August 6, 2008
Nicholas Patler (ekurd.net).
In the United States of America we are taught from a
very young age that human freedom and liberty are to
be cherished above all else. Indeed, our country
owes its existence to Thomas Jefferson’s immortal
declaration that “all men are created equal, that
they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable rights, that among these are Life,
Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” So important
are these rights that Jefferson called them
“self-evident,” and he even placed them over
established authority in the American Declaration of
Independence when he affirmed the absolute power of
the “[p]eople to alter or abolish” their government
when it infringed on their unalienable rights. In
short, the American people were to find their
highest expression and God given right in
self-determination—a self-determination which left
them unfettered to pursue their individual lives and
to collectively guide the affairs of their
government in the direction of human liberty.
Since Jefferson’s time, the U.S. has both
miraculously succeeded and miserably failed in
living out its precepts. We have moved towards a
broader notion of freedom and ethnic inclusion, and
also have tragically engaged in slavery, racial,
gender and ideological discrimination, and
xenophobia.
Today, I am at pains to say, we are once again
failing miserably. For the past half-century—indeed,
stretching back to the post-WWI era—the U.S. has
feverishly pursued its interests abroad while
utterly trampling on Jefferson’s human declaration
for other peoples and countries whose resources,
markets or strategic geopolitical locations we have
coveted for our own benefit. In other words, while
claiming to be a country that puts emphasis on the
importance of the individual and his/her
aspirations, we have often moved in the opposite
direction abroad,www.ekurd.net
not only failing to
encourage human rights but intentionally
disregarding or preventing the sacred right of
self-determination for other peoples, going as far
as to crush budding democratic governments and
movements when they have conflicted with our own
narrow self-interests. We have done so even in the
shadow of President Woodrow Wilson’s noble but
problematic attempt in the twentieth-century to
proclaim Jefferson’s self-determination a universal
right, not just for Americans, but also for peoples
throughout the world.
Perhaps nowhere have we so neglected, indeed,
trampled human rights and self-determination than we
have for the Kurdish people. Beginning with the
Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, where the international
community abandoned its earlier commitment to a
Kurdish state—indeed, America only attended the
Lausanne Conference as an unofficial participant to
assure that its commercial interests were locked-in
—to U.S. and Western support of Saddam Hussein in
the 1980s with material and diplomatic support as he
committed genocide against the Iraqi Kurds, to
American backing of present-day Turkey as they deny
ethnic existence to 20 million Kurds living in the
southeastern part of the country, self-determination
for the Kurds—and just their day-to-day safety—has
been utterly abandoned by countries which have had
it in their power to help, especially the U.S.
In much of the world today, this striking hypocrisy
between what we claim to represent and how we act is
costing my country its credibility and is making a
mockery out of our supposed concern for human
rights. The fact that a democracy is projecting its
military and economic power across the globe like
some reckless empire, disregarding the rights and
aspirations of other peoples, with its history of
covertly thwarting self-determination, sends the
message that human rights are not important to us in
the larger scheme of things—and that America could
care less about abiding by them—thereby inspiring
tyrants and dictators, including former Iraqi
leader, Saddam Hussein and the modern day repressive
government in Ankara.
What is worse—what is far worse in the sense that it
has played an important role in the destruction of
so many human lives—is that the U.S. has directly
supported and enabled repressive leaders and regimes
with material and diplomatic support. While such
support has negatively impacted many peoples, it has
created some of the most tragic consequences and
unimaginable horrors for the Kurdish people living
in Iraq and Turkey. During the 1980s, the U.S.
supported Saddam Hussein with diplomacy, money and
loans, and helped arm his regime with lethal
weaponry, including deadly chemical and biological
agents—all of which, as we well know, was used to
commit genocide against the Iraqi Kurdish population
during the horrific Anful campaign. Moreover,
Hussein was emboldened not only by U.S. material and
diplomatic support, but also by the tame response
from the U.S. government and the relative silence of
the American media as he carried out chemical
weapons attacks and mass executions against the
Kurds and Iranians.
