Erbil, Kurdistan
Region (Iraq), October 1, -- Iraqi Kurds were left
reeling after two independent newspapers named
scores of people who allegedly cooperated with
Saddam Hussein's feared intelligence services,
including many now in positions of power.
The president of the Kurdistan autonomous region (KRG),
Massoud Barzani, ordered the formation of a
committee to study the allegations which come as
bitter memories of the community's savage repression
under Saddam's Sunni Arab-dominated regime have been
revived by his latest war crimes trial.
"The committee will be legal and political and will
choose a suitable approach for its work and prove
the facts about these files," Barzani's chief of
staff Fuad Hussein said Sunday. |
Massoud Barzani, President of Kurdistan
Region in Iraq |
|
"It will be a fact-finding mission and not a
punishment committee," he said, adding that the
committee's members would be appointed by Barzani in
concert with the prime minister of the regional
government and the speaker of the regional
parliament.
"This matter has become huge and very sensitive for
the people of Kurdistan," he said.
The names of more than 150 people who allegedly
spied on their fellow Kurds for Saddam's mukhabarat
intelligence service after the Kurdish uprising of
1991 were published by the Awina (Mirror) and
Hawlati (Citizen) newspapers Friday.
According to the newspapers, which both went through
several print runs on the day of publication, the
mukhabarat recruited people close to the two main
Kurdish rebel leaders, Barzani and Jalal Talabani,
now Iraq's president.
The allegations drew demands for an inquiry from
members of both former rebel factions -- Barzani's
Kurdistan Democratic Party and Talabani's Patriotic
Union of Kurdistan -- and by Saturday more than half
of the 111 MPs in the regional parliament had signed
a petition calling for an immediate debate.
"Those who worked with the mukhabarat must be
tried," said PUK regional lawmaker Ariz Abdallah.
"These agents of the odious Saddam regime must
become examples for others like them in the future,"
said KDP counterpart Khiman Zirar.
The allegations also prompted a spate of law suits
against the alleged informers by their victims and a
variety of threats against the journalists by those
named.
Adel Omar, who works for a computer maintenance
company in the Iraqi Kurdish cultural capital of
Sulaimaniyah said he was "shocked and stunned" when
he saw how many big names in the two main former
rebel groups had worked for the Baathist regime.
"Publishing the files showed how the Iraqi
mukhabarat infiltrated the parties and the Kurdish
administration," he said, adding that he hoped the
government would hold them accountable.
The revelations come at a particularly sensitive
time for Iraqi Kurds after Saddam and six
co-defendants went on trial charged with genocide
over the 1988 Anfal campaign.
The campaign, in which hundreds of thousands were
gassed, relocated and their villages destroyed was
not carried out just by Iraqi soldiers, but also by
pro-government Kurdish militias.
Victims' families have been calling for those who
collaborated in the Anfal to be brought to justice
too, not just Saddam and his main henchmen.
For Yassin Taha, a high school teacher in
Sulaimaniyah, the newspaper reports of Kurdish spies
just made him furious.
"They have to receive the necessary punishment for
their treachery against their own kind," he said.
AFP
Top |
® 