The Kurdish genocide is more than the Anfal

This text was published in Aso newspaper the 4th April 2010. Aso is the biggest newspaper in Kurdistan, it is published in Sulaymania.

The anniversary of the Anfal is soon. When Kurds speak about the Kurdish genocide they usually mean the Anfal. But it is only the peak of the genocide process, which is much bigger than the Anfal.

Ottoman Kurdistan was divided between Iraq, Turkey and Syria after the First World War. The process which led to the Anfal started in Lausanne in 1923. Arabs and Turks started to assimilate Kurds by all means. But Kurds resisted in many small revolutions. Usually historians speak about them as local uprisings without seeing the context. The uprisings were not separate incidents.

Arabization of Kurds started with milder forms like making education in Arabic language. But Kurds refused to give up their identity and they have defended it since those days. So oppression methods became harder.

Television programs and newspaper articles about the Anfal show horrible pictures of dead bodies and skeletons. This gives audience an image that genocide is same than killing. It is that but it is also other things.

There are many forms of genocide and various methods to make it. The aim of the perpetrators is to force the target group to change its identity. Cultural and linguistic genocides are methods for this. If Kurds forget their language, after some generations they will be Arabs. There is no need to kill them.

Well, Kurds have refused to forget their culture and identity. So the oppressors took harder methods. Local uprisings were ended brutally. The aim of brutalities was not to kill all of them but teach a lesson: you must accept to become Arabs! In the 1970s and 1980s Kurds still refused to do it. Men were fighting as peshmergas and women folk assisted them. All methods to change Kurds into Arabs had turned out to be in vain. So Ba'ath party decided to move to the final stage of the genocide process, the total annihilation of Kurds. The Anfal started.

The Iraqi Parliament has accepted the Anfal as genocide. It is a good start for the international recognition of the Anfal. It is important that especially the Arab World would understand that genocide happened in Iraq in 1988.

The Kurds themselves should understand whole the horrible process which their land has gone through during 87 years. It is necessary for the sake of understanding and solving the present problems.

The victims of massacres before the Anfal and victims of deportations and purposefully caused starvation are also victims of genocide. The amount of the victims of the Kurdish genocide is much more than 182 000 people. No one knows how many. Many Kurdish generations were suffering last century.

For the victims, of course, it does not matter what is the cause of their death. But for the survivors it is important to understand what really happened. They live in a post-genocide society. And the future generations need to know what atrocities happened to their ancestors.