And in the past several decades, Turkey has been one
of the largest recipients of U.S. military exports
and training in the world. This, along with American
diplomatic support and its granting of immunity, has
made it easier for Ankara to commit cultural
genocide against the Kurds in the southeast region
of the country, and has given the Turkish military a
stronger arm to physically repress the Kurds,
including killing, torturing and jailing civilians,
and destroying their villages and hamlets.
With that said, this paper is written in part to
highlight in an international forum U.S.-Western
political and corporate support of Saddam Hussein in
the 1980s. While this information is readily
accessible to any casual researcher, much of it is
still suppressed or deflected by the American
government and media—and many people in my country
are still in the dark regarding the Kurds and their
experience. It is important that we make every
effort to put this on record for the world over and
over—to capture and motivate the popular
imagination—so that America and the international
community will stop turning a blind eye and begin
responding to the historical and contemporary plight
of the Kurds.
The U.S. political establishment rarely reacts to
genocide and government mass murder without a
concerted effort and outside pressure by an informed
populace and collective organizations and movements,
such as occurred during the Bosnian and Rwandan
genocides. In responding to these horrors, indeed in
preventing them, the populace must first be informed
enough to be inspired to make their reluctant
governments take action.
Let me make it clear that the main objective here is
not just to rebuke America or the West, although
they bear their share of responsibility. The goal of
this paper is to diffuse information, heighten
global awareness and empower us with knowledge and
compassion to change things. On a personal level, as
an American, it is about being honest and taking
responsibility for the actions of my country of
which I am a part—actions that have had dire
consequences for the Kurds here in Kurdistan-Iraq
and in Turkey.
Perhaps most importantly, I have written this paper
in hopes of inspiring the international community in
general, and America in particular, to begin making
human rights, starting with the human rights and
aspirations of the Kurdish people, a cornerstone of
their foreign policies, moving beyond the old
paradigm of only considering strategic and material
interests. And it goes without saying that it is my
hope that we will begin to hold leaders and regimes
accountable for crimes of genocide and repression—indeed,www.ekurd.net
that we will work to
prevent such from occurring when we have it in our
power to do so—rather than sheltering them for
strategic interests or turning away because no
interests are at stake, as we are doing in Darfur
and the Congo. As Abraham Lincoln once said,
“We—even we here—hold the power, and bear the
responsibility.”
In December 2002, the Bush administration hurried to
New York to take possession of an 11,800-page report
detailing the history of Iraq’s weapons programs,
which had just been completed by the U.N. Security
Council. They then hastily removed 8,000 pages that
detailed the enormous amount of weapons and other
assistance provided by the U.S. government to Saddam
Hussein, and sold by American and Western
corporations to Iraq prior to 1991. While the Bush
administration censored this important information
to prevent it from becoming an obstacle in their
path to war, it enabled Americans and their media if
not to deny that we had aided Hussein, to at least
conveniently ignore it since it had been officially
erased from the historical record—a collective
amnesia that largely persists to this day.
And while most people were not displeased to see
Saddam Hussein removed from power—particularly the
Iraqi Kurds who were brutalized by his regime—U.S.
censorship of those 8,000 pages of the Iraqi weapons
report six years ago continues today to prevent any
serious dialogue of U.S. and Western responsibility
in the deadly rise of Saddam Hussein, particularly
in the media. We have conveniently removed ourselves
from this inhumane equation in which we were an
important variable. In short, the U.S. blacked out
its own name in supporting, both directly and by its
silence, the Kurdish genocide in Iraq.
Essentially repeating what I said a moment ago, it
is imperative that America and the West begin to
openly acknowledge their role in that terrible
tragedy—to accept responsibility—so that we can
transcend such reckless power politics and begin to
help create effective international policies that
puts human needs and concerns first, and that can
further serve as safeguards to human abuse in the
future.
Defeating the Ayatollah
Khomeini by any means necessary: The U.S. and West
sanction Iraqi terror and genocide
In 1983, Saddam Hussein began using chemical weapons
against the Iranians during the brutal Iran-Iraq war
in clear violation of the Geneva Protocol Against
Chemical Weapons. And for the next five years,
emboldened by the lack of official response—or
unofficial response, for that matter—from the U.S.
and international community, Hussein would use
chemical weapons approximately 195 more times on the
Iranians and then on his own civilian Kurds,
including women and children.
