Anfal and the Rwandan genocide

This text was published in Xebat the 27th December 2008.

I visited Iraqi Kurdistan spring and autumn this year and collected information about Anfal. The scale of Saddam's destruction and the horrifying nature of Anfal shocked me.

After returning to my native country Finland, I searched information about Anfal and genocides in general. It surprised me how little there is information in internet about Anfal. For example about the Rwandan genocide there is so many documents, best seller books and popular movies, for example “Hotel Rwanda” which was a candidate for three Oscar awards, the most respected movie awards in the world. It did not win any of them, but even a candidacy is a good achievement.

The Rwandan genocide occurred 1994, also five years later than Anfal. Why the international community has recognized the genocide that happened in Africa but not a similar case in Iraq? In addition, it is not doing anything even now when the Allies have liberated Iraq from Saddam’s tyranny! Why his atrocities are not being surveyed intensively?

When I have asked Kurds to explain this to me, many people have spoken about the Western support to Saddam Hussein during the 1980s. That was the time of Iraq-Iran war. NATO countries sold weapons to Saddam and he used them against his own citizens. Now these countries are ashamed for this and do not want the truth to come to day light.

Kurds and KRG want Anfal to become internationally recognized. Before the international community can announce Anfal as genocide, it must know what Anfal is.

Iraq war is the hottest topic in international mass media. There are several well selling books about it, and new ones are published all the time. They are sold as cheap paperback editions. Readers can buy them easily via internet in every part of the world, except not in Iraq. There are plenty of books also about the Sudan civil war, the Afghanistan war and the Rwandan genocide. Anfal is absolutely as important news topic as them but information about it is missing in the international forums.

Kurds should not wait passively than foreign writers and filmmakers come to Kurdistan to document Anfal. That might happen, or might not.

Kurds must arrange very many things to clear the destruction, which Saddam left. You have to handle the every day problems of the genocide survivors. It is not an easy work to document the genocide in addition to that and distribute the information to international forums. For Armenians it took several generations. The Armenian genocide occurred 1915 but only now the international community is little by little starting to recognize it.

But if the Kurds do not do this work by themselves, no one else will neither do it. It is unfair that it is the responsibility of the victim to get justice. However, so it is.

If you Kurds want Anfal to be recognized as genocide, you must make international lobby for it. There must be a long perspective plan for it. Despite it is difficult thing in a chaotic country where the urgent problems take all the attention of the decision makers. Nevertheless, it is the only way to reach the target, international recognition of Anfal.