Claims of Saddam's Genocide Far from Proven
by Robin Miller
Is it really true that Saddam Hussein "gassed his own people" while committing genocide against Iraqi Kurds, images that have become woven into the fabric of the American perception of Iraq?
Human Rights Watch, the respected New York City NGO, has long championed these claims. According to its reports, "at least 50,000 and possibly as many as 100,000 persons, many of them women and children, were killed out of hand between February and September 1988," the victims being Iraqi Kurds "systematically put to death in large numbers on the orders of the central government in Baghdad." Iraq allegedly used chemical weapons in "forty separate attacks on Kurdish targets" during a campaign that HRW characterizes as genocide. The most prominent of these purported attacks was the March 1988 "chemical assault" on the town of Halabja, in which the number of dead, according to Human Rights Watch, was "in excess of 3,200," or perhaps "up to 5,000," or even "as many as 7,000."[1]
Horrifying claims, these, but how much of this is true?
We know that both Iran and Iraq used chemical weapons against one another in their eight-year-long war, which ended with an August 20, 1988, cease-fire. Most of Iraq's alleged assaults on the Kurds took place while this war was raging, although Human Rights Watch claims the attacks extended into September. Iraq has acknowledged using mustard gas against Iranian troops but has consistently denied using chemical weapons against civilians.
We also know that Iraq, for what it called security reasons, forcibly relocated--within Iraqi Kurdistan--Kurds living in certain areas, much as Israel has done with the Palestinians and the U.S. did in Vietnam.
What Happened at Halabja?
The only verified Kurdish civilian deaths from chemical weapons occurred in the Iraqi village of Halabja, near the Iran border, where at least several hundred people died from gas poisoning in mid-March, 1988. We know that Iran overran the village and its small garrison of Iraqi troops; what is contested is who was responsible for the deaths--Iran or Iraq--and how large the death toll was.
The best evidence is a 1990 report by the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College.[2] It concluded that Iran, not Iraq, was the culprit in Halabja. Lead author Stephen Pelletiere, who was the CIA's senior political analyst on Iraq throughout the Iran-Iraq war, has described his group's findings:
"The great majority of the victims seen by reporters and other observers who attended the scene were blue in their extremities. That means that they were killed by a blood agent, probably either cyanogens chloride or hydrogen cyanide. Iraq never used and lacked any capacity to produce these chemicals. But the Iranians did deploy them. Therefore the Iranians killed the Kurds."[3]
Pelletiere says the number of dead was in the hundreds, not the thousands claimed by Human Rights Watch and the U.S. administration. To this day, the CIA concurs.[4]
While the War College report acknowledges that Iraq used mustard gas during the Halabja hostilities, it notes that mustard gas is an incapacitating, rather than a killing, agent, with a fatality rate of only two percent, so that it could not have killed the hundreds of known dead, much less the thousands of dead claimed by Human Rights Watch.[5]
According to the War College reconstruction of events, Iran struck first, taking control of the town. The Iraqis counterattacked using mustard gas. The Iranians then attacked again, this time using a "blood agent"--cyanogens chloride or hydrogen cyanide--and re-took the town, which Iran then held for several months. Having control of the village and its grisly dead, Iran blamed the gas deaths on the Iraqis, and the allegations of Iraqi genocide took root via a credulous international press and, a little later, cynical promotion of the allegations for political purposes by the U.S. State Department and Senate.[5a]
Pelletiere described his credentials in a recent New York Times op-ed:
"I am in a position to know because, as the Central Intelligence Agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and as a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, I was privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf. In addition, I headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States; the classified version of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair."[6]
Was There an Ongoing Campaign of Genocide?
Pelletiere also rejects the larger claim that, aside from whatever happened at Halabja, Saddam Hussein engaged in a months-long campaign of genocide against Iraqi Kurds that killed 50,000, 100,000, or more. Calling this is a "hoax, a non-event,"[7] he explains that:
"This one is extremely problematical since no gassing victims were ever produced. The only evidence that gas was used is the eye-witness testimony of the Kurds who fled to Turkey, collected by staffers of the U.S. Senate. We showed this testimony to experts in the military who told us it was worthless. The symptoms described by the Kurds do not conform to any known chemical or combination of chemicals."[8]
Pelletiere also says that international relief organizations who examined the Kurdish refugees in Turkey failed to discover any gassing victims.[9]
Another skeptic is Milton Viorst, long-time Middle East correspondent for the New Yorker and author of a dozen books. He visited Kurdish areas in Iraq when the gassing allegations surfaced in 1988 and reported that:
"From what I saw, I would conclude that if lethal gas was used, it was not used genocidally--that is, for mass killing. The Kurds compose a fifth of the Iraqi population, and they are a tightly knit community. If there had been large-scale killing, it is likely they would know and tell the world. But neither I nor any Westerner I encountered heard such allegations.