These chemical attacks against the Iraqi Kurds were
part of what is known as the Anfal campaign—a tragic
reference to a Kurdish hell all-too-familiar in Iraq
and the Middle East, but still largely unfamiliar to
many people in the U.S. Indeed, if a poll were taken
in America today, most people would probably respond
that they have never even heard of the Anfal
campaign.
This horrific operation to eliminate the rural
Kurdish population not only rained down lethal
chemical fire on the Kurds living in the towns of
Halabja, Guptapa and other villages in northern
Iraq, killing thousands of people, including many
children, and causing permanent genetic mutations
similar to those suffered by Japanese exposed to
radiation in the aftermath of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki—but the campaign also included the torture
and mass shooting executions of men, women and
children, the utter destruction of their villages
and hamlets, and the forced imprisonment of
thousands more in concentration camps where torture
and extreme malnutrition were routine. By 1989,
around 150,000 to 200,000 Kurds had been murdered,
almost 4,000 of their villages and hamlets destroyed
and over a million forcibly relocated. Moreover,
thousands more lay wounded and suffering in
unimaginable agony from chemical burns and
poisoning.
Shockingly, writes genocide scholar Samantha Power,
“at no point during the eighteen-month (Anfal)
campaign of destruction did Reagan administration
officials condemn it.” The neglect and silence of
the U.S. in the face of Hussein’s genocide of the
Kurds was made all the more appalling when
newly-elected president, George H.W. Bush, President
Reagan’s successor, renewed relations with Hussein
less than a year after Anfal, rewarding the dictator
with $1 billion dollars in credit loans, thus
doubling the annual amount he received from the U.S.
government while he was gassing and shooting Iranian
child-soldiers and Kurdish civilians.
The U.S., however, had been rewarding Hussein from
the very beginning with full-knowledge of his deadly
and illegal use of chemical warfare. From 1983 to
1988, America had reliable information from its own
intelligence, including satellite intelligence, and
other sources that Hussein was using chemical
weapons and literally wiping Kurdish villages off
the face of the map. Recently declassified U.S.
State Department memos from 1983 and 1984 reveals
“Iraq’s almost daily use of CW (chemical weapons)”
against the Iranians and Kurds, even quoting the
Iraqi government’s admission to having “annihilation
insecticide… that will destroy any moving creature.”
Indeed,www.ekurd.net
the United Nations had
sent fact-finding teams to Iraq in 1984, 1985, 1986
and 1987, writes Power, and each time concluded that
the Hussein regime had used chemical weapons. In
1988 alone, the U.N. had discovered “in seven
separate findings” that Iraq had used chemical
weapons against civilian Kurds. Amazingly, just
months after the first finding in 1984, which made a
brief spark in the international press, the U.S.,
rather than holding Iraq accountable and letting
Hussein know that such further crimes would not be
tolerated, actually extended diplomatic relations,
essentially sanctioning his behavior.
In doing so, the U.S. and international community
refused to take advantage of an opportune moment to
potentially prevent the horrendous nightmare of the
Kurdish genocide that followed. While they initially
toyed with the idea of discouraging Hussein from
further using chemical weapons and did eventually
offer a very weak objection—mostly out of concern
that violating the Geneva Protocol could be a public
relations nightmare in Iraq’s war against Iran, and
to U.S. credibility if it was perceived that they
failed to respond in some way (nothing about saving
lives—all about credibility and power) — in the end
they signaled to the dictator that he would not only
escape accountability for his past actions, but that
he could continue to confidently dispose of his
enemies or undesirables in the most brutal fashion
possible without any serious repercussions. Saddam’s
man in charge of the Anfal campaign, his cousin Ali
Hasan al Majid, expressed this brazen attitude to
kill and torture with immunity and without restraint
when he declared in a taped meeting with supporters,
“I will kill them all with chemical weapons! Who is
going to say anything? The international community?
F*** them!”
