Iraq: Up to a million dead under dictator Saddam Hussein

At the beginning of the proceedings against Saddam Hussein before a special court in Baghdad the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) recalls that the Kurds alone including the Yesidi and the Christian Assyro-Chaldeans of North Iraq counted under the regime of the Baath Party of the Iraqi dictator between 1968 and 2003 some 500,000 and the Shiites and Marsh Arabs some 400,000 victims. The GfbV points out that thousands of members of other Iraqi nationalities and religious communities have fallen victim to the crimes of destruction and expulsion. The Kurds make up 20 – 25&, the Shiites 55 – 60% and the Christian Assyro-Chaldaens about three percent of the more than 27 million inhabitants of Iraq.

"We have as a human rights organisation since 1970 continually documented the crimes of war and genocide, have stood up for the rights of the persecuted ethnic groups and minorities of Iraq and have initiated humanitarian and reconstruction work " said GfbV secretary Tilman Zülch. "In the so-called Anfal offensive of 1987/88 alone 182,000 people, most of them Kurds, died an agonizing death either through the use of chemical weapons or – if they survived the use of poisonous gas – from mass shootings by special units or they died during and after the forcible resettlements. In 1988 8,000 men and boys of the Kurd Barzani tribe, among them the men of a Christian village, were kidnapped and liquidated. The organiser of the Anfal offensive, the cousin of Saddam Hussein, Ali Hasan Al-Majid, has admitted 100,000 victims. This genocide was meticulously recorded by Saddam’s administration, army and special units in all the details. 14 tons of the material has been seen through and analysed by the human rights organisation Human Rights Watch.

Organisations of the Shiites in South Iraq have 300,000 dead to mourn since 1991, among them being 9,000 preachers. These details were confirmed by human rights workers. Following the planned drying out of the marshes of the Euphrates and Tigris delta some 500,000 so-called Marsh Arabs were driven out. Tens of thousands died from the bombardments and executions and while in flight. In the middle of the 70s the Baath Party had already chased out of the country almost all of the remaining 3,000 members of the Jewish community after public executions and expulsions.

Representatives of all opposition parties, intellectuals and members of the workers’ and women’s movements became the victims of further massacres and individual and mass shootings. Many emigrants were murdered by Iraqi agents in their new host country. Saddam Hussein engineered the liquidation of thousands of members of the regime, among them diplomats, secret service agents, members of the officers’ corps and even of his Republican Guard and his own family.

The GfbV criticises that the west European countries, the USA, the former Soviet union and its satellites, especially the GDR, made these crimes possible through deliveries of arms and military know-how, through close diplomatic, economic and political cooperation. A number of German firms from the Federal Republic of Germany has played a considerable part in building up the Iraqi poison gas industry.