Nor did Kurdish society show discernible signs of tension. The northern cities, where the men wear Kurdish turbans and baggy pants, were as bustling as I had ever seen them."
Crucially, Viorst reported that:
"Journalists visiting the Turkish camps saw refugees with blistered skin and irritated eyes, symptoms of gassing. But doctors sent by France, the United Nations and the Red Cross have said these symptoms could have been produced by a powerful, but non-lethal tear gas."[10]
In his 1994 book "Sandcastles," Viorst added to his account:
"On returning home, I interviewed academic experts; none unequivocally ruled out the use of gas, but the most reliable among them were doubtful. It was only Washington, and particularly Congress--although, conspicuously, not the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, which was in the best position to know--that stuck stubbornly to the original story, and this persistence bewildered the Iraqis."[11]
In "Sandcastles," Viorst also described Iraq's Kurdish resettlement program:
"Saddam, after the cease-fire, sent in his army to stamp out Kurdish insurgency once and for all. He ordered his troops to go as far as the Iranian border and depopulate a swath of territory eight or ten miles deep, neutralizing for all time an area that had served the rebels as sanctuary.
Saddam's objectives were understandable; his tactics were characteristically brutal. The army dynamited dozens of villages into rubble and dispatched thousands of inhabitants from their ancestral homes to newly built "resettlement villages" far in the interior. In the process, sixty thousand Kurds crossed the border into Turkey, where they told journalists they were fleeing from attacks of gas. The Iraqis angrily denied the charge, but Secretary of State Shultz claimed it was true, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, without investigating, proposed a bill to impose heavy sanctions on Iraq. With the pro-Israeli lobby fanning the fire, the bill nearly passed. But in the Turkish refugee camps, international teams of doctors were more skeptical of the refugees' claims, saying their examinations did not confirm the use of gas at all."
(Both Pelletiere and Viorst primarily address claims of Iraq's gassing of the Kurds because this was the original formulation of the genocide allegations. Only later did these allegations evolve into claims that Iraq's killing methods had included gassing, bombing and mass executions. [11a])
A third dissenting voice, oddly enough, is the CIA. Its October 2002 dossier, "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs," identifies only 10 instances of reported Iraqi use of chemical weapons, and none of these were directed specifically at the Kurds. All occurred during the Iran-Iraq war; seven were directed only against Iranians, and in three cases, including Halabja, the victims included both Iranians and Kurds, thus supporting Iraq's contention that it used mustard gas only in military operations against Iran.[12]
Significantly, the CIA claims only 20,000 casualties--dead and wounded combined--in Iraq's alleged campaign against the Kurds, as opposed to Human Rights Watch's assertion of 50,000 to 100,000 deaths. Given the tendency of the U.S. government to magnify claims of Saddam's criminality, the CIA's estimates should be interpreted as maximum possible figures.
Dissecting the Genocide Reports
Several reports issued by Human Rights Watch (HRW) form the backbone of the gassing and genocide claims, the principal report being "Genocide in Iraq: The Anfal Campaign Against the Kurds."[12a] (Physicians for Human Rights, another prominent American NGO, collaborated with HRW.) But the reports' evidentiary basis is remarkably thin, consisting entirely of (1) interviews of 350 Kurds in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1992 and 1993, four and five years after the events; (2) exhumations of grave sites in three villages; and (3) examination of documents taken by Kurdish rebels from captured Iraqi government offices.[13]
According to Human Rights Watch, these years-after-the-fact interviews were sufficient to allow the detailed reconstruction of a two-year period (from mid-1987 to mid-1989) of alleged continuous repression of the Kurds. Yet all reports--and in particular atrocity reports--of refugees and their political supporters must be viewed with caution. In the absence of corroborating physical evidence, it's folly to speak with the certainty exuded in the HRW reports.
The political environment in which the interviews took place--interviewers from the U.S., a country strongly supporting the Kurdish movement, working hand-in-hand with representatives of the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee--particularly undermines the credibility of these refugee accounts.[13a] The interviewees had every reason to attempt to please Human Rights Watch, which was in a position to help the Kurdish cause through publication of these atrocity reports.
