#anfal genocide

[dougielombax]

Also leaving this here since today is the Remembrance Day for victims of the Anfal genocide.

Where Saddam Hussein (with the help of the MEK) and his cronies slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Kurds and Assyrians (and other minorities) in Iraq near the end of the Iran-Iraq war.

I posted about it earlier this year not too long ago.

Feel free to reblog.

[navramanan]

sincerely hope from the bottom of my heart that saddam burns in the deepest pits of hell

[aradxan]

[reasonandempathy]

Saw this and I actually wanted to add some actual details, in case people didn't know/weren't curious.

US Specific Recessions:

Recession of 1990 and 1991

2000 to 2001 Recession

The Great Recession, from 2007 to 2009 (this does not include the recovery, which took years and arguably never really happened)

The COVID Recession

Genocides:

Rohingya (2016 and ongoing)

Iraqi Turkmen (2014-2017)

Yazidis Genocide (2014-2019)

Darfur (2003 and ongoing)

Congolese (2002-2003)

Hutus (1996-1997)

Rwanda (1994)

Bosnia (1992-1995)

I'm presuming we can all agree he was also referring to Ghaza right now

So yeah. 9 Genocides and 4 major recessions since 1990. If he was born in 1985 there are 3 more genocides (Anfal, Gukurahundi, and Isaaq).

[literallymechanical]

Incredible book. There’s no way to describe Exordia fully in a sentence, so, it’s about Obama-era foreign policy and the 1980’s Anfal Kurdish genocide and storytelling and first contact à la Roadside Picnic à la E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, by the author of The Traitor Baru Cormorant. Science Fiction Fantasy Horror Queer Mystery, I guess??

(Also, you should read The Traitor Baru Cormorant)

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #6 – Exordia by Seth Dickinson

This is a book I have been looking forward to for quite literally years, from someone who is easily one of my favourite working authors. I also read the short story the book was expanded out from before I even knew it was going to be a book, and so went in spoiled on the broad strokes of what turned out to be the climax of the whole thing. All to say my opinion on this is unlikely to match that of the typical reader, I guess.

Anyway, Exordia is a glorious spectacular mess that has no right to cohere anywhere near as well as it does. It’s target audience is small, but I’m certainly somewhere in it. Please ignore all the marketing it’s so bad you have to wonder if someone at Tor just has it out for the author.

Exordia is a, well, a profoundly difficult book to give any sort of plot summary for. The first act involves Anna, a 30-something survivor of the Anfal Genocide now living a rather unimpressive life in New York City, until one day in the early 2010s she sees an alien eating the turtles in Central Park. Then there’s a cat-and-mouse hunt between terrifying alien snake-centaurs for the future of free will in the galaxy, and the plot jumping to kurdistan, and six more POV characters from as many different nations, and nuclear weapons, and oh so many people dying messily. The first act is an oddly domestic and endearing piece of table setting, the second is (to borrow the idiom of the book’s own marketing) Tom Clancy meets Jeff Vandermeer or Roadside Picnic, and the third is basically impossible to describe without a multipage synopsis, but mostly concerned with ethical dilemmas and moral injuries. It’s to the book’s credit that it never bats an eye at shifting focus and scale, but it does make coming to grips with it difficult.

This is, as they say, a thematically dense book, but it’s especially interested in the fallout of imperialism. The Obama-era ‘don’t do stupid shit’ precise and sterile form of it in particular – the book’s a period piece for a reason, after all. The ethics of complicity – of being offered the choice of murdering and betraying those around you or having an alien power with vastly superior destructive powers inflict an order of magnitude more misery to you, them, and everyone in the same general vicinity to punish you for the inconvenience – is one that gets a lot of wordcount. It is not an accident that the man most willing and able to collaborate with the overwhelming powerful alien empire in hopes of bargaining some future for humanity is the National Security Council ghoul who came out of organizing surveillance information for the drone wars. It’s also not a coincidence that the main (if only by a hair) protagonist is someone with a lot of bitter memories over how the US encouraged Iraq’s kurdish population to rebel in the ‘90s and then just washed their hands and let them be massacred (the book couldn’t actually ship with a historical primer on modern kurdish history, so it’s woven into the story in chunks with varying amount of grace. But it is in fact pretty thematically key here).

