdish males who disappeared in the hands of Iraqi government forces is unknown.8 However, MEW has obtained reports from several eyewitness survivors of mass executions, who testified that the forcibly disappeared Kurds were taken south by truck and later killedand buried in pits in various locations.9 MEW/PHR believe that most, if not all, those who disappeared during Anfal were murdered by Iraqi security forces. Future MEW reports will detail the evidence for this opinion.

Surviving Kurds -- women, children, and the elderly -- were transferred by truck in a state of great hunger and privation, from forts to areas of southern Kurdistan. By the tens of thousands they were dumped in camps which lacked food, water, shelter or medical attention. These camps were simply empty land watched by guard towers. Many died there; those who survived did so with the help of essential supplies brought into the camps by Kurds in neighboring towns.

The Kurdish villages, empty of inhabitants, were then destroyed in their entirety under the direction of special teams of Iraqi army engineers. The rubble of thousands of Kurdish villages razed to the ground, down to the stone foundations of the schools and mosques, can be seen across Iraqi Kurdistan today. The mud brick houses were demolished with bulldozers and backhoes.

Anfal differed from earlier campaigns of destruction carried out by Iraqi authorities against the Kurds. The earlier campaigns had killed people and destroyed property, and were perhaps partly intended as punishment for presumed and actual collaboration between the rural civilian Kurdish population and Kurdish guerrillas, some of whom were aligned with Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. They were vicious and illegal campaigns, and constituted gross abuses of human rights. They were also apparently intended to reduce the Kurdish guerrillas' social base among the Kurdish villages and to relocate the Kurds, in part, into areas firmly under army control. But in contrast to Anfal, the earlier campaigns generally -- although not always -- assumed that Kurdistan was the Kurds' rightful place. Though the Kurds were liable to frightful punishment, they would remain where they had always been.10

Anfal began from the different assumption that, foreseeing a possible ceasefire in the Iran-Iraq war, it was time to settle the "Kurdish problem" once and for all. It was not intended as exemplary punishment of the Kurds for their presumed or actual collaboration with Iran or for supporting Kurdish guerrillas. Punishment not being exemplary if there is no one left to witness the lesson, Anfal was not intended to deter. Anfal was a "final solution," implemented by the Iraqi government, the Ba'ath Party and the Iraqi army. It was intended to make the Kurds of Iraqi Kurdistan and their rural way of life disappear forever. Only such an intent can explain the precise, neat, and thorough destruction of the already empty Kurdish villages, and the fact that Anfal encompassed virtually all Kurdish villages. Or, as stated by Ali Hassan al-Majid, a cousin of President Saddam Hussein who was, during Anfal, in charge of Iraqi Kurdistan and at this writing serves as Iraqi Minister of Defense: "Yes, I'll certainly look after [the Kurds]. I'll do it by burying them with bulldozers. That's how I'll do it."11

The Investigation of the Anfal Campaign

Since mid 1991, when Kurdish fighters protected by the 1991 Gulf War allied forces established control over much of traditional Iraqi Kurdistan, permitting human rights monitors to enter the region, MEW has been conducting an investigation of the Anfal campaign. The investigation has had three parts.

First, MEW investigators have travelled throughout Iraqi Kurdistan, conducting interviews with survivors, in order to reconstruct the Anfal campaign, the extent of its destruction and the extent of its crimes.

Second, MEW, working with Kurdish groups in Iraqi Kurdistan, arranged to have large quantities of Iraqi government documents captured in the March 1991 Kurdish uprising airlifted to the United States in May 1992. MEW investigators have begun the task oftranslating and sorting these documents in order to make available the evidence as to the Iraqi government's conduct of the Anfal campaign. The airlifted documents are some 14 tons, and the task of evaluating them is commensurately large.

Third, MEW and PHR assembled an international team of forensic scientists, under the scientific direction of forensic anthropologist Dr. Clyde Collins Snow (the "forensic team"), to undertake studies of mass gravesites reported to contain victims of the Anfal campaign.12 The first MEW/PHR forensic mission took place in December 1991, and its investigations included a search for the graves of Anfal victims as well as of victims of Iraq's state security police and military during many years.13 A second MEW/PHR forensic mission took place in February 1992, in which Dr. Snow and Andrew Whitley, Executive Director of Middle East Watch, tentatively assessed the mass gravesites discovered at Koreme, and made preparations to return for a full-scale exhumation in the spring of 1992.