Al Majid had reason to be brash and arrogant. He
understood that the world’s strongest superpower was
obsessed with the military defeat of Iran and that
it supported Iraq. Former Bush Secretary of Defense,
Donald Rumsfield, had been sent to Iraq a few years
earlier to renew relations with Hussein. With Iran
and the United Nations accusing Iraq of using
chemical weapons, Rumsfield made it clear that “the
defeat of Iraq in the three-year-old-war with Iran
would be contrary to U.S. interests.” For America
and much of the West, the lives of the
innocent—children, women and men—were of little
concern, and the inhumane methods of death and
destruction used against them, reminiscent of the
Nazi genocide, such as chemical gassings, mass
shooting executions and concentration camps, could
be ignored or silenced as long as Saddam Hussein
defeated America’s then public enemy number one, the
Ayatollah Khomeini.
Tragically, until that end was achieved, essentially
any amount of suffering and death was acceptable. As
one unidentified Western diplomat openly admitted in
an interview with David McDowell, author of A Modern
History of the Kurds, in 1987: his “government had
no intention of jeopardizing its political and
economic prospects in Iraq and the Gulf for the sake
of the Kurds.” Moral and legal obligations,
supposedly the cornerstone of the American and many
Western systems of government, were simply brushed
aside in the name of oil, since the West feared this
prized Iraqi resource falling into the hands of the
Ayatollah; in the name of strategic power, where the
U.S. vehemently opposed a strong Iran in the Middle
East; and, we must not forget, moral and legal
obligations were discarded by the U.S. in its
obsession to take revenge against Iran for its
takeover of the American embassy in Tehran a few
years earlier, including the taking of American
hostages, and the Iranians unforgivable sin of
pursing self-determination by overthrowing America’s
puppet-leader, the Shah.
Simply put, the attitude of the U.S. seemed to be
that it wanted Iran defeated by any means necessary
and at any expense. In a top-secret message,
President Reagan even encouraged Saddam Hussein to
“step up his air war and bombing of Iran.” Moreover,
a senior intelligence defense officer told the New
York Times that the “use of gas on the battlefield
by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic
concern.” If the Kurds were the unfortunate
casualties crushed in the process, so be it. Saddam
Hussein would be given immunity and left alone (with
our help) to do what we wanted him to do, even if
terror was his means to our end.
Arming a genocidal regime
U.S. and Western assistance to Iraq, of course,
extended beyond diplomatic immunity to commit
genocide against the Kurds and chemical attacks
against the Iranians. We not only more or less gave
our consent, but we helped provide the resources and
weaponry that enabled Hussein to carry out his
campaign of terror against the Kurds. “Without
high-tech weapons from the West, “says one
correspondent, “Iraq’s war against Iran and Kuwait
would never have taken place.” Today, it is still
difficult to obtain a full detailed listing of all
the money, weapons, chemicals and other assistance
the U.S. and other Western countries provided and
sold to Hussein. The U.S., as mentioned, went to
extreme lengths to censor and delete specific parts
of Iraq’s Weapons Declaration that revealed American
and Western political and corporate complicity in
arming Hussein. But we at least have some of the
details from leaks in the press,www.ekurd.net
penetrating
investigative research and fairly recent
declassified U.S. documents. Moreover, we can
clearly demonstrate the important point that needs
to be stressed over and over, which is that much of
this assistance was done with full-knowledge of
Hussein’s crimes both during and after the Anfal
campaign as well as in the Iran-Iraq war. Thus,
something disturbingly new in history had taken
place: a democracy—a supposed defender of human
rights—intentionally aligned itself with a genocidal
regime.
In the U.S. alone, twenty-four companies, along with
fifty subsidiaries of foreign companies that sold
Iraq arms within U.S. borders, supplied Iraq with
billions of dollars worth of high-tech weapons and
infrastructure support to build more. These included
such corporate giants as Dupont, Hewlett-Packard,
Honeywell, Bechtel Group, Silicon Valley, Unisys,
Rockwell, Sperry and Eastman Kodak. American
companies also sold Hussein chemicals to make deadly
mustard gas and sarin, and they provided him with
seed stock or “starter germs” to create deadly
diseases whose names today strike terror in the
hearts of many living in western cities, such as
anthrax, botulism, West Nile Virus and E. coli.
