• The Black Book of Saddam Hussein
2 million victims
• Chris KUTSCHERA
Hearing the Victims
by Bernard Kouchner
It was Saddam Hussein himself who proved to be his country’s main weapon of massive destruction. For 35 years, he turned brutally on his own people. Right up to the final days of his regime, he conducted an “Arabization” campaign against Kurd-populated areas. Code-named Anfal, or the “spoils” of war, it resulted in nearly 500,000 people vanished without a trace, most of them women and children, and more than 4,500 villages erased from the map. Sadly, victims can’t be identified since the Iraqis lack sufficient DNA testing capability. As of 2005, some 4.0 million exiles still seek to return to their homes. The years of war and military operations have left some 1.5 million wounded and handicapped. Spoils of war, indeed.
- -
The road to Ruanduz
November, 1974. It all began for us on the road to Ruanduz, the celebrated Hamilton Road, which had served as a lifeline of British colonization. With Dr. Jacques Béres and Dr. Max Récamier, we struck out on the first independent Doctors Without Borders mission. Along with Chris Kutschera, we had found the Kurds to be a people without borders, a people we would never really leave.
On the way back, going towards Iran, Saddam’s helicopters launched an attack on us, amid a crowd of fleeing Kurds. I can still see the machine guns spitting out their rounds, the missiles exploding into the asphalt and dozens of bodies in the ditches. The aircraft and missiles were Made in France. Back then, Saddam Hussein was Iraq’s vice-president, and our country was doing good business in death.
With numerous French doctors, I worked on several occasions among the Kurds, as well as with the majority Shiites, who were equally victims of repression. During all those years, France supported its ally Saddam, dealing in arms and without regard for the civilian victims. Here are some episodes in the tale of horror.
- -
Halabja, the morning of March 16, 1988
People have forgotten the name of this Iraqi Kurd town, sitting at the foot of snow-capped mountains on the Iranian border. But the pictures appeared around the world: in this still market town, inhabitants lay lifeless at their door front, a woman clutched her daughter in her arms, their eyes forever open and unseeing.
Halabja had become a ghost town, populated by 5,000 corpses of Iraqi Kurds who appealed in deafening silence to us, all of them dead without even the benefit of our compassion. Iraqi air force planes had rained down poison gas bombs, and on Kurd zones nearby, chemicals including sarin which the Nazis had developed in 1941. Saddam Hussein’s despicable stealth massacre, carried out by his right-hand man “Chemical’ Ali Hassan al Majid, brought few protests at the time. Who could get too worked up about it? Saddam enjoyed back then a favorable image, both in the United States and with his Soviet ally, as a secular ruler in a sea of religious fervor.
To say nothing of France, his trading partner where he could count on the support of politicians, ranging from Jacques Chirac on the right to Jean-Pierre Chevènement on the left. Who cared about mass deportations, mutilated survivors or women sold as sex slaves in the Persian Gulf? Some brave humanitarian groups, present on the ground, offered their testimony: they were accused of seeking to undermine the Franco-Iraqi alliance. Halabja’s dead were swept under the carpet. It proved a major political mistake: the west had chosen Iraq as its buffer against Iran’s surging fundamentalism and thus made possible a chemical arms arsenal that nobody would then denounce. Saddam’s envoy Tariq Aziz was able to attend a chemical weapons conference in Paris in 1989.
But families of victims were not allowed to testify. When the Iran-Iraq war broke out shortly afterwards, many hoped the two sides would massacre each other and thus contain the mullahs’ ideological imperialism.
- -
1991, the first Gulf War
America and its allies, including France, launched an offensive, not for the region’s oppressed, but to defend Kuwait’s petroleum reserves. We hoped at the time the Iraqi tyrant’s regime might collapse. The anti-Saddam coalition called on Kurds and Shiites to rise up, but without supporting their heroic rebellion against the Sunni government and a police force controlled by the dictator. Baghdad’s repression of this revolt was terrifying and aimed solely at Iraqi civilians: more than 200,000 dead. The appalling exodus of Kurds towards Iran’s and Turkey’s closed borders got underway.
