Taimour remained in the compound with his mother and sisters for a month, living off a piece of bread per day, until one morning in late May the guards summoned them, checking their names off a list and hustling them onto the green-and-white buses. Taimour drove with some fifty or sixty women and children who were seated the length of the bus. They drove in sweltering silence—three children died of dehydration on the way—until nightfall. When the guards threw open the rear doors, Taimour, who had removed his blindfold saw that each of the thirty or so vehicles in his convoy had been positioned next to its own desert burial pit, each of which was about fifteen feet square and a yard deep. A mound of mud was stacked precipitously on the far side of each pit. Before Taimour had time to process the grim scene, the guards pushed him and the others into the pits, separating him from his mother and sisters.55
When Taimour was hit by a bullet in the left shoulder, he began to stagger toward the man who shot him, reaching out with his hands. He remembered the look in the soldier’s eyes. “He was about to cry,” Taimour said three years later, mechanically reciting a narrative he had learned to tell and retell, “but the other one shouted at him and told him to throw me back in the pit. He was obliged to throw me back.”56 The officer ordered the soldier to fire again, which he did, hitting Taimour for a second time, this time on the right side of his back, just above the waist. The boy lay still. When the guards had walked away, he felt a young girl move next to him. “Let’s run,” he whispered, but she declined, too frightened of the soldiers.
Taimour emerged from the pit and stole one last look behind him, spotting his mother, three sisters, and three aunts piled like cordwood. He inched his way away from the grave, avoiding the sweeping headlights of the guards’ land-cruisers. With blood pouring from his wounds, he passed out behind one of the dirt mounds. When he regained consciousness, the pits had been filled and smoothed flat. He escaped and was sheltered by an Arab family for two years. Only with the Kurdish uprising in 1991 was he repatriated to the north. There he learned he had lost twenty-eight relatives in the Anfal.57
A Pair of Iraqi Victories
U.S. and European policymakers had long refused to meet officially with Iraqi Kurdish leaders for fear of irritating Saddam Hussein. But the high-profile gassing of Halabja and the disappearance and suspected massacres of tens of thousands of unarmed Kurds caused Jalal Talabani, the leader of one of the Iraqi Kurds’ two main political parties, to believe he might at last gain an audience with Western officialdom. In June 1988 Talabani, a fifty-four-year-old former journalist and lawyer, decided to test his luck and left the Middle East for the first time in eight years. He traveled to London where, along with Latif Rashid, his party’s representative there, he pored over a copy of the genocide convention. “We knew ‘genocide’ was a very sensitive term, and we wanted to be very careful that we were using it correctly,” Rashid remembers. After reviewing the text, debating its terms, and comparing it to the facts of the Anfal, Talabani announced publicly that Iraq was “waging a genocide campaign against our people through the daily use of poison gas.”58
A few weeks later, Talabani visited Washington. He claimed that Iraq had destroyed more than 1,000 villages in the previous year alone and offered gruesome accounts of gassing. Wearing a pinstriped suit and a paisley tie, Talabani did not conform to the image of the pantalooned, bullet-laden Kurdish rebel. More politically savvy than expected, Talabani deftly made the case that Hussein’s genocide was downright historic. “It’s the first time in history a government has used chemical weapons against its own citizens who are not at the battlefront,” he told Elaine Sciolino of the New York Times. He also defended the alliance that his forces had made with Iran on the grounds that “when you are facing a war of genocide, it is your duty to fight back in any way you can.”59
Larry Pope, the State Department’s Iran-Iraq office director, favored the Reagan administration’s chosen policy of engagement with Iraq. But he was sufficiently revolted by the images out of Halabja that he felt the United States should register its disapproval by agreeing to meet Talabani at the State Department. This meant ignoring the long-standing “self-denying ordinance” that required all contact with the Kurds to occur off U.S. government property. Talabani was delighted. He and Pope met for an hour in the State Department’s fortress at Foggy Bottom. The first burst of outrage came not from the Iraqis but from Turkish president Kenan Evren, who happened to be in Washington to meet with Secretary of State Shultz. Evren, who feared that any encouragement given Iraqi Kurds would embolden Turkey’s 10 million Kurds, went ballistic. Shultz knew nothing of the Talabani-Pope meeting and demanded to know, “Who the hell had this bright idea?” The Iraqis, predictably, were also irate. Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz canceled his long-planned meeting with Shultz, accusing the U.S. government of interfering in Iraqi internal affairs. Iraq was most sensitive to U.S. statements and maneuvers. The State Department scrambled to appease Iraq by declaring publicly: “The United States does not interfere in the internal affairs” of those countries with a Kurdish minority.60 Pope was reprimanded, and the department reiterated its policy of meeting with the Kurdish leadership only off-site. “At first, we were so popular. Everyone was so gracious and interested,” remembers Rashid, the Talabani aide. “Then suddenly, overnight, the doors closed and we were shut out.” In the end Pope believes his gesture—tame as it was—backfired. “Rather than send a message of disapproval to Iraq, we sent the message that our relations with Iraq and Turkey were more important than anything Hussein did internally,” he recalls.
