Iraqi Kurdistan: Documents Provide Historical Record Of Sadd

[Aslan]

Among some of the 14 tons of Iraqi government documents seized by Kurdish parties during the 1991 uprising, detailing Saddam Hussein’s crimes against the Kurds, Shorish Haji recalls being moved by one in particular.

It recorded the intention of Saddam’s henchmen to fake the ages of a group of Kurdish children so they could be executed for scrawling slogans on public walls in Sulaimani, recalls Haji, an Iraqi MP from the Kurdish Change Movement (Gorran).

“A council composed of the head of the secret services, the governor and a number of other officials had written their intention to fake the children’s ages in order to have them executed when sent to Baghdad,” Haji says.

Haji and his wife, together with more than 20 Arab and American researchers, were hired by New York-based Human Rights Watch to sift through and categorize the documents, which were flown out to the United States for safekeeping after the 2003 US-led invasion.

Another incident from the documents that still sticks in Haji’s mind is about a major confrontation between Iraqi troops and Kurdish Peshmarga fighters in 1984-85, after which field officers wrote to the then defense minister, Adnan Khayrullah, reporting they had seized 131 Peshmaraga fighters and asking, “Should we execute them or send them to Baghdad?”

Haji quotes from memory Khayrullah’s hand-written reply: “Are you trying to deceive me or yourselves? Yesterday you wrote that many tanks, army units, and helicopters were mobilized but failed to advance for even one meter! How did you manage to arrest 131 Peshmargas today? I am sure you have arrested the civilian villagers. Free them as soon as you read this letter.”

Haji believes that, despite their cruelty, some officials in Saddam’s Baath party stood out against injustice done by the Iraqi army.

“What made me eager to work on this project was the fact that the international community was not paying any attention to these atrocious genocides,” Haji told Rudaw in a recent interview.

He says he has worked on collecting crime documents since the late 1980s when the anti-Kurdish Anfal genocide campaign was in full swing. Then, Haji was a Peshmarga fighter of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), based in the rugged Qandil Mountains.

During those years, he says, he had recorded the names of close to 4,000 villages and towns destroyed by the Iraqi army since 1963. “In the report I logged the names of 16,000 individuals who were missing in the Anfal campaign,” Haji says. “Later my report was sent to the Human Rights Watch.”

He adds that, in the documents that recorded events from 1946 to 1991, different Iraqi governments had different terminology for the Kurdish parties that were fighting for Kurdish rights in the north of the country.

“In a certain era these parties were called ‘saboteurs,’ and then they were named as ‘rebels,’” Haji says. “Later they were labeled as ‘Iranian agents.’ Some of them were also called ‘traitors.’ This happened stage-by-stage, corresponding to the political events of the day.”

Haji says that documents dating between 1961-1991 provide great insight -- almost a historical record -- of the life of the Kurdish parties, as well the structure of the Iraqi government.

He believes it was a wise decision for the Americans to whisk the documents out of Iraq soon after the invasion.

“In the US the documents were examined and preserved. If they were kept here, maybe during the civil war they would have been all burnt, or maybe simply damaged in the rain,” he says.

Haji says that former US diplomat Peter Galbraith, considered a close friend of the Kurds, played a major role in shipping the documents to the US. He also says that the Kurds can have them returned anytime they want.

“The documents’ ownership is registered under the Kurds,” he says. “They are there on a temporary basis. Whenever, the Kurds ask for the documents, they are to be returned to us.”
According to Haji, scanned copies of most of the documents have been given to the PUK and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), and original copies of these documents are kept at the University of Colorado.

Working on these documents has made Haji an authority on the crimes of the Iraqi regime, and he is regularly invited by foreign universities, governments and courts to give lectures.
Haji says that the documents show that the Iraqi secret service had a special desk in the 1990s, tasked with fueling the civil war between Kurdish parties in the autonomous region.