- -
1992, in the outskirts of Sulaimaniyah
Once again, on the road to Halabja. With Danielle Mitterrand, we went to offer our support to Kurds who had moved back to their autonomous zone thanks to the much-delayed intervention of French, British and American forces. Inside the vehicle, which we had switched at the last minute, we were discussing a nurses’ strike back in France. A Japanese-made minibus, bearing the white and blue markings of public transportation, passed us coming from the opposite direction. Two seconds later, it exploded, hit by a car bomb parked alongside the road. Despite security directives, we stopped, and I ran towards the car we should have been riding in: it was aflame, with six Kurd fighters trapped inside. There was no way to get close and open the doors until the flames could be snuffed out by fire extinguishers. The passengers of the mangled minibus were crying out. At last, we were able to help them, but in all there were nearly 20 killed and wounded. It isn’t every day a dictator attempts to assassinate the spouse of a western president. Were there any voices of protest?
- -
A muffled voice
For the past 30 years, we have been struggling to make the Iraqi people heard, those millions of victims, men, women and children, tortured and killed by Saddam Hussein’s regime in almost general indifference. It’s the exhausted voice of all those wounded, who look at you accusingly, those whom I’ve met since 1974 during my numerous missions among the Kurds and Shiites, those who have been sacrificed to the arms trade and to Realpolitik, those who saw the presence of France, the nation of human rights, only when Mirages dropped bombs on them.
To recount now the crimes committed by Saddam Hussein’s totalitarian barbarity amounts to an exercise in political honesty. That’s the hope behind the grim pages in this book. We owe it to the victims not to forget the arbitrary arrests carried out every morning by Saddam’s police. Followed by the most horrible and humiliating torture, the organized rapes, the summary executions, the prisons filled with innocent people: we must tell what happened. Otherwise, we will never comprehend either what Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship consisted of nor the valid and invalid reasons behind an American intervention based, alas, more on ideological assumptions than on defending human rights. Similarly, there’s no understanding the horrors and the wars of Saddam Hussein if we don’t recall chemical warfare against Iraqi civilians or the hundreds of Kuwait citizens who disappeared without a trace during the 1991 Iraqi occupation. To gauge Baath party policies, which represented nobody but the Sunni minority and the dictatorship, we must remember how the regime dried up southern Iraq’s swamplands to root out Shiite rebels, how hundreds of thousands of Shiites were declared Iranians and expelled from their lands in the 1980s, how so many of them perished during the repressive campaign of 1991. Also, we must not forget how the Baathists hanged Jewish citizens publicly in 1969…
By showing clearly over hundreds of pages the scope and shame of such crimes, from Kurdistan to the southern wet lands, from Iran to Kuwait, and by chronicling the sheer number and diversity of the victims, Shiites, Kurds, Iranians, marsh Arabs, Jews, Kuwaitis or simply those opposed to the regime, this Black Book of Saddam Hussein at long last restores their voice to all those martyred.
We must detail these murders one by one, describe them in all their horror, and make perfectly clear their purpose, in order to combat the risk of amnesia and to state what is too often forgotten: Saddam was one of history’s worst tyrants and that it was necessary and urgent to remove him. Did we hear these simple truths sufficiently before, during and after the war? I doubt it. And yet, it would have been enough to listen to the Iraqi people. They probably don’t like the Americans, who have botched the country’s reconstruction, but they detested Saddam Hussein. Obviously, we would have preferred the UN Security Council and the international community, as in the case of Kosovo, put pressure on Saddam and if required wage war on him. The swift unilateralism of the Americans, who also condoned and supported Saddam Hussein for so long, was not the appropriate answer. But did an appropriate answer exist?
The 60th anniversary of the Auschwitz liberation showed the way: by letting the victims speak, by recognizing their suffering, we can combat oppression and deny it a victory. Crimes against humanity always seek to hide their true face. Whether in valleys ravaged by poison gas or in the depths of torture chambers, those of Saddam Hussein were no exception: every massacre the outside world declined to see constituted a triumph for him, every slaughter that went uncondemned consolidated his hold on power and allowed us—motivated by profit rather than perversion—to help him improve his deadly efficiency. If we let these crimes fade into the fog of history, we hand the butchers their victory, and we condemn their victims to a second agony.
- -
The American war
By December, 2002, America was preparing for war in Iraq. I wanted to know what my Kurd and Shiite friends thought about it, and so I returned to the autonomous Kurd zone created after the first Gulf war in 1991. In a now democratic Sulaimaniyah, the mayor’s political opposition was demonstrating publicly on local issues, while supporting the war of liberation being prepared. Of the 4,000 women enrolled at the university, not one wore a veil. You could choose from a total of 17 dailies and weeklies, representing all convictions. I returned towards Halabja, where thousands of women and children had perished in a few seconds of Saddam’s chemical bombing. There, I encountered a veiled woman who in despair unleashed her long-repressed anger on me. What was I doing there, she asked? Why should I, a former cabinet minister who couldn’t save these people from their tragic destiny during previous visits, why should I now return to this wounded land? How could I now face the victims, Frenchman that I am, whose government supported the regime, she asked? And what hope could I possibly offer them, me the humanitarian physician, when the French Doctors had long ago left the scene?
