The Kurdish Woman at the US Senate

[kurd-l at burn.ucsd.edu]

From: mail06672 at pop.net (AKIN)


Washington

The Kurdish Woman at the U.S. Senate

"I was violated" the Kurdish woman wanted to say, but she could not.  She,
instead, sobbed and sobbed.  Senator, Diane Feinstein, wanted to help.
"Speak as if you were in the company of some good friends."  It did not
help.

This was the scene at a recent hearing on the "Iraqi Atrocities Against the
Kurds."  A number of experts and some victims of Saddam's misconduct were
invited to testify.  The event took place on August 3, 1995, at the
Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs in the Dirksen Senate
Office Building.

To be sure, there never was a shortage of evidence to allow one to give the
benefit of doubt to the ruler of Baghdad.  Speaker after speaker spoke of
the horrors that the Kurds had endured.  The woman's inability to put her
anguish into words left an indelible impression on the Senators.  Others
described the meticulous Baghdad schemes through operations such as
"Anfal," a word taken out of Quran, the holy book of Islam, to market the
diabolical plans of Saddam and his cronies.

A Kurd, I was extremely disturbed by the proceedings, not because I was a
novice to these tales of brutality against my people, but rather crying for
help at the U.S. Senate did not seem to be a proper way to tackle this
wrongdoing against the Kurds.  I felt impotent; the world, historians tell
us, had contempt for such peoples.

There were other disquieting moments in the hearing.  A Kurdish man spoke
of a number of coordinated chemical attacks that had rained instant death
on the unsuspecting Kurdish civilians.  For example, in Halapja, Kurdistan,
on March 16, 1988, some 5000 Kurds had dropped dead, after inhaling the
poisonous fumes.  At the time, the International Community did not consider
imposing sanctions on Baghdad.  It did so only after the invasion of
Kuwait.

A film put together by the United States government officials serving in
northern Iraq was also shown.  It portrayed life in Iraqi Kurdistan.  It
was a page out of Hobbes' Leviathan.  Some Iraqi soldiers blindfolding and
tying Kurdish men to poles and shooting them in the sight of
camera-recorders.  The footage, the narrator said, was captured by the
Kurdish fighters, from the archives of retreating Iraqi soldiers, during
their brief liberation of Kurdistan.

In a span of four years, from early 1987 to early 1990, approximately 4,000
Kurdish villages were destroyed.  Some 182,000 people, mostly men, were
killed.  Today, in northern Iraq, the narrator went on to say, there is a
higher ratio of women than men.  Orphans and widows, hopelessness and
prostitution have become facts of life.

Kathryn Cameron Porter, President of Human Rights Alliance, spoke of her
recent visit to the Kurdish enclave of Northern Iraq.  The situation of the
Kurds, has not changed, she said.  Death visits them often and does so at
an alarming rate.  The Iraqis and the Turks and the Iranians would rather
see all Kurds dead.  The Kurds of Iraq are now doing exactly that: killing
one another to the dismay of their friends.

Ken Roth, the Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, spoke next.  He
noted the meticulous plans of Ali Hasan Al-Majid, the man Saddam had
hand-picked to deal with the Kurds.  In what became known as "Anfal"
campaigns, the Iraqi army began military attacks on the Kurdish
settlements, making use of the chemical weapons, with the express purpose
of dealing with the Kurdish question once and for all.

Mr. Roth went on:  "... the stores of documentary testimonial and forensic
evidence in the possession of Human Rights Watch provide incontrovertible
proof that in 1988 the Iraqi state killed tens of thousands of Kurdish men,
women and children because they were Kurds (the italics are the author's).
Our goal is to ensure that the Iraqi government is brought to account for
its heinous crime of genocide."

After the hearing, I felt like a Jew who had the misfortune of urging the
West to rescue his kind from the fury that was Hitler at the Second World
War.  That help never came.  The Kurds too will not get it.  Saddam will
either be his own nemesis or wait until my generation of Kurds catches up
with him.

Kani Xulam
American Kurdish Information Network


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