Talabani had quickly learned the value the United States placed on its relationship with Iraq. Still, the trip paid some dividends. He got to know several members of Congress and became acquainted for the first time with Galbraith. He also helped nudge along Senator Mitchell’s resolution condemning Iraqi chemical weapons use, which passed unanimously (91–0) on June 24, 1988.61 But because no sticks were attached to the resolution and because Hussein could be confident the White House was still on his side, he was not deterred. In late June and July the Iraqis staged chemical weapons attacks throughout Kurdish territory.
The United States had concentrated its diplomatic efforts in 1987–1988 on isolating and securing an arms embargo against Iran. It had also supplied concrete assistance to Iraq. Although it did not sell Baghdad weapons, the United States provided intelligence gathered from AWACS early-warning aircraft, which included damage estimates on Iraqi strikes and reports of Iranian troop movements.62 Partly as a result of U.S. support, Iraq turned the tide in its war with Iran. Iran may have blundered by highlighting the gruesome effects of Iraqi chemical weapons. Instead of mobilizing public opinion, the testimony of survivors convinced potential volunteers to steer clear of the recruiting offices. Khomeini agreed to a cease-fire in July 1988. Teheran radio broadcast a statement in his name that hinted at the role of the poisonous chemicals. “Taking this decision was more deadly than taking poison,” the ayatollah said. “I have sold my honor. I have swallowed the poison of defeat.”63 More than 1 million soldiers and civilians on both sides had died in the war.64 Not an inch of land had changed hands.
On August 20, 1988, Iran and Iraq signed an armistice ending their bloody struggle. Despite the vivid images from Halabja and the brief flurry of Western interest in the Kurds, their suffering had faded from public view. Al-Majid continued his ruthless drive to empty rural Kurdistan throughout the summer, dragging away any Kurd who dared remain in the prohibited areas. On August 25 Iraq launched a new attack on Kurdish villages, using aircraft, fixed-wing helicopters, tanks, and tens of thousands of Iraqi troops. It was the “final” offensive in al-Majid’s six-month Anfal campaign.
After ignoring Iraqi attacks for so long, senior U.S. officials had to take notice of this one. Perched at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, Rankin remembers his reaction to the news:
We at the embassy thought that once the Iran-Iraq war ended, Hussein would bring his country and his people, who
had so much potential and who had suffered for so long, out of oblivion. We told ourselves that if he no longer had to fight Iran, he could become the man we wished he could be. But when he signed the cease-fire with Iran and then gassed the Kurds, he lost his cover. It was clear he could never be that man. He was a monster. These attacks had nothing to do with his Iranian security threat. They had to do with killing Kurds.
