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Forced Relocation, and

the Dead Infant Girls of Jeznikam Cemetery

Beharke, Jeznikam, Qushtapa, Daratu, Binasirawa, Kasnazan, Sharways, Pirzin, Mala Omar, Segirtkan, Barhushtar, and Sebiran -- these are the names of some of the camps around the Kurdish city of Erbil to which tens of thousands of villagers from the surrounding mountains were forcibly relocated as part of the Anfal campaign.1 Some, like Beharke, were large, with many thousands of inhabitants, and over time grew to merge with neighboring camps and eventually became collective towns. Others were small and remained discrete units.

Whatever their size, the camps lacked basic facilities and infrastructure, making it questionable whether they should be called "camps" at all. What does one call a flat, windswept plain, without buildings, without the systematic provision of food, water, sanitation, health care, blankets, huts, or shelters, onto which thousands of already weakened people were deposited over a few weeks at the beginning of autumn with winter approaching? The only structures were the guard towers with their machine guns, and the security buildings controlling the roads in and out. According to numerous accounts received by MEW/PHR, when asked by Kurdish villagers for food, water, and shelter, soldiers responded again and again, "Saddam has sent you here to die."

How Fakhir Survived in Salamia

Some of the surviving Kurdish villagers -- particularly elderly men -- went directly from regional forts like that in Dohuk to the camps. The old men of Koreme, after spending a few days in Dohuk fort, went directly by army truck to Beharke and Jeznikam, adjacent camps located about half an hour outside the Kurdish city of Erbil, and which together were the largest in the area.

Many of the women and children went from forts like Dohuk to still other forts. The women and children of Koreme were sent from Dohuk to a fort located near Salamia, a small town between Erbil andMosel. They stayed there two weeks before being moved to Beharke to join the older men.

Conditions were generally better in Salamia than Dohuk, as the villagers received more food. As at Dohuk, several thousand displaced people, almost all of them women and children, were crowded into the fort. The guards distributed a single piece of bread per person for the whole day, but also "chicken broth and sometimes rice and other staples," according to one woman who was there with three young children. There was a regular water supply. In addition, the guards let the detainees out of the fort to buy food at small shops in Salamia.

Still, there were risks at Salamia. Fakhir, a 15-year- old boy from Koreme, had originally been in the execution line-up at Koreme, but a soldier took him out, presumably because he looked too young. Fakhir was fortunate to look younger than his age, because other teenage boys his age perished at Koreme, and others disappeared in the fort at Dohuk. In Salamia, however, an officer, a first lieutenant, asked for his identification card. Fakhir's mother produced it, and when the officer saw his date of birth -- 1973 -- he said, "Why are you here? You're too old to be here." According to Fakhir, his mother tried to "tell the soldier I was too young, I was too small. She understood what they would have done with me. I didn't know. I thought they would take me to do hard labor until it was time to join the army. I didn't know."

The officer took Fakhir by the arm and walked him to the post at the main gate of the Salaman security fort. At the main gate, Fakhir said, was an old man who had not been taken directly to the camps with the others. The old man said, "Don't take this boy, do him a good deed, Saddam didn't say you had to take this one." The officer hesitated, and the old man continued, "Saddam won't see if you don't take him. Saddam's not watching. Do good in the sight of Allah, the compassionate, the merciful."

The officer let go of Fakhir, shook him roughly, and said, "Don't let me see you again. I was kind to you this once, but I won't be kind the next time." The old man told Fakhir to go hide with his mother "and stay out of sight. Don't let anyone see you."

Fakhir's two uncles, Zober Mostafa Saleh and Zahir Mostafa Saleh, had been executed at Koreme. His father, Taha Mostafa, had not been with the villagers when they were captured; according to Fakhir, "he had 10,000 Iraqi dinar and tried to bribe his way across the border. But they wouldn't let him across." Fakhir was told by other relatives that his father was captured by soldiers, wounded in the leg, and eventuallybrought to Dohuk fort after his family had been transferred south. Fakhir heard from others, but was unable to confirm, that his father had died of a beating in Dohuk fort; he thought he was buried in Dohuk cemetery, but could not be sure. The last time Fakhir saw his father alive was in the mountains on the way to the Turkish border, when the villagers turned back and Fakhir's father decided to try the border crossing alone.

The Generosity of the People of Erbil

After two weeks at Salamia, the women and children of Koreme, along with thousands of others, were taken and left at Beharke and Jeznikam. When they left Salamia, they asked the soldiers where they were being taken. According to Fakhir, the guards said, "There's been an amnesty. We're taking you back to your village."

