Genocide research needs a good plan

The Anfal Campaign happened twenty three years ago. No time should be wasted in documenting it: now people still remember details of Anfal but they forget more and more as the time is passing.

Collection of the memories must be done in a systematic way. My experience is that members of the Anfal families have a big need to talk about their experiences. And of course it is important that someone listens them. But research interviews must be done according a systematic plan and the target of the research must be clear.

With all the respect to Kurdish activists who document Anfal: my experience of their work is that often the main focus is to express how horrible thing Anfal was. We all agree about this. Academic research has other targets, it goes deeper. Art expresses feelings and emotions, scientific research facts. There is need for both of them. If the KRG wants Anfal to be accepted internationally as a genocide, the artistic methods are not enough despite they help the Kurds to go further in the healing process. There is need to present hard facts by academic research which is done according to international standards.

In 1918 there was a few months long civil war in my native country Finland after it had got her independence. The civil war still affects the country. New research, books, and movies are being made all the time.

The Kurdish genocide is much bigger issue than the Finnish civil war. The Kurds will document, survey and express their feelings about it for generations by methods of art, research, and civil society activities. Many different methods are necessary. Some of them are spontanous. But academic research, to be internationally respected, should not be spontanous or local. There must be a good plan to decide the priorities of the research.

And when the plan is ready, there must be enough of economical resources to make it true.

This text was published is Asos newspaper in Sulaymaniyah in Sebtember 2011.

Iraqi Kurdistan is a post-genocidal society

Photo: Chamachamal the 13th April 2010.

In April Kurdistan was mourning the anniversary of the Anfal. There were ceremonies in many places, for example in Chamchamal and in Kalar. In these ceremonies and in mass media the symbol of the Anfal was pictures of Anfal widows, women in black clothes with a permanent sorrow on their face.

Their destiny is horrible. But when news about the Anfal are always visualised by pictures of Anfal families, it gives audience a false idea that the Anfal affected only those families who lost their members. A genocide affects the whole society for a very long time, for many generations. The pain of mother whose child disappeared is easy to see. But the wider effects of the Anfal are hidden. They have an impact on all Kurds. Kurdistan is a post-genocidal society.

182 000 Kurds were murdered in the Anfal campaign. Their destiny is a crime which must be surveyed in criminal investigations. Effects of the Anfal on the Kurdish society is another issue. Mass media shows the Anfal usually as the dissappearance of a huge amount of people but it is also other atrocities. Many villages were burnt in spring 1988. Villagers who survived the Anfal, were forced to leave their homes. They were deported to towns.

They are also victims of the Anfal. Their situation must be understood. I do not mean "that the KRG must help them" as people here in Kurdistan say about every problem. When Kurdish villages were destroyed, a huge amount of Kurdish culture and knowledge disappeared.

Until the end of 1980s Kurds were active producers. Kurdish villages were self-sufficient, they could produce everything by methods which had been passed from generation to generation for decades, maybe for centuries. Knowledge which was suitable especially to Kurdistan's conditions.

Autoritarian regimes want to make people passive and dependent of the state. Also the Baath regime behaved this way. When Saddam deported Kurds to central villages his target was to prevent Kurds producing their food themselves and make them dependent of the government.

The Ba'ath regime is gone, but Kurds have not become self-sufficient. They are dependent of another government, the KRG. Active producer society has turned into a passive consumer society and food is imported from abroad.

How to change the situation?

People demand help from KRG to every problem. But this way of thinking is not the solution, it is part of the problem. People must solve the problems by themselves, not wait that some one provides ready solutions.

I know this is huge task. And it is not the fault of Kurds that Baath regime destroyed their production systems and society.

There is need for wide perspective research about the effects of the Anfal, not only documentation of the atrocities. It is the only way to understand all effects of the Anfal. It is the first step in searching solutions to problems of a post-genocidal society.

Human Rights of Dead People

This text was published in Aso newspaper (in Sulaymania) the 12th April 2010.

”Human rights” is internationally one of the central terms when speaking about justice and development. They are considered to be a basic right for all people. Also for all living people. According to international law human rights end at the moment of death.

Finnish forensic odontologist Helena Ranta disagrees with this. According to her dead people have three basic rights: a grave, their name in it and funeral ceremonies according to their religion. This is reflected also in the Additional Protocol 1 of Geneva Convention from 1977. It is the most important international convention about warfare conditions.

According to Dr Helena Ranta the forensic expert community agrees that also dead have human rights.

Dr Helena Ranta says that it is the right of the families to know the cause of death of their beloved ones. Without this information it is very difficult for them to continue their own lives. The families have also right to bury their deceased.

Dr Helena Ranta is the head of the Finnish Forensic Expert Team. She has been surveying mass graves around the world over fifteen years.

