MURDER BY HELICOPTER IN KURDISTAN

Charles Glass charges George Bush and

John Major with cynicism in their attitude to Saddam Hussein's suppression of his people

THE army of Iraq, until recently distracted by foreign conflicts with Iran and the United States of America, has revived the role for which it was created in 1921: that of waging war on the people of Iraq. 'The spinal column for forming a nation', as the first King Feisal called the army Britain gave him to go with his throne in Baghdad, may have been bruised in Kuwait, but it has shown in battles with its people in southern and northern Iraq that it is not broken. The army survived, because the allies wanted it to — 10, perhaps not in a form to threaten American allies, but at least to deal with the Iraqi populace.

The main resistance came from security, intelligence and Ba'ath Party forces, who correctly judged the mood of the people and knew their surrenders would not be accepted by those they had tortured and whose sons and daughters they had mur- dered. The most damaged building we saw on the road south from Zakho, in the northwest corner of Iraq, to Arbil, Iraq's second city and capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, was not an army base. It was the Ba'ath Party headquarters in Sumeil which Kurds attacked with tanks and light automatic weapons, killing 11 of the 50 party mem- bers inside.

The army of the north was unreliable, because its members were mainly Kurdish auxiliaries of the Fursan, Arabic for `Knights'. These were tribal levies, obeying their local chieftains who until then en- joyed government privileges, and unem- ployed boys from the concentration camps into which the Kurds were herded after the destruction of more than 5,000 of their villages. While the main forces, the com- mitted Republic Guards and professional troops, were engaged in and around Kuwait, the Jash, 'donkeys', as the Kurds called their people in the Fursan, were left to defend the north against invasion from Turkey and subversion from within. When they saw the defeat of the army in Kuwait and heard George Bush's call to topple Saddam Hussein, which they mistakenly interpreted as support for the Kurds and other Iraqi dissidents, they moved to what they believed would be the winning side. Kurdish ranks swelled, and neither of the two main factional leaders, Massoud Barzani and Jelal Talebani, could absorb all the new recruits. They tried to put the more senior and experienced officers, for- mer staff chiefs and tank commanders, into positions of responsibility, but the bulk were mercenaries who would change sides as conditions required. Some of them actually shot and killed two bodyguards of Massoud Barzani in a tribal vendetta that had nothing to do with the rebellion.

The rebellion was achieving more than it had dreamed in the north, and in the south Shi'ite Muslim rebels were tying down thousands of Iraqi troops. In the early enthusiasm, Lieutenant-General Thomas Kelly, operations director of America's Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Washington Post, 'Of any ten individual outcomes, nine of them would be beneficial.'

George Bush made repeated calls to the Iraqi people to overthrow Saddam Hus- sein, calls they answered to the extent of their ability. Yet, later, when Bush had permitted the Iraqi airforce to fly, prom- ised the return of Iraqi prisoners and agreed to channel aid through the Baghdad regime, thus granting it legitimacy denied it by its own people, he announced, 'We are not going to intervene.' The calls to the people of Iraq may have been subtly misdirected. To discover the real object of the appeal, reading the ventriloquist's lips in Washington reveals less than the dum- my's words in London. 'I don't recall asking them to mount this particular insur- rection,' John Major said on 4 April, when the rebellion was in retreat. And he added: 'We hope very much that the military in Iraq will remove Saddam Hussein.' Ah, the military, not the people at all. Why, we might ask, didn't someone say so before the Kurds, Shi'ites and others took the risk, before they committed the capital crime of challenging Saddam Hussein, destroying his effigy in their towns and removing his army from their barracks, before that army regrouped for its 'final solution' to the Kurdish problem?

The Iraqi army, on which the Western world has put hope for the salvation of Iraq, is the armed wing of the Ba'ath Party, a national socialist ruling clique dedicated to preserving itself in power at any cost. When the Ba'ath Party briefly held power in 1963, it recognised the military as al jaish al 'aga'idi, 'the ideological army'. Senior officers fearing a Ba'athist purge deposed the party later that year, but it returned to power in 1968 in a bloody putsch that resulted in the execution of Jews, non- Ba'athists and even Ba'athists of question- able loyalty. The Ba'ath created a Military Intelligence Branch that put informers in every army unit. All officers and NCOs were required to join the Ba'ath Party, and non-Ba'athists were either killed or expel- led from senior command posts. The party established a Department of Political Orientation 'to prepare the fighters ideolo- gically and psychologically, in accordance with the principles of our revolution, the party and leader, Saddam Hussein.' Is this the backbone Messrs Bush and Major want to support the future Iraqi state? When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on 2 August, horror stories about his activities of the previous 20 years — how he had deceived and executed colleagues, massacred Kurds, punished dissent with a ferocity that would have impressed Hitler and Stalin — found more exposure in the Western press than ever they did while the United States and its allies were trading with and aiding the Iraqi regime. By March of this year, however, the United States apparently chose to trust Saddam Hussein as it had in the days before Kuwait.