And, incredibly, Human Rights Watch makes assertions of genocide despite the extreme paucity of physical evidence. Of the three exhumed grave sites, one yielded 26 bodies of men and boys executed by firing squad.[14] Certainly this was an atrocity, but this leaves 99,974 bodies unaccounted for. The other two grave sites--revealing only five separately-buried individuals who had died from unknown causes--supplied no evidence supporting allegations of genocide.[15]
Human Rights Watch's explanation is that the other 99,974 people were "trucked to remote areas and machine-gunned to death, their bodies bulldozed into mass graves" that have never been found.[16] HRW also claims that "the Iranian forces in Halabja had managed to bury an estimated 3,000 victims of the March 16 chemical attack in mass graves under a thin layer of dirt in the complex of Anab. Four years later, the corpses were still there, and they were beginning to pollute the local groundwater." How do they know this? We have no idea, as no evidence whatsoever is provided.[17]
And this brings us back to CIA analyst Stephen Pelletiere's question: If 100,000 people were slaughtered, where are the bodies?
There are several other reasons to doubt the accuracy of the Human Rights Watch reports:
1. Others who have investigated the situation have not reached similar conclusions. Only two American groups (HRW and Physicians for Human Rights), working with Saddam Hussein's two sworn enemies, the Kurdish opposition and the U.S. government, have.[18]
2. The reports do not even mention the existence, much less consider the weight, of contrary evidence. Although the 90-page War College report had been in the public domain for three years when HRW published "Genocide in Iraq" in 1993, the earlier assessment goes unmentioned. Nor is there any consideration of Milton Viorst's nearly contemporaneous, firsthand observations. No serious assessment of any question--much less of claims of genocide--wholly ignores contrary evidence.
3. The reports, and HRW's handling of them, reveal an unmistakable political bias in favor of Iraq's Kurdish movement. "Genocide in Iraq" describes offices of the Iraqi national government--the country's internationally-recognized sovereign--as a "puppet administration," while HRW worked closely with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the main opposition groups.[19]
And, in an astonishingly revealing decision, Human Rights Watch released its newest report on Iraq--"The Iraqi Government Assault on the Marsh Arabs," purporting to detail "a fifteen-year campaign by the central government to eliminate" the Marsh Arabs--on January 25, at a time when its release could only have inflamed public opinion against Iraq's central government.[20]
4. There simply is no proof of what agent--a legal chemical agent such as tear gas, an illegal chemical agent, or a nonchemical agent--caused the symptoms described in the Human Rights Watch reports. The most that HRW can say is that the injuries reported by the Kurds were "consistent with" exposure to mustard gas. But this fails to eliminate other possible causes. Moreover, we know from Stephen Pelletiere that mustard gas simply doesn't kill large numbers of people. And, in any event, Iran also used mustard gas.[21]
An example of conclusions reached without convincing evidence--or even any significant evidence--of causation can be found in the Human Rights Watch report "The Destruction of Koreme During The Anfal Campaign." This report describes the exhumation of the bodies of two persons allegedly killed by a "chemical weapons attack" in the Kurdish village of Birjinni. Yet all HRW can say is that "forensic examination of the two skeletons was limited to determining whether there was any sign of trauma or perimortem violence that might contradict the account of the villagers that the two decedents were overcome by chemical weapons. No indications contrary to death by chemical agents were found." In fact, there is absolutely no indication of how these two persons died. To use this as conclusive evidence of a "chemical weapons attack" is preposterous.[22]
5. The various HRW statements exhibit both "claim creep"--the tendency, over time, to assert ever-larger numbers of victims--and fundamental change in the nature of the claim. In its 1993 report, "Genocide in Iraq," HRW claimed that the number of victims was "at least 50,000 and possibly as many as 100,000 persons." By 2003, that number had grown to a firm 100,000. The gender breakdown of the victims also changed. In 1993 "many" of the victims were women and children; by 2003 all 100,000 victims were men and boys. Or maybe by 2003 it was only the men and boys who were "trucked to remote areas and machine-gunned to death, their bodies bulldozed into mass graves," while the women and girls were killed on site. HRW doesn't tell us; but, in any event, there are still no bodies, whether male or female, to corroborate any of this.[23]
6. On several occasions, Human Rights Watch reports explicitly invoke the Holocaust. Readers are told that "like Nazi Germany, the Iraqi regime concealed its actions in euphemisms";[24] that "the parallels [between the Holocaust and the alleged campaign against the Kurds] are apt, and often chillingly close";[25] and that "until [Lidice], there were supposedly only two possible attitudes for a conqueror toward a village that was considered rebellious."[26] Resort to this deep well of emotionality is necessary only when the facts themselves are insufficient to convince.