She writes in an essay about the importance of the grave:
”At the grave the relatives can remember and pay tribute to them who have gone before them.”

In Kurdistan April is the month of remembering and mourning the victims of the Anfal. Last year there was funeral of Anfal victims in Kalar, this year similar ceremony was in Chamchamal.

When following such ceremonies in the grave yard or from mass media, one should keep in mind these three basic rights of dead people: funeral ceremonies, grave and name in it.

182 000 people disappeared in the Anfal. Only few thousand bodies have been found. The found victims have been buried to their home areas. But how many of them got all the three rights of dead people? Most of the buried victims have got the two first rights: Islamic funeral ceremony and a grave. But not their name in it. There are grave yards of the victims of the Anfal and the Barzan genocide but no one knows who are lying in the graves. In the graveyeard of the disappeared Barzanis near Bile no grave has a name. 8300 Barzanis disappeared 1983, only 503 bodies have been found.

Barzan genocide happened twenty seven years ago and the Anfal twenty two years ago. Most of us believe that no one of the disapperared persons is returning alive. But the mothers and fathers, wives and husbands – some of them, not all - refuse to believe the death of their beloved ones until they see the body. They wait for their return and spend their own life by dreaming. There are miracle stories like Ali who returned to Halabja twenty two years after his disappearance. Such returns are unique but they fuel the dreams of the families who have lost their members.

The Anfal happened more than twenty decades ago. Many of the elderly survived family members have suffered so much that their pain has had permanent effect on them. Maybe it is too late for them to return to normal life like Dr Helena Ranta says. But they get peace in their mind if they know what happened to their beloved ones and they have a grave where they can vein. The human rights of dead people and the
rights of their families belong together.

Anfal funeral in Chamchamal

106 Anfal victims were buried in their home region Chamchamal in South Kurdistan on Tuesday the 13th April 2010. Prime minister Dr Barham Salih and former prime minister Nechirvan Barzani attended the funeral.

Ba'ath party and Saddam Hussein committed Anfal, the Kurdish genocide in spring 1988. The amount of victims is 182 000. There is more information about it in Sahmaran blog under titles "Anfal"; "Genocide" and "Human Rights of dead people".





Photos: Kristiina Koivunen

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.

My interview about the Kurdish genocide

My interview was published in Kurdish language the 10th March 2010 in Hewler newspaper, a daily newspaper which is distributed free of charge. The interview was done by Wirya Rehmany.

Here are Wirya's questions and my answers:

What is your idea about genocide of Kurdish nation in all parts of Kurdistan (especially Kurdistan of Turkey and Iraq)?

The genocide process started when Kurdistan was divided in the Treaty of Lausanne. Kurds become an unregocnised minority in Turkey. In Iraq they did not get cultural or linguistic rights, despite they were recognized as a minority.

Iraq and Turkey started immediately to assimilate Kurds by force. But Kurds did not accept to become Turks and Arabs, they arranged uprisings. Turkey and Iraq replied by force, not by negotiations and compromises. The oppression had from the 1920s genocidal character but it started with milder forms than massacres, for example by cultural and linguistic assimilation. The peak of the genocide process was the Anfal in 1988.

Which kinds of genocide happen in Kurdistan (physical, cultural genocide and etc?

State violence in both Iraq and Turkey towards the Kurds increased from forced assimilation to harder violence, to deportations and massacres.

Polist jurist Raphael Lemkin, on whose theory the United Nation Convention against Genocide is based, has described eight genocidal methods. He analyzed Holocaust, the genocide of the Jews during the Second World War. The methods are: political, social, cultural, economic, biological, physical, religious and moral genocide. 

I think Saddam Hussein used all these methods against the Kurds except the last one. He could not break their moral. Lemkin means by moral genocide for example increase in alcohol consumpition. As far as I know alcohol or drugs are not a problem among the Iraqi Kurds. But in Iran the use of drugs, especially opium among Kurdish youth is so big problem that maybe it fits Lemkin's describtion of a moral genocide. 

I add two genocidal methods: ecological and statistical genocides. Saddam Hussein used both of them in Kurdistan, and they cause still serious problems. 

Ecological genocide means destruction of the environment permanently so that it effects life of the target group for many generations. Maybe in some areas it will turn permanently impossible to live in. 

Iraqi army bombed Halabja by chemical weapons, and the poisons are still in the environment. The ground water in Halabja is polluted, no one knows how badly. Halabja people have much more cancer and other diseases than Iraqi people in general. 

Another example is Germia. The side effect of deportation of hundreads of thousands of people to so called model villages is pollution of the environment. The areas which were first refugee camps have become permanent residence areas. For example Kalar is on the edge of desert. The arrival 200 000 people causes permanent damages to the vulnerable environment. The ground water will run out after some decades and the area becomes desert. Next generation must search a better place to live. 