But instead of taking them to the mountains, the soldiers took them instead to the plains outside the city of Erbil, a journey of four hours by road. The place consisted of barren fields, with a perimeter marked by guard towers and a security post at the main road. Those newly arrived spent hours searching for the old men of their village, who they hoped would be there, but could not know for sure.

In Beharke, there was nothing. There were no buildings, no shelters, no blankets against the cold at night, no protection from the sun during the day, no systematic provision of water or food, and no medical care. The administrators of Anfal appear not to have contemplated any need for these. The conclusion is unavoidable that they saw no reason to make any attempt, however minimal, to provide such amenities, because they were indifferent to whether these people lived or died.

All told the Iraqi military and Ba'th Party authorities mobilized hundreds of thousands of soldiers and militia and forcibly relocated hundreds of thousands of Kurds in a coordinated operation lasting many months. To refuse in the final phase of that operation to make any systematic provision, no matter how ineffectual, for elementary food and shelter for the relocated, makes it clear that official policy was that these people might as well die. Deliberately killing by malnutrition, disease, and exposure is as much murder as killing by firing squad.

The survival of the people in the camps around Erbil, including Beharke and Jeznikam, was due to the efforts of the fellow Kurds from Erbil. They organized a prodigious relief effort, bringing into the camps food, water, blankets, and later the materials necessary to build primitiveshelters. Many people -- mostly children -- died in the camps, but the number would have been immeasurably greater but for the relief supplied from Erbil. One woman said, "They brought us food, clothes, vegetables and fruits, and later, what we needed to build our huts, everything. The army brought us nothing."

At the beginning, especially, the residents of Erbil ran personal risks entering Beharke clandestinely. The camp was not surrounded by barbed wire or fences, but only by guard towers; the women, children, and elderly located there had no means or anywhere to go. Erbil residents were not allowed official entrance to the camp and had to enter through the fields. Occasionally, in the first days, they were shot at. Other times they were picked up by soldiers and beaten, and sometimes taken in for questioning. After the first few days, however, the guards became more relaxed about allowing Erbil relief incursions, and by the end of a year essentially ignored them. But the most extraordinary feature of the Erbil relief effort was how long it went on as a voluntary endeavor; the city supported the people in the camps from the time they first arrived in September 1988 to the March 1991 Kurdish uprising, when most of the camp's residents were able to return home.

Still, the efforts of the people of Erbil could not prevent many deaths. Most of these deaths were among the infants and children, and they included Fakhir's baby sister, Farman Taha Mostafa. "My mother's milk," he said, "dried up in Dohuk after a few days." Under the better conditions in Salamia it returned, but failed again in Beharke. After two months in Beharke, in November 1988, Farman died, at the age of one year, of what cause exactly -- disease, general exposure, malnutrition, or dehydration -- no one knew. Fakhir took his sister's body, washed it and wrapped it as best he was able according to Islamic precept, and buried it in a shallow grave in the cemetery of Jeznikam. The cemetery had originally been that of an ancient village, but gradually was taken over by the dead from Beharke and Jeznikam camps, whose graves greatly expanded its perimeters.

Within a few months after the Kurdish villagers arrived at Beharke, epidemics spread through the camp. Kurdish doctors from Erbil, who clandestinely entered the camp in November and December 1988 and January 1989, found epidemics of typhoid, hepatitis, and cholera, in addition to more routine, but deadly, dysentery and influenza. "We tried to come into the camp with medicines at the front gate," said one Kurdish Erbil doctor, "but the soldiers wouldn't let us." But the soldiers let them sneak through the back roads. Indeed, several KurdishErbil doctors expressed the view that the reason the Baghdad regime eventually tolerated unofficial but regular shipments of food and supplies from the Kurdish people of Erbil, and after a year set up an official medical post, was that it feared the spread of disease from the camps, in particular a possible cholera epidemic.

By the end of the first year, in late 1989, the government had relaxed its grip on the residents of the camps. They were issued identity cards, and allowed to spend the daytime working in Erbil. Those who could worked as day laborers; these were mostly old men and boys, since the young and adult men had largely been killed or had disappeared earlier. The camps gradually came to resemble the collective towns in which the government had relocated Kurds in earlier, pre-Anfal campaigns. By the end of 1990, the military authorities occasionally gave permission to some of the elderly men to make trips back to their village lands. The external political situation had shifted by then; the 1991 Gulf War was about to begin, and the regime's attention was apparently elsewhere. It was on one of these extended passes that the old man from Koreme returned to the village and put up a cinder block wall around the burial place of the executed men of Koreme, who included his own sons.