On 23 March General Norman Schwarz- kopf told journalists in Saudi Arabia,' 'They're using helicopters, but predomi- nantly to move troops around the battle- field and that sort of thing. The use of armed helicopters has decreased rather dramatically since the meeting we had the other day.'

By then, I had seen Iraqi helicopters bombing the city of Dihouk and the Kurdish towns between Dihouk and Mosul. We saw scores of civilians in hospitals whose skin was burned beyond recognition, who had lost limbs and who were in shock. At the renamed Freedom Hospital, formerly called the Saddam Hos- pital, we watched a man being brought into the emergency room without visible wounds. He had died of a heart attack from the terror of continuous helicopter bombardment of his neighbourhood.

On 27 March, in an astounding interview with David Frost, Schwarzkopf said, 'We had destroyed the Republican Guard as a militarily effective force.' The next day, Iraqi army helicopters deposited Republi- can Guards in the Kurdish-controlled oil city of Kirkuk, by then the southernmost extent of the Kurdish advance. The Guards seized the city in savage fighting and began an offensive north into the rest of Iraqi Kurdistan. Other Western journalists and I watched with Kurdish civilians as the Re- publican Guards, supported by regular army brigades, mercilessly shelled Kurdish-held areas with Katyusha multiple rocket launchers, helicopter gunships and heavy artillery.

Schwarzkopf discussed with Frost the difficulties of deciding when to stop the bombing of the Republican Guards. A transcript of the discussion reads: Mr Frost. A very courageous decision, and a very real debate, really, that between, on the one hand, completely dispensing with the Republican Guard so it could never be used again, as you were recommending, another 24 hours versus the [Bush] humanitarian decision. That is one of the, as you say, that is one of the great decisions of history which way to do that.

Schwarzkopf. Yeah.

Schwarzkopf revealed to Frost his reasons for allowing the Iraqis to use their helicopters.

And they looked me straight in the eye and said, 'Well, you know, you know, you have destroyed all of our bridges, you know you have destroyed all of our roads, and, therefore, it's hard to get around the coun- try. We would like to fly our helicopters. And, the purpose of flying those helicopters will be for transportation of government officials'. . . . That seemed like a reasonable request. And, within my charter, I felt that that was something that it was perfectly all right to grant. I think I was suckered, because I think they intended — right then, when they asked that question — to use those helicopters against the insurrections that were going on.

For those unfamiliar with the slang vocabulary used in my country, 'suckered' means 'tricked' or 'deceived'. It implies that Schwarzkopf misjudged Iraqi inten- tions, just as allied leaders 'misjudged' the intentions of Stalin in 1945 when they released to him thousands of Cossack and other prisoners of war, whom he promptly murdered. Was General Schwarzkopf, or those who betrayed the Cossacks to Stalin, naive or cynical? Will he, as the allied leaders who pleaded ignorance of Stalin's intentions, claim before the bar of history that he did not know Saddam Hussein's reputation? Would Frost classify this as 'one of the great decisions of history'?

In the two weeks we toured northern Iraq, visiting all its main cities and towns, we watched the revolution dissipate under the fire of those Iraqi helicopters. Not only did they alter the course of the military battle — giving the Iraqis airborne gunships, valuable observation posts and troop transports — they reduced Kurdish morale. When the Jash saw America tip- ping the balance in favour of Saddam Hussein, they began to disobey their new leaders. The civilians were terrified — not only of the helicopters, but of the soldiers, the security officers and torturers who followed in their wake. And they fled, clogging the roads to Iran and Turkey, even as those helicopters continued to bomb them in their exodus. Out of the four to five million Kurds of northern Iraq, only a handful — those too poor, too ill or too hopeful the government would let them survive — remained behind.

The governments of the world, who encouraged and then abandoned the Kurds, are now observing their genocide. This is a term used carefully, in accordance with the definition in the Genocide Con- vention of 1948, as

any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately in- flicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruc- tion in whole or in part . . .

Iraq signed the convention in 1959. Article VIII states:

Any Contracting Party may call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide.. .

If any Contracting Party — any of the nations now piously promising blankets and food parcels to millions of Kurds freezing along Iraq's borders — raises the genocide issue at the UN, it can be referred first to the International Court of Justice and then to the UN Military Staff Commit- tee for action — the same committee that international law said should have over- seen the liberation of Kuwait.

In the meantime, Turkey and Britain are proposing an 'enclave' for the Kurds some- where in northern Iraq. Here, their destiny would be to live as international beggars. The Kurds are reluctantly grabbing at this straw as a last means of survival, and the Iraqi government rejects it outright as an 'infringement' of the sovereignty it has so steadfastly abused. For a few weeks this spring, until they were betrayed, the Kurds were a proud and free people who believed they could make their country something it has never been, a democracy.