Statistical genocide means falcification of statistics and research. Saddam practised it especially in Kirkuk province. 

How do you see the Halabja and Anfal case in high tribunal of Iraq? If Halabja chemical bombardment is genocide and why the court didn't recognize it as genocide?

I am not familiar to these trials. I see that the Kurdish genocide is a process which has lasted many decades. Halabja chemical bombardment lasted a few days and the Anfal three months. Iraq and the international community should regocnize the whole genocide process in Kurdistan. Halabja bombardment and Anfal are the most horrible parts of it. But there has been massacres in Halabja, in Karadaghi, in Barzan and in many other places since the 1960s. The people who have been murdered in them are also victims of genocide, not victims of "ordinary massacres".

What is the importance of recognition of Kurdish genocide in international arena?

I see that it is a necessary step in finding solution to the Kurdish question. Other genocides, like the one in Rwanda and Kamputcea, have been surveyd by local and international researchers. Only by making in-depht research the complexity of the genocide process can be understood. There is still danger of new genocides, especially in the disputed areas. To prevent them it is necessary to understand how the process developed little by little in other Kurdish areas.

What should Kurdistan regional government doing about Kurdish genocide (especially in international community).

KRG should establish a genocide research institute. Many reports have been made about Anfal and other genocidal acts. But there is need also for in-depth analysis about the Kurdish genocide. It should be done according international academic standards. KRG should study how the Armenians succeeded getting their genocide of 1915 regocnized by the international community. Their lobby in Washington, Paris and London is based on decades long support for the research about the Armenian genocide.

Television programme about Kurdish genocide

Kurdistan TV will send a programme about Anfal and Kurdish genocide this week. I am one of the persons interviewed in the program.

Program times:

Part 1:

Tuesday the 19th January 2010 at 7.15 PM
and second programming Wednesday the 20th January 2010 at 10 AM

Part 2:

Wednesday the 20th January 2010 at 7.15 PM
and second programming Thursday the 21st January 2010 at 10 AM

Funeral of Anfal Victims in Rizgari the 14th April 2009

I am now back in Finland after spending nine months in South Kurdistan. I have thousands of pictures and as I have finally possibility to use internet which is fast and working every day, I will put some of my pictures to Sahmaran during the coming weeks.

I start with pictures from funeral of Anfal victims in Rizgari the 14th April 2009.

Anfal, the Kurdish genocide, happened in eight waves in 1989. We mourn now the twentieth anniversary of Anfal.

These bodies were found 2008 in Najaf, where has been found until now 45 mass graves where are both murdered Kurds and Shia Arabs.

Bodies of 187 Anfalized Kurds were identified and returned to Hewlêr the 21st November 2008. They were buried to their home region the 14th April which is the anniversary of the Guermian Anfal. In Rizgari, near Kalar, is a grave yard for these Anfal victims.

When the bodies arrived November 2008 from Najaf to Erbil International Airport, president Masoud Barzani received them. But he did not appear in the funeral in Rizgari, which was a disappointment to the families of the Anfalized martyrs. Neither came president Jalal Talabani (but he sent his wife Hero) or prime minister al Maliki.

Here are pictures from the funeral:














Pictures by Kristiina Koivunen

Human Rights of Dead People

Graveyard of Barzan Anfal victims.

Do dead people have human rights? According to Finnish Dr Helena Ranta they have three basic rights: a grave, their name in it and funeral ceremonies according their religion or belief.

Last September I visited the graveyard of the Anfalized Barzan men near Bile. It was a big victory in the search of the Anfal victims when the bodies of five hundred Barzanis were found. They were buried with Islamic funeral ceremonies in their home region.

Any way, the first thing which came to my mind in this graveyard was the statement by Helena Ranta of the rights of the dead people. Five hundred victims of Barzan Anfal have got two of the three rights: a grave and funeral ceremonies. But they do not have their name in their grave. No one knows whose bodies were found and who are still missing.

Dr Helena Ranta is forensic odontologist and Team Leader of the Finnish Forensic Expert Team. She has written several articles about the human rights of dead people. The latest of them was published last November in an essay collection in Finland. She writes there:

”The lawyer’s view, unwavering in logic but simultaneously narrow in focus, is that human rights belong only to the living. My personal view is that even the dead have human rights.
I regard being buried according to one’s religion and traditions in a grave that bears one’s own name a human right. That right is closely related to the rights of the relatives; namely, they have right to know how their loved ones died.
Only this information and the existence of a grave can help them to close the door to the past and build their life again in a damaged society”, writes Dr. Helena Ranta.

When I read these lines I remembered a view from the movie ”All my mothers” which tells about Barzan Anfal and the brave Barzan widows: The funeral convoy carrying the five hundred Anfal victims to their funeral travelled through the Barzan villages. Roads were full of mourning people, who joined the convoy. One elderly Barzan lady refused to believe that the body of her husband was among those to be buried. She refused to believe the death of her husband. She still waits him to return, for more than twenty years. Her waiting will end only if she gets documents stating the death of her husband. She is living in her memories.