How could one reply to her formidable accusation of western selfishness? What reasons could ease the consternation of this young woman with delicate hands whose veiled body had been entirely burned, still causing her constant, gruesome pain? All her family members had been killed by the bombs of a man who at the time claimed French support.
In February, 2003, one and a half months before the second Iraq conflict, I co-authored for the Vauban Club, with Antoine Veil, an op-ed piece entitled, “Neither war nor Saddam.” At a time when politicians, intellectuals and the French media found themselves oddly consensual in opposition to George Bush, and in more or less absolving Saddam Hussein, we took exception to claims of weapons of mass destruction, asked for reinforced UN inspections and specified that only human rights violations could justify military pressure. We referred to the lessons provided by previous peace missions, to the need not to disband the armed forces but to reform them, and we demanded Iraq not be treated as a defeated belligerent. Lastly, we also recalled some of Baghdad’s most egregious crimes. We additionally called for a UN-organized international conference to throw a light on Saddam’s massacres, instead of making him the new hero of anti-US resistance. “The voice of the Iraqi people is still not being heard,” we wrote at the end, to decry the narrow choice imposed on us: American unilateralism or strengthening the Baathist dictatorship.
Whether facing Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon, or with State Department officials in Washington, or at numerous New York think tanks, or at the Peace Academy alongside Sergio Veira de Mello, we harped on certain truths as the storm clouds gathered: “Don’t come in as conquerors, create confidence and not fear, involve the Iraqis in each decision. It’s their country, protect them, and they will support you…” We drew constantly on the lessons learned from UN peace missions we had been involved with and from wartime NGO experience. We sought to convince our interlocutors that all countries are not alike and that despite Sunni-Shiite cultural differences, Kurd secular clashes suggested the definite existence of an Iraqi nation—fractious, tough, quarrelsome but genuine. We told them over again that peacemaking was relatively simple in comparison to the enormous challenges of nation building. We insisted that democracy could not be imposed but only offered and chosen, and that the first day would be decisive for confidence building. It didn’t do any good. We despaired.
The international conference, alas, never took place, and with the war behind us, the voice of the Iraqi people, despite the immense progress of elections, remains astonishingly absent from all debate…
In France and in Germany, the year 2003 saw some sincere defenders of freedom inadvertently support the worst oppressors by protesting American policy choices. They accused us of selling out the right to involvement in favor of aggression, of preferring expediency over compassion. Weren’t they revealing a soupçon of revisionism in such simplifications? Putting aside Saddam’s crimes, they distanced themselves momentarily from defending human rights so they could express political enmities, forgetting our shared concern about protecting minorities. They hadn’t taken the time to listen to the Iraqi people, who wanted for a long time to be rid of Saddam Hussein. And yet, his victims had a first claim to be heard.
We tried to explain that some of us had first-hand knowledge since 1974 of Saddam Hussein’s bombs and mass graves and to explain also that we spoke for the Kurds, the Shiites, and Iraqi partisans of democracy, including Sunnis, whose grievances, anger and appeals for help we had heard by meeting them in their country before the war. They wanted to be delivered. If the Americans proved themselves ideologically inept and incompetent peace makers, that made things no easier of course. But what morality allows you to define the victims by the political tint of the hand extended them? Saddam was one of the 20th century’s most prolific killers, after Stalin and Hitler. That fact should perhaps allow some to temper their politically-correct anti-Americanism.
The Americans, we liked to say, are sometimes our adversaries, but never our enemies. Saddam, terrorism and Islamic religious fascism seem to us the chief dangers. We do not confuse them with enlightened Koranic thought or with those terrified moderate Moslems who depended on our help to be rid of their oppressors.
We didn’t claim we could have avoided war. We said that the French militant position, actually facilitated it rather than the opposite. France’s initial diplomatic move, aimed at forcing a Security Council debate, was in fact smart. Then our nation veered off towards a fruitless veto threat.
Was there a surer way of dismaying those who expected so much of us? This repudiation remains for me an unremovable blot on our democracies. It made removing Saddam more urgent than ever.
