The genocide against the Kurds in Iraq must be at last documented and internationally recognized!

The genocide of the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein against the Kurds must be at last investigated, documented and internationally recognized.

This was the aim of the international "Congress on Genocide in Kurdistan”, which ends today in Erbil, the capital of the Iraqi federal state of Kurdistan. A delegation of the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) headed by Tilman Zülch, President of the GfbV International, is taking part in the congress. 65 experts on genocide from North America, Europe and Asia, among them judges from the Netherlands, the USA, Great Britain and Denmark, who deal with war criminals from Baghdad, have among other matters been conferring on the legal dimensions of the genocide against the Kurds, on the social and psychological consequences and its economic and demographic effects.

The GfbV has from 1970 until 2003 continuously documented the war-crimes and genocide of the dictator Saddam Hussein, has worked for the rights of the persecuted ethnic groups and religious minorities of Iraq and has organised work of humanitarian aid and reconstruction. Under the rule of the Baath Party of the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein Kurds (Moslems and Yezidi) and Assyro-Chaldaeans and Turkmen suffered from 1968 till 2003 some 500,000 victims. Thousands of members of all other Iraqi nationalities and religious communities have fallen victim to the crimes of destruction and expulsion. In the so-called Anfal offensive of 1987/88 182,000 people, for the most part Kurds, died a horrible death either through the use of chemical weapons or – if they survived the gas attacks – were killed in mass executions by special forces. Many others died during and after the compulsory resettlements.

In 1983 8,000 men and boys in the Barzan Valley, among them the men from a Christian village, were abducted and liquidated. The organiser of the Anfal offensive, the cousin of Saddam Hussein, Al-Majid, admitted 100,000 victims. This genocide was rigorously registered and documented by Saddam’s authorities, army and special forces. 14 tons of this documentary material was analysed in the USA by the human rights organisation Human Rights Watch.

The GfbV delegation has been in the Iraqi federal state of Kurdistan since 22nd January. They have been conducting talks with 50 representatives of Kurdish, Arab, Turkmen and Assyrian organisations from Kirkuk, with spokespersons of the women’s organisation from this town and with the widows’ organisation "Rebirth” (Vejin), of the widows and mothers of the 8,000 boys and men from the Barzan Valley who were murdered in the year 1983.