Captured Iraqi Documents
Human Rights Watch also relies heavily on Iraqi government documents captured by the Kurdish opposition. These documents have made their way to the Iraq Research and Documentation Project within the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. The IRDP--which, like Human Rights Watch, has collaborated with the U.S. State Department--has posted a few of the documents on its website. After appointing the documents with suitably provocative names like "Bureaucratic Beheading" and "A Professional Rapist," the website makes wild claims about the significance of some of them. Consider the document titled "Admission of Chemical Use," which provides in its entirety:[27]
"We have been informed of the following:
1- The Iranian enemy has supplied the saboteurs' families in the villages and rural areas along the border with pharmaceutical drugs, especially anti-chemical medicaments; and they [the Iranian enemy] are training them to use syringes for this purpose and to wear protective head masks.
2- There exist approximately 100 saboteurs from various gangs of saboteurs in the Werta region, al-Sadiq district. They are along the Khanqawa route in order to stop the force accompanying the Village Deportation Committees, albeit most of the families in this region have left to Iran.
Please verify information and notify us within 24 hours."
The IRDP interpretation is:
"This document is very important because it vitiates any claim by the government of Saddam Husayn that it did not use chemical weapons against its Kurdish population. The date, provenance and text of the document lend undeniable proof to the regime's genocide campaign, known as Anfal, against the Kurds. The Iraq regime's use of chemical weapons as part of the Anfal campaign was so widespread, the Iranians had to supply the Kurds with anti-chemical protectives."
While this is one possible interpretation, the document could also be either (1) a simple statement of fact, or (2) a warning that the Iranians, who also used gasses (blood agents and mustard gas), had issued medical supplies and protective clothing to their supporters and might be themselves preparing to launch a chemical attack. We just don't know. It's ludicrous to anoint this short document an "Admission of Chemical Use" by Iraq.
Nerve Gas Allegations
Physicians for Human Rights, which collaborated with Human Rights Watch, has also issued a number of reports. Most make claims similar to those in the HRW reports and are subject to the same objections.[28] One of its reports, though, is sufficiently important to require separate examination. This is "Nerve Gas Used in Northern Iraq on Kurds," released on April 29, 1993. According to this report, a PHR team collected soil samples on June 10, 1992, from bomb craters near the Kurdish village of Birjinni in northern Iraq. The Iraqi military is claimed to have bombed Birjinni on August 25, 1988.[29]
The samples were then analyzed by a British laboratory, which reported "unequivocal" residues of methylphosphonic acid (MPA) and isopropyl methylphosphonic acid (iPMPA) as well as "degradation products of mustard gas." MPA is a product of the hydrolysis (reaction with water) of any of several nerve agents, and iPMPA (which the report incorrectly calls "isipropyl" methylphosphonic acid) is a product of the hydrolysis of sarin.[30]
Assuming the samples were authentic and the proper conditions (if any) for hydrolysis of sarin were present, this finding is significant. Sarin, then, may have been a factor in the deaths of four Birjinni villagers reported that day. However, sarin is odorless,[31] and, according to Human Rights Watch, the villagers reported various distinctive odors from the bombs: "pleasant, at first. It smelled of apples and something sweet"; it smelled like "pesticides in the fields"; "it became bitter." To accept this account, it also must be possible for Iraq to have combined sarin and mustard gas either with each other or with a third substance, as the villagers reported three waves of four bombs, all apparently identical.[32]
Other sources also claim that Iraq has used nerve gas. The CIA says that Iraq used nerve agents six times: five times against only Iranian troops, and at Halabja against both Iranians and Kurds. Four of the six instances involve the cruder tabun, rather than sarin, and the agents allegedly used on the other two occasions are unspecified.[33] Rick Francona, a retired U.S. Air Force intelligence officer who was a liaison to the Iraqi military, puts the figure at four times in 1988.[34]
Other Advocates of the Genocide Claims
There are other champions of the genocide claim. One is Jeffrey Goldberg, whose 18,000-word story, "The Great Terror," in the March 25, 2002, issue of the New Yorker [35] forms the basis of the U.S. State Department's website on alleged Iraqi genocide.[36] Goldberg's story is long on lurid details; we are told, for instance, that one woman, Hamida Mahmoud, died while nursing her two-year-old daughter. Goldberg also follows the Human Rights Watch formula in invoking the Nazis: "Saddam Hussein's attacks on his own citizens mark the only time since the Holocaust that poison gas has been used to exterminate women and children."