Speaking of complicity, the book’s other overriding preoccupation in (in the broadest sense) Trolley Problems. Is it better to directly kill a small number of people or, through your inaction, allow a larger number to die? Does it matter is the small number is your countrymen and the larger foreigners, or vice versa? What about humans and aliens? Does it matter whether the choice is submitting to subjugation or killing innocents as a means to resist it? What about letting people around you die to learn the fundamental truth of the cosmos? Does the calculus change when you learn that immortal souls (and hell) are real? This is the bone the story is really built around chewing on.

All that probably makes the text seem incredibly didactic, or at least like a philosophical dialogue disguised as a novel. Which really isn’t the case! The book definitely has opinions, but none of the characters are clear author-avatars, and all perspectives are given enough time and weight to come across as seriously considered and not just as cardboard cutouts to jeer at. Okay, with the exception of one of the two aliens who you get the very strong sense is hamming it up as a cartoon villain just for the of it (he spends much of the book speaking entirely in all caps). There definitely are a couple points where it feels like the books turning and lecturing directly at the reader, but they’re both few and fairly short.

The characters themselves are interesting. They’re all very flawed, but more than that they’re all very...embodied, I guess? Distracted with how hot someone is, concerned with what they ate that morning or the smell of something disgusting, still not over an ex from years ago. Several of them are also sincerely religious in a way that’s very true to life to actual people but you rarely see in books. The result is that basically comes as being far more like actual humans than I’m at all used to in most fiction (of course, a lot of those very human qualities get annoying or eye-roll inducing fairly quickly. But hey, that’s life). Though that’s all mostly the case at the start of the book – the fact that the main cast are slowly turning into caricatures of themselves as they’re exposed to the alien soul manipulation technology is actually a major plot point, which I’m like fifty/fifty on being commentary on what happens to the image and legacy of people as they’re caught up in grand narratives versus just being extended setup for a joke about male leads in technothrillers being fanfic shipbait.

Part of the characters seeming very human is that some (though by no means all) of the POVs are just incredibly funny, in that objectively fucked up and tasteless way that people get when coping with overwhelming shock or trauma. It’s specifically because the jokes are so in-your-face awful that they fit, I think? It manages to avoid the usual bathetic trap a lot of works mixing in humour with drama fall into, anyway.

Speaking of alien soul manipulation technology – okay, you know how above I said that the points where the book directly lectured the reader were few and far between. This is true for lectures about politics or morality. All the freed up space in this 530 page tome is instead used for technobabble about theoretical math. Also cellular biology, cryptography, entropics, the organization of the American security state, how black holes work, and a few dozen other things. This book was edited for accuracy by either a doctoral student from every physical science and an award winning mathematician, or else just by one spectacularly confident bullshitter with several hundred hours on wikipedia. Probably both, really. I did very much enjoy this book, but that is absolutely predicated on the fact that when I knew when to let my eyes glaze over and start skimming past the proper nouns.

The book has a fairly complete narrative arc in its own right, but the ending also screams out for a sequel, and quite a lot of the weight and meaning of the book’s climax does depend on followthrough and resolution in some future sequel. Problematically, the end of the book also includes a massive increase in scale, and any sequel would require a whole new setting and most of a new cast of characters, so I’m mildly worried how long it will be before we get it (if ever).

The book is also just very...I’m not sure flabby is the right word, but it is doing many many different things, and I found some of them far more interesting than others. I’m not sure whether Dickinson just isn’t great at extended action scenes or if I am just universally bored by drawn out Tom Clancy fantasies, but either way there were several dozen pages too many of them. The extended cultural digressions about the upbringing and backstories of each of the seven POVs were meanwhile very interesting! (Mostly, I got bored of the whole Erik-Clayton-Rosamaria love triangle Madonna complex thing about a tenth of the way into the book but it just kept going.) It did however leave the book very full of extended tangents and digressions, even beyond what the technobabble did. Anna herself, ostensibly the main protagonist, is both utterly thematically loadbearing but very often feels entirely vestigial to the actual, like, plot, brought along for the ride because she’s an alien terrorist’s favourite of our whole species of incest-monkeys. The end result is, if not necessarily unfocused, then at least incredibly messy, flitting back and forth across a dozen topics that on occasion mostly just seem unified by having caught the author’s interest as they wrote.

It’s interesting to compare the book to Anna Saves It All, the short story it was based on – quite a lot changed! But that’s beyond the scope of this already overlong review. So I guess I’ll just say make sure to read the book first, if you’re going to.