Dr Ranta’s text about the importance of the grave continues:
”At the grave the relatives can remember and pay tribute to them who have gone before them. The forensic research community agrees that the dead also have human rights. This way of thinking springs from the ethical code of the discipline and is indirectly supported by Additional Protocol 1 to the Geneva Convention from 1977.”

Dr. Helena Ranta is coordinator at the department of Forensic Medicine Helsinki University for Disaster Victim Identification and International Missions.

She has been leading the forensic investigations of deceased found in mass graves since 1996 in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Cameroon, Peru and Iraq.

March 2003 Mrs. Ranta was Chamber Witness in Haag International Tribunal at the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia) at the court case of Slobodan Milosevic.

Mrs Ranta was advisor of the Truth and Conciliation Commission in Peru. She has coordinated Master of Science education in forensic sciences and human rights at the Catholic University of Lima in Peru, South-America.

I interviewed Dr Ranta two years ago about the difficulties in searching disappeared persons:

”There are lots of problems in accomplishing these basic rights in the battle fields all around the world. Despite situations are different the circumstances are always the same: there is a country which is breaking down and it turning against its own citizen.”

Quotations: Dr. Helena Ranta: The Right to be buried, in Suomalainen-Karvinen: The Ahtisaari legacy: Resolve and Negotiate. Tammi 2008

Genocide studies lesson provided by the Armenians

Church of Tigran Honents in Ani, the ancient Armenian capital. This photo is from the boarder of Turkey (left) and Armenia (right), in between is river Arpacay, which can not be seen here.

Photo: Kristiina Koivunen.

This text was published in Xebat on Monday the 5th January 2009.

Some days ago I compared Anfal and the Rwanda genocide in Xebat. There is a need to compare also the Armenian genocide and Anfal. Kurdistan Regional Government wants Anfal to be internationally recognized. Therefore, Kurds need to study how Armenians succeeded in reaching similar target with their genocide, after many decades it occurred.

Many foreign journalists visit North Iraq, write their stories and travel away. When the tension on the Turkish boarder becomes very hot, journalists arrive to Hewlêr like birds that fly to south in autumn and to north in spring. The same way these war reporters fly away as soon as the conflict tenses down. They move to the next war zone in some other part of the world. Their writing is important for Kurds. However, it does not serve the purpose of reaching international recognition of Anfal.

Genocide is very complex issue. A reporter cannot understand it deeply enough during a short visit. Neither can genocide be described well in newspaper articles or television programmes. It is so wide and complicated issue that it can be explained well only in books. I have read in internet and newspapers several well-written articles about Anfal. They are usually interviews of Anfal victims or NGO representatives working with the Kurdish genocide. They express the fate of interviewed persons and their pain, often there is also some background information about Anfal.

Stories in mass media are important, but they have different audience than books, which can be anything from travel stories to academic dissertations. Newspaper stories are written to big audience, so they may not be too difficult to read. Usually they repeat every time same background information, as some of the audience might be not at all familiar with the issue. Politicians do not make their decisions based on information provided by mass media. Of course, they follow it intensively but they need also harder facts. Newspaper stories should be followed by such documents which provide deeper analysis about the situation.

Some war reporters stay so long time in a war zone that they get enough of information for a book instead of newspaper articles. There are several well selling books in English language about the Iraqi war. But they express Baghdad perspective not Hewlêr perspective. Examples of such books are Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” and Jeremy Scahill’s “Blackwater”.

Maybe some journalists will stay long enough in Hewlêr to write books about their experiences here - especially if Hewlêr turns into a war frontier. However, most probably such books would not tell about Anfal. It happened too long time ago for the interests of the mass media houses which look for profit. Such atrocities are not selling which happened one generation ago!

The Armenian immigrants residing in United States and Europe have understood this. The recognition of the Armenian Genocide in France and discussions about it in the United States are based on massive research material about the topic. It is gathered by scientific methods so it not possible to deny it. Armenians immigrants have themselves supported research about the Armenian genocide.

In many countries it is possible for outsiders to finance research in universities by paying the salary of a professor and all the necessary costs related to scientific research about some topic. It is long process to get university’s acceptance for this, it is not enough that the donor has enough of money. Academic research is objective; it does not function so that any rich person goes to a university and orders a research according his interest. Any way, by this method Armenians have managed to get enough of evidence about their genocide to get it internationally accepted. It has taken long time.

Their success is a good lesson for KRG to study in making their long perspective plan on research about Anfal. Scientific documenting and analysis are compulsory if Kurds want to get international recognition for Anfal.

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.