Between 1986 and 1989, foreign policy expert
Chalmers Johnson writes that, “some seventy-three
transactions took place that included bacterial
cultures”—and this after the U.S. mildly objected to
Iraq’s use of chemical warfare. Even six months
after the Kurdish Hiroshima in Halabja—the largest
and most publicized chemical weapons
attack—journalist Paul Rockwell revealed that, “a
Maryland company sent 11 strains of germs—four types
of anthrax—to Iraq, including a microbe strain
called 11966, developed for germ warfare at Fort
Detrick (USA) in the 1950s.”
Beyond selling lethal chemical and biological agents
to Hussein, U.S. companies negligently provided his
genocidal regime with plans and technical drawings
on how to build chemical production facilities and
factories. This would be something equivalent to
providing Adolf Hitler with instructions for
building concentration camps and gas chambers in
Nazi Europe and selling him the Zyclon-B to boot.
Of course, U.S. weapons and chemical companies could
not have done business with Hussein without official
oversight and direct permission from the American
government. A 1994 report by the U.S. Senate Banking
Committee revealed that the U.S. government licensed
dozens of companies to sell weapons and weapons
parts and technology to Iraq, and repeatedly
approved the sale of “materials to make mustard gas,
VX nerve agent, anthrax and other biological and
chemical weapons.” The Senate report also stated
that, “the same micro-organisms exported by the U.S.
were identical to those U.N. inspectors found and
recovered from the Iraqi biological warfare
program.” This report came from the legislative
branch of the U.S. government of all places, and has
been public information for years, yet still
relatively few Americans are aware of it.
The U.S. also directly provided Iraq with billions
of dollars in farm credits, which were really
fraudulent loans that enabled Hussein to build up
his conventional and chemical weapons arsenal, and
they pressured other public and private entities to
give Iraq loans to purchase weapons exports. Under
President Reagan’s leadership, the CIA made sure
that Iraq had sufficient weapons, including gun,
tank and air bomber ammunition. They also made an
intense effort to get Hussein cluster bombs, which
kill and maim numerous human beings at one time as
they spread deadly bomblets over large areas. But
that’s precisely why CIA director, William Casey,
wanted them—so as to destroy “human waves” of
Iranians, as he so callously put it.
Today, modern battlefields are littered with cluster
bombs, which continue to kill long after wars have
ended. Indeed, “ninety-eight percent of those killed
by cluster bombs are civilians,” says one expert on
the issue. I wonder how many of these terribly
inhumane cluster bombs were used against the
Kurds—how many people were killed—how many Kurdish
and Iranian children were left maimed for life and
continue to be hurt and killed to this day? The
Pentagon and CIA further gave Iraq a steady stream
of “intelligence and strategic military advice,”
including techniques to increase kill efficiency in
combat. And a recently declassified document also
reveals that, “the CIA… provided Iraq, through third
parties that included Israel and Egypt, with
military hardware,” including helicopters used in
the shooting and chemical bombings of Kurds and
their villages. With all considered, the United
States government may have very well provided the
actual guns and bullets used in the mass shooting
executions of the Kurds, and the tanks and bombs
that destroyed their villages!
Of course, the U.S. was not alone—although as the
most powerful democracy in the world, its complicity
in supporting tyranny and genocide was the most
egregious. Several European countries and companies,
along with Russia, Japan, China and Brazil, also
sold Iraq an untold dollar amount in lethal military
hardware and arms, and materials to make chemical
weapons. Britain, Germany and France exported to
Iraq ignition systems for missiles capable of
carrying biological and nuclear warheads, and tanks,
bombers and helicopter gun ships. And like the U.S.,
Britain actually doubled its export credit to Iraq
after the Anfal campaign and the publicized chemical
attack on Halabja.
It also appears that perhaps a dozen German
pharmaceutical companies, with the assistance of the
government, provided Iraq with material and the
know-how to manufacture chemical weapons, lethal
assistance which was also sold to Hussein by France,
Italy and the Netherlands. Shockingly, once the
Anfal campaign was underway, a major German company
even gave cover for the importation of materials for
chemical weapons production in Baghdad. This was all
the more a mockery for the Kurds who were victims of
chemical attacks since it was Germany that first
developed and used chemical gas warfare on other
human beings in WWI, and now, over seventy years
later, was going to extraordinary lengths to keep
the wheels of chemical warfare turning at the
expense of the Kurdish people in Iraq.