[heretic-child]

palestinian kids with a mural of palestine flag // kurdish kids with a damaged mural of saddam hussein.

iraqi ba’athist regime was supported by palestinian authorities during gulf war which ended up with genocide against kurds known as anfal campaign to arabize them.

regardless of the sides and politics, the real losers of the war is children.

[scottishcommune]

Analysis, Nov 27th Last night, the Kurdish People’s Democratic Assembly in Haringey, London, was subject to nothing short of an aggressive invasion by the police. There were no warrants and no legitimate reason for the aggression and violence that they conducted themselves with against a community of civilians celebrating a cultural event. This invasion by the Metropolitan Police comes only two days after UK defence minister Grant Shapps and Turkish counterpart Yaşar Güler held a meeting agreeing to “enhance” defence and security cooperation. As a result of foreign influence on parliament, we are seeing an increase in the number of people within our communities being arrested through the liberally applied ‘Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act‘ (2000), including last week when our community was subject to another aggressive display by the police as they swarmed a small protest, outnumbering the protesters themselves and separating parents from the children, then interrogating them in front of their helpless and crying children. There is also the upcoming trial of Mark Campbell and a Kurdish asylum seeker, ‘Berîtan’, on the 17th and 18th of January, who will face trial for holding a Kurdish flag during a protest.

We must also highlight that this year is also 100 years since Kurdistan was divided by the Sykes-Picot agreement. Since that agreement, the Kurdish people have been subject to continuous attempts of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and ecocide by Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, including the Dersim Massacre, the Anfal Genocide Campaign, the Yazidi Genocide, etc. As a result, many civilians are forced to seek asylum in the UK and elsewhere. Yet what we are seeing is that, despite Turkey’s support for the ISIS insurgency in North and East Syria, the ethnic cleansing they have committed in Afrîn, and their heinous violations of human rights in Turkish prisons, as members of NATO, Grant Shapps and the UK government would have us believe that they are valuable allies whose “influence cannot be underestimated.” The Kurdish People’s Democratic Assembly invites all ethnic, religious, and cultural communities and organisations across the UK to unite with us to prevent the criminalisation of communities, mainly through the misuse of the Terrorism Act. The Metropolitan Police should not be a ‘for hire’ mercenary service to do the bidding of foreign dictatorships, and UK politicians must not be able to use the means of the justice system to advance their own political agendas. Long Live the Democratic Resistance Biji Berxwedan ~ Kurdish People’s Democratic Assembly Britain

[canichangemyblogname]

Ugh. The BBC (derogatory) 😠.

During the World News Hour, they were covering South Africa’s ICJ case against Israel. And rather than tell the audience what South Africa had to say, they interviewed an Israeli official to gather Israel’s “thoughts” on this.

What??? Hello? That’s not coverage of this ICJ case? We’ll get to hear Israel’s case and Israel’s “thoughts” on the case on Friday when they present their defense. What did South Africa present? Tell me about South Africa’s case. WHAT DID SOUTH AFRICA SAY?

And the official’s main arguments— and if these are Israel’s arguments before the ICJ, they’re screwed— were essentially, “We have enough fire power to kill them all in one day, but we dragged this out instead. That makes us merciful and means we care about civilians,” “South Africa is a Hamas apologist,” “Hamas wants to genocide, so we have to kill people,” and “This is war and this is what happens during war. People die. It could not possibly be genocide because it’s war.”

Now, that last point is so, so insidious. Because it’s literally just genocide revisionism. Most genocides in modern history have happened during a war or were inspired by armed conflict. IREL scholars and lawyers point to the fact genocide often happens within the context of war as a reason for international inefficacy in prosecuting and preventing genocide. Because war oft obfuscates what happens and provides (a thin) rhetorical justification for the perpetrators of genocide: “It’s not genocide; it’s war, and civilians die in war.”

The Srebrenica Massacre happened during the Bosnian War.

The Rohingya Genocide in Myanmar (Burma) has been happening during a Civil War (following a Military coup), and during ethnic insurgencies.

the Darfur genocide happened during a Sudanese Civil War and has been reignited during the current war between the SAF and RSF.

The Hutu Massacre occurred during the First Congo War.

The Effacer le tableau happened during the Second Congo War

The Rwandan Genocide began on the heels of a Civil War and a re-ignition of the Civil War ended the genocide.

The 1912-1913 Balkan Wars inspired the beginning of the Armenian Genocide, which continued during the Turkish War of Independence.