For the Iraqis, there could be no doubt about the need to overthrow the Baghdad regime. Weapons of mass destruction? On more than 60 occasions, Saddam Hussein had been the first in human history to experiment their use by the state against its own citizens. His human rights violations? The thousands of villages erased from the map by Chemical Ali in 1988 or the hundreds of thousands of Anfal operation deportees serve as examples, among others. The links between Saddam and al Qaeda? The Kurds, who fought Ansar al-Islam infiltrators from Kabul in the mountain ranges, could see the reality of this on a daily basis, as they watched the regime strengthen its control over Bin Laden’s network. Iraqi national sovereignty? Everybody knows this sovereignty, born of a military coup, relied on a network of corrupt torturers…
For these reasons, it is today critical at long last to win the peace in Iraq after the crucial step of successful elections. A legitimate Iraqi government will soon take power. I’m not alone in this belief: the most reluctant European states opposed to the American-British war have changed their attitude towards the United States. Sunni minority dictatorship and Baath party crimes have been stopped: this is progress. Even if America’s war is far from being won. Even if suicide attacks will continue.
- -
The international community
We should keep in mind that intervention in Iraq was a just cause based on the wrong reasons. To justify the war, the so-called Neo-conservatives hastily cited only Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction and its supposed links with al Qaeda. America said nothing of Saddam Hussein’s massive human rights violations. Very late, near the end of the crisis, Tony Blair alone used this argument. It was as though Washington’s leaders cared nothing for the people of Iraq, listening only to the Iraqi exiles they sponsored. If Bush’s people looked upon Saddam as an enemy, it was only because his country ranked as a “Rogue state of the Axis of Evil” and not because he had grabbed power after a bloody coup or because he was killing his own people.
Among opponents to American policy, and most notably in France, human rights was also not mentioned. A show was made of defending international legality without actually defending a regime privately considered dictatorial, and all this without ever admitting that each criticism of Washington boosted Saddam Hussein.
« Some bombs can free you » wrote some German authors, referring to the Allied victory over the Nazis, as did some Kosovo journalists who two years earlier had eagerly awaited NATO operations. All the former dissidents in eastern Europe, all those suffering from a dictatorship—despite some misgivings—lined up behind the Americans. We were among those who sought to argue that only the victims’ opinion and the decisions mattered: that is, of the Iraqis themselves. At the Vauban Club, we thought war could be avoided and Saddam Hussein deposed with a strong international coalition applying pressure, as with Kosovo. We were not heard.
The debate we promoted never occurred: the Security Council became a boxing ring and other forums better suited to diplomatic and political thought were ignored, the opposite of what had happened with the Kosovo crisis.
- -
Intervention
To tell the truth, only one valid reason existed for supporting the coalition intervention: the consent of the Iraqi people and their well-known desire to remove their dictator. For them, the warfare had been raging 30 years, and they expected peace and deliverance from the American offensive.
Whose job is it to help others in distress? How can we protect minorities? Do we have the right to prevent massacres? Such questions were absent from the contest that opposed the United States and France, in the context of Iraqi dictatorship and killings. And yet, the debate was in no way new, and international decision-making had started its reform process.
We had made progress since the 1960s. At that time, totalitarian states killed freely while the rest of the world went about its business. Despots could indulge in all the domestic murder they wanted. Should the oppressed be allowed to die? “Yes,” answered the cold-hearted and the international law experts. “No!” countered the activists. But law and order drowned out their cries of indignation.
During the 1999 UN General Assembly, Kofi Annan asked the vital question: “If humanitarian intervention does indeed constitute an unacceptable breach of national sovereignty, then how should we react to situations we have witnessed in Rwanda or in Srebenica? What are we to do when confronted by such flagrant, massive and organized human rights violations, which contradict all the principles on which our human condition reposes?” The forbidden debate was open.
French Doctors developed a French-style human rights approach, which spread rapidly as a means of preventing mass slaughters. Kofi Annan referred to it as “humanitarian intervention.”
For nearly 20 years, the UN Security Council voted more than 200 resolutions along the lines of Resolution 688, which in 1991 established the right to intervene to defend Kurds against Saddam so they could live autonomously within a sovereign state. The text was drawn up by five people in the Geneva home of Sadruddin Aga Khan: Sadruddin himself, Perez de Cuellar, Stafan de Mistoura, Jean-Maurice Ripert and myself.
