A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (40 page)

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.."15' 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 unpre dictable 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 1 ivon'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 mulch and know you will be a fine, loving nian. Live a good, kind, caring lifi'.

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 pro- claimed,"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 Sevres gave that right to the Kurds. I ani 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."'

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 collapse 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.""'

Some 400,000 Kurdish refugees had reached Turkey by mid-April, and it was feared an additional half a million were en route.''' Galbraith's newfound 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""' 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"15' 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 sev enteen-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.' 1161

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.''

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 whereVX, sarin, and mustard gas were combined in deadly cocktails. Survivors remain blinded from corneal scarring from mustard gas burns."' 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 sur vived 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..""' 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.""' 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 mechanical 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." 11,7 There were proud tallies of individuals and villages eliminated, minutes of meetings, arrest warrants, notes on phone surveillance, and decrees ordering mass execution.