The Iraqi Turkmen genocide and Yazidi genocide happened during an ISIS invasion and occupation of Iraq; the 2014 Northern Iraq Offensive and 2013-2017 Iraq War.

The Isaaq genocide, orchestrated by the Somali Democratic Republic, happened during the Somaliland War of Independence.

The Anfal Campaign Genocide against Iraqi Kurds happened during the Iraqi-Kurdish Conflict and the end of the Iran-Iraq War.

The Cambodian Genocide happened during the Cold War and the U.S. bombing of Cambodia, began with the Cambodian Civil War, and ended with the Cambodian–Vietnamese War.

^The above is not an exhaustive list.

War plays a large part in the orchestration of genocides. The mass violence and instability of war help provide the conditions and vulnerabilities that make genocide and genocidal mass violence possible. And the excuse of war often obscures the intent of genocide.

[dougielombax]

So.

Today marks 36 years since the beginning of the Anfal Genocide in Iraq where Saddam Hussein’s regime slaughtered hundreds and thousands of Kurds, Yazidis, Assyrians, Mandaeans and Shabaks.

Around 100,000 people at the least would be killed.

It would last from February to September of 1988. During the late stages of the Iran-Iraq war.

Largely consisting of mass killings, chemical attacks and forced displacement.

Many in Iraq sadly continue to deny it to this day. Predictably. As do Saddam Hussein’s many idiot apologists on the internet.

I’ll leave some sources from this year and the last few years here for additional information.

Some sources also focus on the Assyrian victims too.

Above: A monument dedicated to the memory of the Assyrian victims of the Anfal genocide in the village of Gonda Kosa.

Just to remind any idiots who think Saddam and his cronies were kind to the Assyrians. They were certainly not!

Feel free to reblog.

Reblog the shit out of this!

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Travel around the social media verse, and you’ll soon run into a very familiar perspective of sexism.

One that tells us that whilst sexism goes both ways; misogyny against women remains endemic, and deadly, whilst misandry against men benignly paddles in the shallow end of sexism, more of an inconvenience than anything else.

As the meme goes – Misogyny kills, and misandry irritates.

One is a matter of life and death. The other just has to pay the bill on dates.

Misandry is sexism-lite; a kind of luke warm, off brand knock version of misogyny classic.

But of course, like most things you’ll read online, misandry is not trivial, to be relegated to the world of mere inconvenience, as like misogyny, it can kill too – and has.

If you don’t believe me – ask the countless hundreds of thousands of men and boys systemically exterminated in Anfal, or within Operation Searchlight, the 8,000 massacred in Srenbrenica, or many more disappeared in Kashmir.

History, and the present day, is full of examples of boys and men being sought out and punished, hurt or killed, purely because of their gender.

Misandry sleeps under bridges. Misandry drops out of school.

Misandry gave Europe its worst genocide since the Second World War..

And these deaths, disadvantages, and disspearances, cannot be watered down to men just ‘being irritated’.

Neither can the fathers who are losing children in family court, the survivors shut out of refuges, or indeed the hundreds of thousands conscripted in Ukraine, be rounded down, and reduced to ‘an inconvenience.’

What’s more the whole framing of misandry vs misogyny is entirely unhelpful.

It builds a divide where there should never be one, and turns one side against another, when it needn’t do so.

So why do we water down the experiences of men and boys across the world, why do we minimise their staggering loss of life, and why do we pit one sex against the other?

--

Sources:

Srenbrenica: https://web.archive.org/web/20150712192651/http:/www.gendercide.org/case_srebrenica.html

Family court coalition: https://fcrc.uk/problems/

Paragraph 175: https://www.holocaust.org.uk/news/homosexual-victims-of-nazi-persecution

Kashmir: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2011/4/18/the-disappeared-of-kashmir

Ukraine: https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3ng45/males-banned-from-leaving-ukraine

US National Survey: https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/17596591211244166/full/html

==

"Misogyny kills, misandry irritates" is still a useful rubric. It helps you very quickly identify the mentally ill and the sociopathic.

[aradxan]

[jethroq]

I see the Anfal Campaign is joining the Bosnian Genocide in the canon of ”things that didn’t happen because I have to argue the US is the only bad country” incidents for ”anti-imperialists”

[alleecatblues]

Hey.

Sorry if I’m interrupting anything.

I saw your post about liberals not understanding the meaning of genocide (heavy shit, I know).