What Goldberg doesn't tell his readers is that he has dual Israeli/American citizenship and served in the Israeli defense forces a few years back.[37] Or that he purposefully ignored the War College report, which, of course, reached quite different conclusions.[38]
In a curious detail, Goldberg, following the Human Rights Watch narrative concerning Halabja, asserts that the Iraqis dropped wave after wave of gas bombs on the city after Iranian troops had taken it, yet the Iranians never reported any gas casualties.
Another piece of Goldberg's narrative that doesn't fit--and this is true of the accounts of all of the genocide advocates--is that mustard gas generally doesn't have any immediate effects, yet the Kurds in these stories are portrayed as experiencing blistering, and sometimes falling dead, almost immediately. According to a December 2002 fact sheet from the British Health Department, "mustard gas does not usually cause pain at the time of exposure; symptoms may be delayed for 4 to 6 hours"; only "occasionally" are "nausea, retching, vomiting and eye smarting" reported immediately.[39] Similarly, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control explains that "mustard gas burns your skin and causes blisters within a few days."[40] Other sources agree.[41]
Interestingly, Goldberg's piece was immediately incorporated into the Bush administration's propaganda efforts.[42] Goldberg's article--placed in the "Fact" section of the New Yorker--can easily be interpreted as part of the joint U.S./Israeli campaign against Saddam Hussein. Goldberg himself vehemently supports the "removal" of Saddam.[43]
Another purveyor of the genocide claim is Christine Gosden, a professor of medical genetics at the University of Liverpool medical school. Although a convert to the cause only after her 1998 visit to Halabja, she's a true believer.[44] In these few years she has made herself into a terrorism expert who has testified before Congress [45] and co-authored a recent virulent commentary with the executive director of the Washington Kurdish Institute.[46]
Gosden hasn't added any new evidence to our understanding of events, although she's upped the ante of total alleged deaths to 200,000 [47] while adding "possibly biological and radiological weapons" to the list of agents allegedly used by Iraq against the Kurds. [48]
One expert who's been particularly scathing about Gosden's claims is Dr. Gordon Prather, a nuclear physicist who was assistant secretary of the U.S. Army for science and technology in the Reagan years and informed himself on chemical agents because of his oversight responsibilities in that realm. Responding to Gosden's genocide claims, Prather is emphatic:[49]
"Your lady doctor's assertion that Iraq bombed 280 villages with poison gas is a joke you should have seen without a fact-checker. There were hundreds of villages cleared by Baghdad on the Iraqi border, but the residents were moved to new villages built for them in the interior. Western journalists were invited in to observe the process, including Karen Eliot House of the Wall Street Journal, now the president of Dow Jones International."
Finally, there's Gwynne Roberts, a British television reporter who visited Kurdish refugee camps in 1988. He also entered Iraqi territory and brought back shell fragments on which a British laboratory reportedly found traces of mustard gas.[50] But Roberts never identified where the fragments came from, [51] and both Iran and Iraq are known to have used mustard gas.
Roberts' most startling report was an alleged massacre at Bassay Gorge, in northern Iraq, on August 29, 1988, in which between 1,500 and 4,000 people, mainly women and children, were supposedly killed by a mixture of various nerve gasses. The absence of bodies was explained by their having been burned by Iraqi troops wearing gas masks.[52]
Stephen Pelletiere, the CIA analyst, says that the U.S. military closely studied these reports but found them groundless.[53]
The Ultimate Assessment
So what, then, does all this evidence tell us?
We know Saddam is a bad guy. We know he has killed people. But those aren't the questions. The allegations at issue are vastly more serious: that he purposefully murdered at least 50,000 (or 100,000, or 200,000, depending on the speaker's fervor) in an attempt to decimate Iraqi Kurds as a people, and that he used chemical weapons on 40 occasions during this campaign.
What hard evidence is there? One grave with 26 (or 27) bodies of people killed by bullets, not chemicals, and traces of two gasses at one location where four people died. That's it.
Only someone who wanted to be deceived would consider this adequate proof of genocide.[54]
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