With the March 1991 uprising, the Iraqi army went south, most of the people of the camps were able to leave them for good and went back to the mountains. The people of Koreme returned to Dohuk city, and to Mengish; some went to Koreme, where they lived in tents and began rebuilding. A few, the poorest widows, with no extended family to help them and their young children, remained behind in Beharke camp.

The Graves of Three Infant Girls At Jeznikam Cemetery

The forensic team conducted investigations at Jeznikam cemetery between June 18 and 20, 1992. The purpose of the investigation was to determine whether archaeological evidence at the gravesites and evidence gathered from skeletal remains was consistent with the accounts given by Koreme villagers. The forensic team also proposed to exhume the skeleton of Fakhir's sister to determine what, if anything, could be said of the cause and manner of her death. The forensic team sought to determine if it could confirm basic elements of Fakhir's account of life in Beharke by finding the grave of his sister, Farman Taha Mostafa, where he indicated it was located and in the condition he said he had left it.

The site. Jeznikam cemetery is located on a small conical tell about 10 meters high and 135 meters across. It consists of (i) an oldercemetery located atop the tell and associated with an older village that was reportedly destroyed by the Iraqi army in 1987, and (ii) a newer cemetery on the southern and eastern slopes of the tell containing --according to Koreme villagers, current inhabitants of Jeznikam, and Erbil residents -- the graves of the dead of Jeznikam and Beharke camps. The portion of the cemetery comprising graves from the camp covers an area roughly 30 x 101 meters on the southern edge and 10 x 100 meters on the eastern edge.

[Jeznikam Cemetery -

Line Graph]

[Reserved for: Jeznikam Cemetery: Estimated

Body Lengths in Burial Sample in Old

Village and Detainee Sectors of Cemetery]

The sample inventory of graves. The forensic team conducted a sample inventory of the graves in the cemetery to compare the ratio of adult and child graves in the old village versus the new detainee sectors of the cemetery.

For statistical purposes, a series of seven parallel transects was walked from south to north across the tell. Each grave intersecting with a transect was measured in centimeters from head to foot stone, and it was noted whether the grave was from the old village or new detainee portion of the cemetery. The transects covered approximately 20% of the total graves in the cemetery and in the opinion of the forensic team represent an accurate statistical sample of the cemetery.

A total of 166 graves fell within the sample. Taking into account the disappearance of many adult men prior to the arrivals of the detainees at the camp, it appears that a disproportionate number of deaths occurred among the children of detainees. The ratio of subadult to adult graves in the detainee sector is about five subadult graves for each adult grave. By contrast, the ratio of subadult to adult graves in the village sector of the cemetery, representing a "normal" distribution, is only about one subadult grave to two adult graves. It is evident that children suffered heavily in detention.2

The exhumation of Farwan Tawa Mostafa. The forensic team undertook the exhumation of three graves in the detainee sector of the cemetery. The purpose of these exhumations was to determine if they contained forensic evidence either consistent or inconsistent with detainee accounts of conditions of the camp. The three graves exhumed each contained the skeletal remains of an infant female. Two of the three showed signs of severe malnutrition and/or disease stress.

One of the three graves exhumed was that identified by Fakhir as that of his infant sister, Farwan Tawa Mostafa, who he said had died in the camp along with her mother, and both of whom he had buried with his own hands. The forensic team opened the grave identified by Fakhir as his sisters, and found the skeleton of an infant female, interred in the dress that Fakhir had described.

Forensic examination of the remains showed that she had been about seven months old, according to dentition, but only one to three months old, according to bone development. Fakhir reported her beingabout one year. The difference in age determination between dentition and skelation is evidence of malnutrition and/or disease, because typically dentition develops normally while skeletal growth is severely retarded in the case of malnutrition or disease. The forensic team found this evidence supportive of detainee accounts of the privations suffered in the camp. It found no physical evidence that was inconsistent with survivor testimony.

Following the forensic examination, the remains of Farwan Tawa Mostofa and the other two infant females were reinterred according to Islamic precept.

[Reserved for Jeznikam Cemetery Bar Graph --

Percent of Subadult and Adult Graves

In Old Village and Detainee Sections

of Cemetery]

1 Some of these were also the names of towns or villages near the location of the camps.

2 See Appendix 1 for a complete discussion of the sample inventory of graves.

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