I thought I was the only one who knew this until you pointed that fact out.

At LAST somebody else gets it.

99% of the time they won’t know anything about the Sayfo or the Armenian Genocide or the Anfal Genocide and so on.

Don’t worry this isn’t an antisemitic rant on my part.

I’m just glad to see that someone else was able to make that observation and put it in words because I could never articulate it.

Yeah, I think part of the reason liberals always compare genocide to the holocaust is because it’s the only one they’re taught about in school. That and sometimes the genocide of native peoples in the Americas, but if it’s taught at all they generally don’t use the word genocide. It’s usually “colonization” or “war.”

Don’t get me wrong, the holocaust was a terrible tragedy, but gauging whether something is genocide based on how similar to the holocaust it is leaves out a lot of historical genocides that were just as bad, if not worse, and it definitely ignores current genocides that are taking place as we speak.

What is happening in Palestine is a genocide. What is happening to Armenians in Turkey is a continuation of a genocide. What is happening to trans people in the US and UK is the setup to a genocide. Calling these things genocide doesn’t lessen or cheapen the severity of other atrocities, but the people who benefit from these genocides continuing would love for you do believe it does, because it makes people less likely to stop them.

[ru-masculism]

Андроцид. Геноцид иракских курдов

Пост подготовила команда CMS на основе материалов сайта gendercide.org.

Контекст

Курды – этническая группа, центром которой является горный регион Курдистан. Курдистан не является суверенным государством – это этногеографическая область, охватывающая юго-восток Турции, северо-запад Ирана, север Ирака и север Сирии. По состоянию на 2020 г., курдское население в Курдистане и за его пределами составляет примерно 30–45 миллионов человек.

После Первой мировой войны и распада Османской империи страны Антанты создавали условия для возникновения суверенного курдского государства, как было обещано в Севрском мирном договоре 1920 года. Всего через три года обещание, данное курдам, было нарушено, поскольку западные союзники хотели задобрить новый турецкий режим Кемаля Ататюрка. Когда Лозаннский договор установил границы современной Турции в 1923 г., не осталось места никаким положениям о суверенном Курдистане. Западные союзники также отказались уступить какие-либо земли в Ираке и Сирии для создания суверенного Курдистана, хотя Ирак и Сирия были переданы Великобритании и Франции в качестве подмандатных территорий.

Последнее столетие было отмечено вооруженной агрессией нескольких государств в отношении Курдистана, поскольку курдские движения боролись против угнетения и дискриминации, а также за расширение культурных прав и независимость. В Ираке и Сирии на данный момент существуют курдские регионы с более высокой степенью автономности, однако их положение по-прежнему неустойчиво.

Демократическая партия Курдистана (ДПК) была основана курдами в Ираке вскоре после окончания Второй мировой войны и стала одной из самых известных курдских организаций сопротивления. Патриотический союз Курдистана (ПСК) был создан в 1975 г. как более радикальная альтернатива ДПК, и разгром ПСК был целью кампании «Анфаль» 1988 года.

В первые годы правления диктатора Саддама Хусейна положение иракских курдов скорее улучшалось. В 1970 г., когда Хусейн еще не был президентом, его партия Баас достигла соглашения с курдскими повстанческими группами, и курды получили определенные права и политическую автономию.

Это соглашение в конечном итоге сорвалось по слишком банальной причине: нефть. Партия Баас начала кампанию арабизации нефтедобывающих районов Курдистана. Курды были изгнаны и заменены арабами из бедных племен южного Ирака, которые, как ожидалось, будут лояльны режиму. В марте 1974 г. ДПК подняла мятеж, вылившийся в полномасштабные военные действия. Около 130 тысяч курдов бежали в Иран в 1975 г., а в марте того же года тысячи курдов, принадлежащих к племени барзан, были изгнаны из своих домов и насильно переселены на бесплодные засушливые земли на юге.

Несколько лет спустя перемещенные мужчины-барзанцы подверглись гендерно-избирательному уничтожению, предвещавшему гораздо более масштабную операцию по истреблению курдского населения – кампанию «Анфаль». Отсутствие протеста международного сообщества по поводу произошедшего с барзанскими курдами, похоже, укрепило веру режима Хусейна в возможность добиться «окончательного решения» в отношении курдов без вмешательства извне.