I believe in the United Nations, in a managed concert of democratic nations, and in the human rights that our diplomats sometimes mock. A notion of our universal responsibility is emerging. I’m certain that Europe can require more. It can protect against the traumas of globalization as well as the simplistic ideas of globalization’s foes, against naïve free-marketers as well as out-of-date collectivists. We can construct credible answers, stimulating alternatives, and activist movements. In France, our electoral slogans ring hollow. What a pity: humanitarian intervention would have made for a great campaign theme. Our nation first developed intervention, that is, the protection of victims, of oppressed minorities, but alas French political leaders have now for years turned their backs on a credo which suits this country perfectly. We should grab at it and offer it to our young people who seek something they can be excited about. I am thinking of my friends who died in Baghdad for the sake of such a hope: Sergio Veira de Mello, Nadia Younes, Jean Sélim Kanaan, Fiona Watson and others, particularly those killed by a suicide attack against the UN headquarters in August, 2003.
Since then, every new day in Iraq has brought refinements in horror and perfectionism in killing Shiite civilians efficiently, indiscriminately and massively. The suicide bombers aim at groups of children, and often at marketplaces heavily frequented by women. Extremist Islamic psychopaths buckle on their exploding belts, rig deadly vehicles or blow themselves up in tank trucks filled with fuel or natural gas.
The number of dead civilians sometimes exceeds 100 in a single day, not to mention the wounded who flood into the hospitals. How long can this carnage continue? This unspeakable escalation covers the front pages of the world press. The civil war that began at the highest levels between minority Sunnis and majority Shiites when Saddam Hussein took power has now moved into the streets. The killers aim to do their worst.
How can we end this hellish spiral of violence? Will Iraqis, freed of their tyrant and by far most of them happy about it, come soon to regret the old days of routine, random torture and extortion?
In Washington, the experts maintain a certain silence. Military recruitment levels have dropped in every state of the Union. Are the Americans and their British allies, who have proved more skilful and luckier in Basra, considering a retreat? What withdrawal game plans are they developing in the Pentagon? Three of them are getting some attention. The first aims at a swift withdrawal thanks to the existence of a provisional Iraqi government, however weak it may be, and hinges on a recent understanding with Teheran. The second has American forces staying many years in Iraq, with a substantial manpower increase. And the third foresees US soldiers leaving Iraq next year with the formation, after new elections, of a stable federal government, along with more viable police and armed forces.
Saddam Hussein will soon go on trial. The man who butchered his own people must answer to some of the crimes this book details. Will the Iraqis cheer their fallen dictator or will they understand that a new era has begun, one they can build on? Nobody knows for now. Raed Juhi, the courageous chief investigative judge of the Iraqi Special Tribunal (IST), announced in July, 2005, that his probe into the 1982 slaughter of 143 Shiites in Dujail was completed. At this rate, it will take many more months of investigation to examine the crimes of Saddam, as presented in this book. Will years of such probes further fuel the Sunni rebellion?
We remain in favor of preventing wars and not of preventive wars, except in exceptional cases. Wounded by September 11, the Americans waged a tardy war on Saddam Hussein for the wrong reasons. They were unable to convince the rest of the world. As old allies of Saddam Hussein, the French behaved poorly. For a time, diplomacy and even the most basic human rights policies were forgotten. Since there was no correct way to remove Saddam the tyrant, a wrong way was chosen. President Bush, by going after a killer, set off an endless round of violence. Human rights activists, trapped in a contradiction, mourned bitterly and too often chose to denounce only American unilateralism, forgetting Saddam’s crimes.
I am told that every morning a Pentagon officer delivers to President Bush an envelope containing the number of dead and wounded over the previous 24 hours in Iraq. I am also told the president does not comment on the numbers, but does note sometimes that the dead are Iraqis and that American soldiers are now less in harm’s way.
The American military has been unable to win over hearts and minds in Iraq. An oppressive force is sometimes replaced by yet another. The life span of a peace mission can extend for years. Democratic instincts develop slowly. Each time, it takes at least a generation.
Some 25,000 Iraqi deaths have occurred since March, 2003, mostly of civilians and policemen. Killing for the sake of killing. After these years of blood and death, we will have to construct a peace. Will there remain enough of the impartiality, the kind found in this book, for us to appreciate the world is better off without Saddam Hussein? I think so, even if history suffers from amnesia. We are all facing an era of terrorism. With or without Iraq, I know it’s inevitable. It’s a war we must win.
The black pages before you, whether in dry statistics of murders or in unvarnished accounts of oppression, evoke the cries of the tortured, which we previously could not or would not hear. These pages render their dignity to a people. We owe them this homage.
It’s a matter of staring a truth straight in the face: that of our own failures.
August 1, 2005