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Iraqi Kurdistan minister says to resort to
UN if Anfal verdicts not carried out
7.12.2007
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December
7, 2007
Erbil-Hewler, Kurdistan region 'Iraq', -- A
minister in charge of the Anfal campaign victims in
the Iraqi Kurdistan region government said her
ministry would resort to the UN if the death
sentences handed down against defendants were not
carried out.
"The ministry submitted a protest memo to the
presidential board, the cabinet and parliament,
demanding the implementation of execution verdicts
against convicts of the Anfal case," Janar Saad
Abdullah said on Thursday.
She pointed out that her ministry would not accept
the intervention of any political party in judicial
issues. A political and legal controversy unfolded
during the past few months in Iraqi circles over
carrying out the death sentences against the three
convicts in the Anfal case. Senior Iraqi
politicians, including President Jalal Talabani, a
Kurd, and his two vice presidents, Tareq al-Hashimi,www.ekurd.net
a
Sunni Muslim, and Adel Abdul-Mahdi, a Shiite Muslim,
believe that death sentences have to be endorsed by
at least the president and one of his two deputies,
which did not happen so far.
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Ali Hassan al-Majid, first cousin of executed
dictator Saddam Hussein and also known as 'Chemical
Ali', 'Butcher of Kurdistan' sentenced to death over Kurdish genocide, AP |
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Talabani and Hashimi argue that officers in the
former Iraqi army should not be executed on the
grounds that they were doing their duty and
enforcing orders from the supreme commander of the
armed forces then, Saddam Hussein. They said those
officers could not disobey these orders.
Talabani has reiterated that Sultan Hashim Ahmed was
a "respected military man who should not be
executed."www.ekurd.net
On November 30, 2007, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki
sent a message to U.S. President George W. Bush
asking him to hand over the three persons condemned
to death in the Anfal case of genocide of ethnic
Kurds during the 1980s.
The Iraqi Supreme Criminal Court's appellate body
had upheld last September the death sentences handed
down in June against three officials of the former
regime of President Saddam Hussein: Ali Hassan al-Majid,
Saddam's cousin, Sultan Hashim Ahmed, the former
minister of defense, and Hussein Rashid al-Tikriti,
the assistant chief of staff of the Iraqi army.
Saber Abdul-Aziz al-Dori, director of the former
military intelligence, and Farhan Motlak al-Juburi,
chief of the former intelligence in the Northern
Zone, received life sentences, while former Mosul
governor Taher Tawfiq al-Aani was acquitted.
Anfal was an anti-Kurdish campaign led by the former
regime between 1986 and 1989 and involved a series
of military campaigns against the Kurdish Peshmerga
fighters as well as the mostly Kurdish civilian
population of southern Kurdistan.
An estimated 182,000 Kurds were killed and 4,000
villages wiped out in the brutal campaign of
bombings,www.ekurd.net
mass deportation and gas attacks known as Anfal.
Iraq's Criminal Court heard the case of the Anfal
(or Spoils of War, taken from Surat al-Anfal in the
Qur'an) campaign.
Charges against the prime defendant Saddam Hussein
were dropped after his execution on December 30,
2006, four days after an appellate body upheld a
death sentence by a court considering the case of
al-Dujail, a small town in northern Baghdad.
The court had found Saddam and a number of his aides
guilty of responsibility for the killing of 148
people following an attempt on Saddam's life in
1982, during the eight-year Iraq-Iran war.
On April 2, 2007 the chief prosecutor in the Anfal
case urged the court to release al-Aani, extenuate a
sentence for Dori and to hand down death sentences
against the four others.
VOI
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