Показательно, что даже в августе 1988 г., когда операция «Анфаль» находилась на поздней стадии и о применении химического оружия против мирного населения было хорошо известно, Подкомитет ООН по правам человека проголосовал 11 голосами против 8 за то, чтобы не осуждать Ирак за нарушения прав человека. Иракскому режиму, который рассматрива��ся властями США как оплот против исламских фундаменталистских режимов в богатых нефтью регионах, сходили с рук все зверства: Хусейн не терял поддержки своих западных союзников до августа 1990 г., пока не вторгся в соседний Кувейт.

Источники: – Martin van Bruinessen, “Genocide in Kurdistan?”, in George J. Andreopoulos, ed., Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994, pp. 156–157; – Human Rights Watch, “Iraq’s Crime of Genocide: The Anfal Campaign against the Kurds”, Yale University Press, 1995, pp. 4, 26–27; – Khaled Salih, “Anfal: The Kurdish Genocide in Iraq”, Digest of Middle East Studies 4: 2, Spring, 1995; – Kendal Nezan, “When our “friend” Saddam was gassing the Kurds”, Le Monde diplomatique, October 1988.

«Анфаль»

В марте 1987 г. двоюродный брат Саддама Хусейна Али Хасан аль-Маджид, известный своей жестокостью, был назначен генеральным секретарем отделения партии Баас в Иракском Курдистане, и в период его пребывания на данном посту контроль над антипартизанской политикой полностью перешел от армии к партии.

Через несколько месяцев после назначения Маджида было инициировано «окончательное решение курдского вопроса». Кампания, организованная Маджидом, получила циничное название «аль-Анфаль» (араб. «Добыча») и отсылала к одноименной суре Корана.

Она состояла из восьми этапов, и семь из них были нацелены на районы, контролируемые Патриотическим Союзом Курдистана (ПСК). В то время, как в кампании участвовало около 200 тысяч иракских солдат, курдские повстанческие силы насчитывали всего несколько тысяч человек.

Кампания «Анфаль», в ходе которой правительство Саддама Хусейна подвергло курдов массовому истреблению, проводилась в период с конца февраля по начало сентября 1988 г. Эта геноцидальная операция содержала в себе аспекты гендерцида и была направлена не только на ликвидацию курдского повстанчества, но и на арабизацию стратегически важных районов северного Ирака. «Анфаль» была частью более продолжительной кампании, приведшей к уничтожению примерно 4500 курдских и 30 ассирийских поселений на севере Ирака. Кампания также привела к исходу по меньшей мере 1 из 3,5 миллионов курдов, на тот момент проживавших в Ираке.

По данным Human Rights Watch (HRW), основными целями кампании являлись курдские мужчины мобилизационного возраста: «Очевидно, что целью кампании “Анфаль” было уничтожение всех мужчин мобилизационного возраста, схваченных в сельских районах Иракского Курдистана» (Human Rights Watch, “Iraq’s Crime of Genocide: The Anfal Campaign against the Kurds”, Yale University Press, 1995, pp. 96, 170).

Под руководством аль-Маджида в кампании «Анфаль» принимали активное участие как иракские военные подразделения, так и курдские коллаборационисты – так называемые силы Джаш. Джаш помогли военным определять местоположение курдских поселений, не отмеченных на карте, и укрытия курдов в горах. Помимо прочего, Джаш использовались режимом для выманивания курдов из укрытий под ложным предлогом предоставления безопасного прохода или амнистии.

Истребление курдов включало в себя наземные наступательные операции, массовые депортации, систематическое уничтожение поселений, расстрелы, применение химического оружия и авиаударов. «К моменту окончания геноцидального безумия 90% курдских деревень и больше 20 городков были стерты с лица земли. Земли покрылись 15 миллионами мин, сделавших ведение сельского хозяйства невозможным, а 1,5 миллиона курдских крестьян были отправлены в концлагеря» (Kendal Nezan, “When our ‘friend’ Saddam was gassing the Kurds”, Le Monde diplomatique, March 1998).

К концу Анфальской кампании было истреблено не менее 50 тысяч курдских крестьян. Установить точную численность убитых затруднительно. Некоторые источники на основе других оценок, выводов и свидетельских показаний заявляют о более высоких показателях – до 110 тысяч погибших: «На основе обширных интервью в Курдистане и изучения сохранившихся иракских документов Шореш Ресул, курдский исследователь, <…> определил число погибших в период террора Маджида от 60 до 110 тысяч» (Jonathan C. Randal, “After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? My Encounters With Kurdistan”, 1998, p. 230).

