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The pain of the Kurds lingers
4.1.2007
By Susan Mohammad |
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I was born in
Toronto, but the horrors perpetrated against Kurdish
family members in Iraq brought me close to my roots
January 4, 2007
There was a book on a shelf in the dining room I
wasn't allowed to open as a child.
My father, an Iraqi Kurd who came to Canada in 1979,
put it there. He would point to it and say, "Not to
touch. You don't want to see this." His dark eyes
burned with the severity of the order.
The book was flanked by several others on Saddam
Hussein, and every time I passed, my curiosity grew
more feverish until I finally took the book down.
Inside, sketches showed the torture methods Saddam's
blood-thirsty government was using on his people,
including the Kurds. My eyes darted between heads
flattened in vices, irons searing flesh, eyes being
gouged and testicles hooked up for electrocution.
The artist, whoever he was, expressed primal horror
and fear on the victims' faces as if he'd seen it
firsthand.
It's odd that my father tried to protect me from
this, because just steps away from the bookshelf
hung a calendar with photos taken after the 1988
massacre at the Kurdish village of Halabja, where
5,000 people died after a chemical gas attack. There
was a photo of a man in traditional dress lying face
down in the dirt on the doorstep of a home. In his
arms lay a baby he had failed to protect. There were
pictures of still children lying on their backs,
with burnt faces, that bothered me even more.
It was hard to understand the horror. Despite being
dragged to protests, and hearing stories of how my
family fled our 160-hectare farm close to the border
of Iran in 1975 -- before it was razed and the
vineyards and fruit trees were burned during a
campaign in which hundreds of villages in the
Kurdish countryside were destroyed and resisters
were murdered -- I tried to carve out my own
identity, one separate from my parents' tragic
immigrant histories and politics as I approached my
teen years.
I reminded friends I was born in Toronto, and when
they confused me for being half Turkish instead of
Kurdish, I rarely corrected them. It was just too
heavy during a time of self-discovery.
Which is why I was surprised when, weeks ago, I
started crying uncontrollably as I watched the
November broadcast of the tyrant furiously
condemning his death sentence for the Dujail
killings in which 148 Shia men were killed. It
wasn't enough, I thought.
You see, watching thousands of Kurds scramble for
the mountains only to suffer or die of hunger,
illness or severe dehydration during the Gulf War
finally caught up to me. Going cold whenever the
phone rang in the early hours of the morning,
wondering if a family member had achieved sporadic
contact to ask for money or share news of someone's
death finally caught up to me. Being denied a chance
to meet family and hear their amazing stories caught
up to me. Here in Ontario.
On one hand, it was justice that the man who
possessed a shocking disregard for humanity was
being executed, but I am also left feeling that many
people who have been affected by Saddam's widespread
violence have been cheated out of a small but
important step toward healing.
Executing Saddam without his facing justice for
other crimes in which even more lives were disposed
of like garbage, like the Anfal campaign where as
many as 200,000 Kurds were (to use the too-sanitary
expression) "ethnically cleansed" in the late '80s
is unjust. And what about the killings of the Marsh
Arabs in the late '90s, or the butchery of the
Shiites and Kurds who revolted against the
government?
How could executing a man who will go down in
history to join the likes of Hitler or Pol Pot,
before he faces justice for his greatest sins bring
any peace to the people of Iraq who have suffered so
much already?
Symbolically, this is important. Especially after
the West warmed to Iraq in the past, favouring a
Saddam with an agenda over Ayatollah Khomeini's
Iran. The West sat on its hands and whistled,
turning a blind eye toward many of the atrocities
taking place. Many lives could have been saved had
the United States not waited to put an end to the
bloody reign. But blood has no market value -- cars
run on oil.
It's been a few days since the hasty execution, yet
the experience is still sickly surreal. A new year
has begun, but survivors of chemical attacks in Iraq
still struggle with the birth defects of their
babies, and families all over the country still
search for the bones of their dead. Their tears
could fill a crater.
After the no-fly zone was established in 1991, my
uncles returned to the countryside to re-claim what
was left of our land, and after the U.S.-led
campaign to topple Saddam was over, my father was
finally able to visit family for the first time in
27 years.
My father's book is still housed in its place in my
parents' dining room. Since pushing away the
sobering knowledge I've gained after first opening
it, I have become proud of my heritage and culture.
I understand now that I am part of a tribe of people
wantonly abused, a people whose suffering the world
has yet to fully recognize or honour.
Indeed, Saddam Hussein's abrupt hanging -- before he
could be forced to answer to his crimes against the
Kurdish people -- is just another sad chapter in
that book.
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