The third MEW/PHR forensic mission to Iraqi Kurdistan took place between May 26 and June 22, 1992. Its mission was to exhume the gravesites at Koreme, take testimony, and conduct other investigations necessary for as complete as possible a determination of events at Koreme. Investigations were based on (i) forensic archaeology, to determine what structures had existed in Koreme and related sites, and the circumstances of their destruction, (ii) forensic anthropology, to identify victims and to determine the cause and manner of death of those found at Koreme and related sites, and (iii) oral testimony, taken from survivors, to construct a narrative of events at Koreme and related sites.

The forensic team was asked by MEW/PHR to gather evidence in as much detail as possible so to establish what happened at Koreme as if a case were to be heard before a judge, jury, or other trier of fact in accordance with internationally accepted standards of judicial due process.

MEW/PHR and the forensic team believe this effort has succeeded and that a court of law would accept both the account of events at Koreme and related sites presented below as well as the legal conclusions that follow.14

1 "Al-Anfal" is the name of a Koranic Sura, "the eighth sura, The Spoils," a revelation to the Prophet Muhammad in the wake of the first great battle of the then-new Muslim faith at Badr (624 A.D.). See The Koran, transl. N.J. Dawood, Viking, 1990, at 176. The term "Anfal" refers to the plunder or spoils of the infidel, and was used by the Iraqi government to give a religious justification to its attack against the Kurds of Iraq, although they too are Muslim. This report refers interchangeably to the Anfal campaign or, for brevity, simply Anfal.

2 See Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the "Genocide Convention"), opened for signature Dec. 8, 1948, 78 U.N.T.S. 277 [1949], entered into force Jan. 12, 1951, reproduced as Appendix 4.

3 See Appendix 5 for HRW's view of the legal elements of crimes against humanity applied to the events described in this report. The elements named above are drawn from the Charter of the International Military Tribunal, article 6 (c), as amended by the Berlin Protocol, 59 Stat. 1546, 1547 (1945), E.A.S. No. 472, 82 U.N.T.S. 284, as modified by the Judgment of the Nuremberg Tribunal, International Military Tribunal, Judgment, 6 F.R.D. 69, reprinted in 41 Am. J. Int'l. L. 172 (1947) and various Allied war crimes tribunals interpreting similar language.

4 There is controversy as to where Anfal began and ended. Seen as an Iraqi military campaign, it began with the attack on the PUK guerrilla headquarters at Sergalou, near the Iranian border, on the night of February 25-26, 1988. It ended with the general amnesty of September 6, 1988, which marked the completion of what the Iraqi army referred to as the "Final Anfal" in the Badinan region. Alternatively, from the perspective of the victims, Anfal began with the destruction of villages and forcible disappearances following the fall of Sergalou in mid-March 1988; the campaign ended sometime in the fall of 1988. Despite the September 6 amnesty, some Yazidi Kurds, Assyrians, and Turkmen were disappeared after the military operation had ended. It was clearly, however, a campaign that began and ended in 1988. See generally Kanan Makiya, "The Anfal: Uncovering an Iraqi Campaign to Exterminate the Kurds," Harper's Magazine, May 1992; Raymond Bonner, "Always Remember," The New Yorker, September 28, 1992.

5 See note 1.

6 For social and political overviews of the Kurdish people, see generally People Without a Country, ed. Gerard Chaliand, transl. from the French by Michael Pallis, Zed Press, 1980; Martin van Bruinessen, Agha, Shaikh, and State: the Social and Political Structure of Kurdistan, Zed Press, 1992.

7 The National Defense Battalions also known colloquially as the "Jash"; this report will refer to it as the "National Defense Battalions."

8 In the early part of Anfal, in the Germian region, men, women, children, and infants were also disappeared.

9 See MEW/PHR, Unquiet Graves: The Search For the Disappeared in Iraqi Kurdistan, March 1992 ("Unquiet Graves").

10 Not without exception, however; Kurds in large numbers were forcibly relocated during earlier periods, particularly from politically sensitive areas near the Iranian border and from other locations as well, and their villages were destroyed.

11 Statement recorded on audio cassette tape, evidently during a speech to a closed-door meeting of regional security chiefs in the late 1980s. Along with large quantities of Iraqi army and government documents, it fell into Kurdish hands in the March 1991 Kurdish uprising. These materials are now being analyzed by MEW.

12 See Acknowledgments for the names and affiliations of the forensic team members.

13 See Unquiet Graves.

14 This report contains no names of witnesses among the Iraqi Kurds, and indeed no full names of living Kurds. The risks to Iraqi Kurds posed by the Baghdad regime at the present time make this an unfortunate necessity. MEW/PHR are prepared to furnish this information to an appropriate body undertaking legal proceedings against the Iraqi government with appropriate guarantees of protection to the witnesses.

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