Кеннет Рот, директор HRW, упоминал о «100 тысячах курдских мужчин и мальчиков, расстрелянных во время геноцида “Анфаль” в 1988 году», то есть, если прибавить к мужчинам другие группы, число жертв кампании значительно превысит отметку в сто тысяч (Kenneth Roth, “Show Trials Are Not the Solution to Saddam’s Heinous Reign”, The Globe and Mail, 18 July 2003).

Источники: – Amnesty International, “Iraq: ‘Disappearances’ – the agony continues”; – Certrez, Donabed, and Makko (2012). The Assyrian Heritage: Threads of Continuity and Influence. Uppsala University. p. 288; – BBC News, “Killing of Iraq Kurds ´genocide´, 23 December, 2005 [https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4555000.stm]; – Human Rights Watch Report, “Whatever Happened to the Iraqi Kurds?”, 1991 [https://www.hrw.org/reports/1991/IRAQ913.htm].

Гендерный аспект

В июне 1987 г. аль-Маджид выпустил директиву SF/4008, в пункте №5 которой были обозначены «запретные зоны». Когда директива вступила в силу, Маджид приказал, чтобы все лица в возрасте от 15 до 70 лет, задержанные в населенных пункт��х в пределах данных зон, были допрошены службами безопасности, а после допроса – казнены.

Несмотря на то, что в приказе прямо не упоминался пол, под целями для задержаний и казней подразумевались только мужчины.

Обратимся к отчету HRW: «Согласно директивам аль-Маджида от июня 1987 г., всякий мужчина мобилизационного возраста, схваченный в районе проведения кампании “Анфаль”, приговаривался к смерти по умолчанию» (Human Rights Watch, “Iraq’s Crime of Genocide: The Anfal Campaign against the Kurds”, Yale University Press, 1995, p. 14).

В сентябре 1987 г. вышла новая директива, призывающая к «депортации <…> курдских семей в районы дислокации родственников диверсантов <…> за исключением мужчин [членов семей] в возрасте от 12 до 50 лет включительно – их следует схватить» (Human Rights Watch, “Iraq’s Crime of Genocide: The Anfal Campaign against the Kurds”, Yale University Press, 1995, p. 298).

Когда захваченных курдов доставляли в пенитенциарные учреждения, мальчиков и мужчин, считавшихся «боеспособными», отделяли от остальных, что является типичной для убийств по половому признаку практикой на протяжении всей истории.

HRW опубликовали несколько заметок о стандартной схеме сортировки новоприбывших в концлагерь Топзава близ Киркука, что примерно в 150 милях к северу от Багдада.

«Мужчин и женщин отделяли друг от друга на месте, как только грузовики останавливались в главном дворе базы или на плацу. Процесс осуществлялся с жестокостью <…> Чуть позже мужчин разделяли еще и по возрасту: маленьких детей оставляли с матерями, а стариков и немощных отселяли в отдельные помещения. Мужчин и мальчиков-подростков, которые, как считалось, достигли мобилизационного возраста, собирали вместе. Грубо говоря, это были мужчины в возрасте от 15 до 50 лет, но строгой проверки документов, удостоверяющих личность, не проводилось, и возраст, как видно, был менее весомым критерием, чем антропометрия и внешний вид. Высокого двенадцатилетку могли оставить, а низкорослого шестнадцатилетнего парня – отправить к родственницам. <…> Далее молодых мужчин дробили на еще более мелкие группы. <…> После регистрации заключенных загоняли в большие камеры, каждая из которых была забита жителями одного конкретного района. <…> И хотя условия в Топзаве были ужасающими для всех, самой переполненной частью лагеря, как видно, была та, в которой содержались мужчины. <…> Избиения заключенных мужского пола в Топзаве были обычным делом» (Human Rights Watch, “Iraq’s Crime of Genocide: The Anfal Campaign against the Kurds”, Yale University Press, 1995, pp. 143–145).

HRW также сообщает, что все взрослые и подростки мужского пола были казнены через несколько дней после прибытия в лагерь.

«Отдельные группы заключенных были выстроены в шеренгу и расстреляны спереди, после чего их тела закопали в заранее вырытых братских могилах; других заставили лечь парами вплотную друг к другу <...> рядом с горами свежих трупов, прежде чем убить их; третьих связывали вместе, ставили на край ямы и стреляли в спину, чтобы они падали в нее вперед, – этот метод убийцы считали наиболее эффективным. Затем бульдозеры засыпали трупы тоннами земли или песка. Некоторые могилы состояли из десятков отдельных ям, очевидно, содержавших тела тысяч жертв» (Human Rights Watch, “Iraq’s Crime of Genocide: The Anfal Campaign against the Kurds”, Yale University Press, 1995, p. 12).