Finally, it’s important to stress over and over in
an international forum the fact that leaders and
officials in all of the countries that helped arm
Saddam Hussein, especially the U.S., were aware that
he was using their assistance to murder and torture
civilians. And the executives at the corporations
manufacturing and supplying chemicals and
conventional weapons and support, sheltered by the
safety and luxury of their environments and
lifestyles, knew as well that the Iraqi dictator was
committing terror against his vulnerable Kurdish
minority. Yet they still made the choice to act
immorally and recklessly by assisting his mass
murder and genocide with knowledge of his crimes.
They can claim that their sales and assistance was
legal, which it may have very well been by some
precarious technical loophole, but they cannot
claim—and we should not let them claim—that their
actions were ethical and moral. Instead, we should
remind them that they bear responsibility for the
crimes of the Saddam Hussein regime, and that such
complicity in human suffering for the sake of power
and money will no longer be tolerated.
This unsettling point is important to stress since,
tragically, the U.S. and other governments still to
this day provide repressive and lethal regimes with
the means to kill. Indeed, the U.S. is by far the
largest exporter of weapons and military assistance
in the world, much of which goes to countries with
poor human rights records. And once again such
reckless behavior is negatively impacting the
Kurds—this time in Turkey. Indeed, Turkey is one of
the largest recipients of U.S. military hardware and
training, receiving billions of dollars worth
annually, and the government uses this weaponry and
military know-how to commit terror and repression
against the Kurds, a campaign of denying them
self-determination and ethnic rights that has been
ongoing for the last eighty years. Rather than
encouraging freedom and democratic rights for the
Kurds, who desperately need them, and holding Ankara
accountable, America is directly supporting tyranny
in Turkey, both materially and diplomatically, as it
did in Iraq during the 1980s.
This has to stop. As I stressed at the beginning of
this paper, it is time that the U.S. and
international community begin making human rights,
starting with the human rights and aspirations of
the Kurdish people, a cornerstone of their foreign
policies, moving beyond the old paradigm of only
considering strategic and material interests. The
U.S., however, has demonstrated time and again that
it is not willing to abide by the International
Court, or any other ethical standards of behavior
when it is not in its interest. Thus, we must
imaginatively, creatively and compassionately find
ways to recreate politics and international affairs,
and change the rules of behavior so that we can
minimize the conflicts between human rights and
narrow national interests. Indeed, the latter must
become subordinated to the former, not the other way
around as it is today. We—you and I—must do this
together, because if we continue to leave it to the
status quo and power elites, we will continue, by
our silence, apathy and fear, to curse the world
with more Halabjas, more Guptapas, and more Saddam
Husseins. We owe it to the children and future
generations to give them something better.
Nicholas Patler, freelance writer and independent
Scholar, August 6,
2008, Exclusively for eKURD.NET © All Rights
Reserved. You may reach the author via email at:
nickpatler (at) hotmail.com
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1- Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian
Genocide and America’s Response (New York: Harper
Collins Publishers, 2003) 369: U.S. commercial
interests were secured with the Turco-American
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2- Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire:
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That Aided Iraqis,” Long Island, NY Newsday,
December 13, 2002.
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1980-1984,” Document 61; Frida Berrigan, “Weapons of
war—killer of innocents: Like landmines, U.S. wants
its cluster bombs,” San Francisco Chronicle, January
7, 2007; Johnson, 224; Power, 173.
19- Rockwell, “Who Armed Iraq?” San Francisco
Chronicle; McDowell, 363, 367
20- McDowell, 363, 367 footnote 62; Preston, 52-53.
21- Nicholas Patler, “What We Owe Children: Solving
the world’s problems may require that we humble
ourselves to the fact that the U.S. contributes to
many of them,” Eightyone, August 2006: 32-33;
Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and
Consequences of American Empire (New York: Henry
Holt and Company, 2000) 14-15, 86-87; 655 report, FY
02 International Military Education & Training (www.
fas.org/asmp/profiles/655-2002/6552002.html).
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