The final offensive against the Kurds was widely known. Two days after it began, the New York Times reported that in late July Iraq had dispatched at least 20,000 elite forces to the north and quoted one regional expert as saying, “We get the impression that the Iraqis wanted to finish the whole business.” A long front-page story on September 1, 1988, described the deployment of more than 60,000 troops and led with the sentence, “Iraq has begun a major offensive [meant to] crush the 40-year-long insurgency once and for all.”65 The media gave this offensive more intensive coverage than previous Iraqi assaults because it quickly sent 65,000 Kurdish victims and survivors flooding into Turkey. The Turkish government was none-too-pleased by the destabilizing Kurdish influx, but it set up encampments along its border and refused to grant Iraq the reciprocal right of “hot pursuit” that Turkish forces had invoked so often to track down armed Turkish Kurds in northern Iraq. The Kurdish refugees did what Cambodians had done: They poured out their stories to journalists, who had full and free access to southern Turkey. These stories got Galbraith’s attention immediately and that of the U.S. secretary of state eventually.
“Genocide”
Galbraith had kept his eye out for bad news from northern Iraq since March, when he had learned of the Halabja attack. There was no question that Hussein’s recent deeds suggested a ruthlessness that boded extremely ill for the Kurdish people: the elimination of the Kurdish villages, the widespread disappearances (and probable execution) of Kurdish men, and Hussein’s repeated, brazen use of chemical weapons. Galbraith had begun to wonder whether Hussein was committing genocide.
Galbraith saw a certain internal logic in Hussein’s piecemeal campaign. He believed the Iraqi dictator might be husbanding the full might of his armed forces, knowing that a more gradual campaign against the Kurds would enable him to keep his soldiers committed, forestall a more spirited international reaction, and enable the local economy (fueled largely by Kurds) to remain afloat.
On Galbraith’s trip to Iraq in 1987, he had seen dozens of villages and small cities demolished far from the sensitive border with Iran. He also knew that al-Majid’s dragnet was sweeping up women and children as well. All Kurds in rural Kurdistan were vulnerable, regardless of their political sympathies. Loyalty to the Baghdad regime was no protection, as the Kurdish jash, those who worked for the Iraqi government, discovered. At a meeting in 1987, al-Majid told one jash, “I cannot let your village stay. . . . I will attack it with chemical weapons. Then you and your family will die.”66
But it was with Hussein’s August offensive, launched after the end of his war with Iran, that Galbraith’s worst suspicions were confirmed. On August 28, 1988, tucked away in Vermont for a relaxing Labor Day weekend, Galbraith came across a short New York Times report buried back on page A15. The piece, “More Chemical Attacks Reported,” described Iraqi Kurds crossing into Turkey and reporting gas attacks.67 He froze, as images of the rubbled remains of Kurdish life flashed into his mind. He read the same sixty-three words over and over again, draining the news item for any details that might be lurking between the lines.
Galbraith was sure that the reports of chemical attacks were true. Although he could not gauge precisely the breadth of the brutal campaign of gassing, execution, and depopulation under way, Galbraith believed Hussein’s regime had set out to destroy Iraqi Kurds. It was genocide.
It was just one of those moments of recognition. I just knew it was true. . . . I knew then that we could never be fully certain that Hussein wanted to destroy the Kurds, but we would also never be more certain.
Unlike the Cambodia watchers of the late 1970s or most of Washington’s Iraq watchers at the time, Galbraith knew that the genocide convention did not require an intent to exterminate every last Iraqi Kurd. Working for Senator Pell, one of Proxmire’s co-conspirators in pushing for U.S. ratification of the convention, Galbraith had come to appreciate some of the nuances inherent in the law’s notion of “destruction.” He had surveyed Lemkin’s writings and the drafting history of the genocide convention, and he knew that a perpetrator did not have to be executing attacks as holistic in scope as the Holocaust to qualify as genocide. The category of genocide was valuable because it described an ongoing or outstanding intent, whereas the “Holocaust” described a singulary monstrous event that had already happened. “These things accelerate,” Galbraith says. “Hitler, when he took power in 1933, did not have a plan to exterminate all the Jews in Europe. Evil begets evil.” Hussein and Hitler were both fascist ideologues intent on destroying groups they found distasteful or, for their own reasons, threatening. Hussein’s aims were clearly more limited than Hitler’s. It was only Kurds in the “prohibited areas” who had thus far been marked for destruction. But Galbraith believed the million or more Kurds living in Baghdad would eventually be targeted as well: “While at that time the extermination campaign was focused on Kurds in rural areas and small towns, I thought that the logic of his program could culminate in the elimination of the entire Kurdish population of Iraq.”