Как упоминалось ранее, кампания состояла из восьми этапов, и гендерная динамика курдского геноцида в зависимости от этапа различалась. Например, нет никаких сообщений о массовых убийствах мирных жителей на первом этапе, то есть с 23 февраля по 19 марта 1988 г.

Наиболее зверские акты андроц��да имели место на заключительном этапе кампании, с 25 августа по 6 сентября. Этот этап начался сразу после заключения соглашения о прекращении огня с Ираном, поскольку теперь части армии и припасы можно было перебросить с юга на север. Данный этап проводился на четырех тысячах квадратных миль в Загросских горах, и поначалу многих курдских мужчин даже не отправляли в лагеря – их просто убивали на месте сразу после задержания. Когда сотрудники HRW позднее исследовали последний этап кампании, выжившие курды предоставили им списки людей, пропавших без вести. Списки, предоставленные курдами, за исключением курдов-езидов, состояли исключительно из взрослых и молодых мужчин, что указывает на крайне жесткий отбор по полу. Для ассирийцев, халдейских христиан и курдов-езидов отбор по полу был менее жестким (Human Rights Watch, “Iraq’s Crime of Genocide: The Anfal Campaign against the Kurds”, Yale University Press, 1995, pp. 178, 190, 192, 209–213).

(От ред. CMS.) Много позже бывшие друзья и покровители Саддама Хусейна наконец покончили с чудовищем, которое сами и взрастили. В итоге тиран предстал перед трибуналом, в том числе за истребление мужского курдского населения Ирака, и был повешен. Казни и пожизненным срокам подверглись и некоторые из других высокопоставленных организаторов геноцида иракских курдов, включая аль-Маджида. По понятным причинам западные политики, долгое время снабжавшие диктатора оружием и иными средствами, не были призваны к ответу. Это еще одна поучительная история, убеждающая нас в том, что не существовало и никогда не будет существовать никакого «хорошего Запада», спешащего спасти угнетенных и гонимых и сокрушить тиранию усатых и плешивых.

[beyondtheknife]

why my boyfriend is a refugee

My boyfriend and his family came to the US as refugees from Kurdistan in 1999, and in 1988 fled to Pakistan. He's talked with me a bit about his people and his culture, but I admittedly don't know much about Kurdistan or its recent history.

Quick facts:

Kurdish regions include 4 countries: Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria.

The Kurds are a distinct ethnic group that have been fighting for autonomy for many years (particularly against neighboring countries of Turkey and Iraq).

In the late 1980s, Kurdish living became especially perilous. Iraq began attacking Kurdish villages with the intent of exterminating their inhabitants. This came a few years after the Iraq-Iran War, in which Iraq invaded Iran in 1980 and the Kurds and Iranians fought back. Kurdish military fighters, peshmerga ("those who face death"), fought to regain Kurdish-inhabited areas of Iraq.

In response, Iraq launched the Kurdish Genocide in 1988, also known as Saddam Hussein's Anfal campaign. From February to September, air strikes, chemical weapons, looting, firing squads, raids, and deportation were used to either kill or displace Kurdish civilians. In total, this led to an estimated 50K - 180K civilian deaths (likely an underestimation) in the late 1980s and many more civilians forced out of their homeland-- among them, my boyfriend's family.

After their hometown of Halabja was attacked with poison gas in March 1988, they were forced to flee east to Pakistan. They remained in Pakistan throughout the 1990s.

In the 90s at the end of the Gulf War (1990-1991), the US and other Coalition nations came up with Operation Provide Comfort, which created a protected zone in Northern Iraq to protect Kurds. This gave way to the formation of an autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq, complete with its own flag, parliament, military, etc.

This region had its own government, made up of two parties-- the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). Unfortunately, this nascent autonomy barely lasted two years before a civil war between these two parties broke out in 1994. Clashes resulting in thousands of deaths continued until 1998, when a US-mediated ceasefire (the Washington Agreement) was signed. The two factions of the Kurdistan Regional Government remained peaceful, particularly to maintain a unified opposition against Saddam Hussein.