Galbraith raced back to Washington to begin making his case on Capitol Hill. He knew a great deal about Lemkin’s law, but he knew almost nothing about his lobbying. Yet within days Galbraith had drafted a new law and begun pursuing its passage with all the blunt zeal of his Polish predecessor.
Response
Sanctioning Saddam
When word of the August offensive broke, the Reagan administration had a number of options available. It could have condemned the new wave of gas attacks. It could have demanded that its ally stop destroying rural Kurdish life. It could have urged that the men and women taken away in the previous offensives be released. And it could have threatened to suspend some of the economic perks it had been extending to Baghdad for the past five years.
Because Congress controlled the purse strings, Galbraith understood that legislators could have considerable influence on how the United States used its economic leverage abroad. Senate staffers were not permitted to speak on the record to the press. Nor could they publish articles under their own names. Yet with the backing of a powerful senator, they could do something far more influential: They could draft U.S. law. Most U.S. laws are proposed by the executive branch. Some are drafted by lobbyists and adopted by the Senate. And many more are drafted by House and Senate staff, especially the committee staff. Having worked for Pell on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for more than a decade, Galbraith knew that the senator, the son of the Roosevelt administration’s representative to the Allied War Crimes Commission, would want to use U.S. law to take a stand. He was right.
After its month-long August recess, the Senate returned for its last weeks of business of the year on September 7, 1988. At the urging of his boss, Galbraith dashed off the draft law in an hour, writing in English that all could understand (a gift he attributed to avoiding law school). “This was not a deeply reflective process,” Galbraith remembers. “I included every sanction that I could think of”; indeed, his bill contained harsher sanctions than those imposed against apartheid South Africa. The sanctions package barred Iraqi oil imports, worth $500 million per year; instructed U.S. officials to vote against Iraqi loans at the IMF and World Bank; eliminated $500 million in annual CCC credit guarantees to Iraq for the purchase of U.S. agricultural foodstuffs; terminated $200 million in annual export-import credits for manufactured goods; and prohibited exports to Iraq of any item that required an export license (e.g., sensitive technology or any item with possible military use).
One of the boldest features of the bill was also one of its most novel. Instead of requiring the president to prov
e that genocide was being committed, which is always hard to do while atrocities are still under way and which an administration aligned with Saddam Hussein had no incentive to demonstrate, Pell’s legislation reversed the burden: President Reagan was required to certify that Iraq was not using chemical weapons against the Kurds and that it was not committing genocide.68 If Reagan wished to avoid sanctions, he would have to defend Iraqi conduct affirmatively.
Senator Pell asked the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jesse Helms, to cosponsor the bill, which he did. Helms had battled Pell and Proxmire over the genocide convention, but he often took a strong stand against flagrantly abusive regimes. In this instance he and his wife had been moved by an encounter with three Kurds who were on hunger strikes to protest the Iraqi atrocities, whom they met through their church, the First Baptist in Alexandria, Virginia.69 Four other senators—Proxmire, Al Gore (D.–Tenn.), Wendell Ford (D.–Ky.), and Senate majority leader Robert Byrd (D.–W.Va.)—heard of the draft law and joined in introducing it. Pell and Helms were able to “hotline” the measure, bypassing the Foreign Relations Committee, which had already held its last business meeting of the year. This gave staff members and senators virtually no time to review the bill. Galbraith had named the law the “Prevention of Genocide Act,” a title that he thought would resonate. “I wanted a title that would call attention to the crimes taking place and rally support for the legislation,” Galbraith recalls. He also wanted to make it less likely that senators would in fact read the bill. If he had called the measure the “Iraqi Sanctions Act,” he knew U.S. business lobbies would read and scuttle it. Additionally, because of the “moral high-tone” of the label, senators might assume that this bill, like others in such a tenor, was merely hortatory.
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