I woke in Istanbul on March 17 with a New York Times printout on my pillow, a gift from my host, colleague and travel companion Yigal Schleifer. The article (available here, with a different and willfully misleading headline) reported that an anti-corruption demonstration in Halabja had escalated into a riot, and that a mob had burned and gutted the city’s monument to the 1988 massacre. The news was unsettling, not least because Yigal and I would be in Halabja in a matter of days. A summary on the incident from the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) is here.
Roughly an hour’s drive east of Suleimaniya, Halabja sits near the Iranian border—so near that one can see the snowcapped peaks of northwest Iran in the distance. The Ba’ath regime gassed some 5,000 Kurds in and around the city in 1988, and although the atrocity was not technically part of the Anfal campaign, Halabja has come to symbolize the full horror of the Kurdish genocide of 1987-1989. Several people we spoke with mentioned Hiroshima in the same breath.
Our fixer hails from Halabja. At age eight he fled the gas attack with his family and took up residence in another village. He did not understand what was happening at the time, but he recalls returning to Halabja several years later and finding the place systematically reduced to rubble. As we drove from Suli, we passed through other villages that had been leveled, like Saidsadiq and Sirwan. All are now rebuilt, but they have a long way to go.
Soon we pulled up to the charred monument, pictured above. (It was opened to the public in September 2003, at a ceremony presided over by none other than Colin Powell.) PUK soldiers stood guard at the ruins but paid us little mind. The place was eerie, desolate, beyond depressing. A group of small children, including girls in their celebratory Newroz garb, puttered around the debris-strewn interior. Glass panes listing the names of the chemical victims were partly shattered. We had to step carefully through Catastrophe Hall, as many of the translucent floor tiles were missing. Outside the structure were piles of burned rubbish, left behind either by rioters or clean-up crews. There were remains of actual chemical weapons shells, office equipment, glass display cases, even a broken and burned guitar. We followed the children up a rusted ladder to the roof. This finally got the attention of the PUK men, who demanded that we all come down.
Why did Kurds destroy a monument to their own martyrs? How could it be that even our fixer, displaced by the attack as a child, was “happy” that the monument burned?
The IWPR’s account reads: “Some said the memorial was no more than a ‘bank’ which helped officials raise cash to line their own pockets.” We heard this “bank” remark from a number of people, including a group of men in their 20s watching an afternoon soccer game. They had been at the demonstration, but they did not endorse the burning of the monument. Still, they condemned what they described as “corruption to the core.” “After 18 years of promises, the people are fed up,” one man said. “The government uses the monument to blind its foreign guests. They take people to see the monument but they won’t let them see the conditions in the town.”
The people’s grievances include inadequate housing, education, health care, electricity, roads and so on. Indeed, even a brief pass through Halabja reveals that the roads are in horrendous shape. “My shoes are falling apart,” said one of the soccer fans. “There’s a big difference between young people in Halabja and elsewhere, because by evening no one can recognize you under the layer of dust.” The roads in other cities didn’t seem much better, in fact. Half the main street through Dukan is impassible, and apparently it’s been that way for quite some time.
Why do these conditions persist? “Because the political decision makers are also economic decision makers,” said one soccer fan. Asos Hardi, editor of a new liberal democratic weekly called Awene, agreed. “Contracts go to cronies of the two parties [PUK and KDP],” he said. “Companies have links to the parties and aren’t accountable. They take six years to do a job and no one asks them why. Can you tell me why it takes one year to finish a 500-meter road?”
—
A bit of perspective is in order. In Kurdistan they are arguing about bad roads. In Baghdad, sectarian militias are torturing people with power tools and hanging corpses from lampposts. Securing the borders and keeping the peace in Iraqi Kurdistan is no small achievement, and the parties deserve credit. However, where most outsiders see an oasis of relative calm amid the Iraqi storm, people on the ground tend to see a budding kleptocracy with authoritarian instincts. Many expressed the world-weary view that power corrupts, that the parties have established their own set of rules. At one busy intersection our fixer claimed to see the son of a high-ranking official disobey a traffic cop, flagrantly and with impunity. “Kurdistan is full of donkeys,” he sighed. (He meant jackasses.)
Running red lights is still mild stuff, of course. But official lawlessness has deeper implications. “We have militia parties, not a government structure, not a state,” Asos Hardi said. And the parties, when challenged, tend to respond like militias, not like democrats. During the Halabja riot a 17-year-old named Kurda Ahmed was shot and killed by PUK forces. While walking in downtown Suli, our fixer ducked into a shop to pick up film left by a New York Times photographer. In this batch of photos was one of Ahmed being cradled by his friends just after the shooting. He’s wearing a blood-stained white tank-top; his eyes are wide open and lifeless. This may have been some of the very film that the PUK tried to confiscate at the scene of the incident.
Many were arrested in the days after the riot. The government pressured journalists to turn over their photos and film footage for surveillance purposes. One of the soccer fans we spoke with said, “We don’t sleep at our houses at night,” but then added, “We’re idle and jobless, so maybe jail is better.” The IWPR reported disturbing remarks from a judge:
Investigative judge Karwan Wrya Ali said that under a Baathist-era law adopted by the Iraqi Kurdistan government, the punishment for destroying government property is life in prison or death by hanging. “Anyone convicted of setting the monument on fire will be executed,” he said.
Asos Hardi insists that the judiciary, too, is compromised by the culture of KDP/PUK rule. And all this must be seen in the context of a wider crackdown on free expression, which has ensnared such journalists as Kamal Sayid Qadir and Hawez Hawezi. (See this LA Times article for more.)
To be continued…
[Go here to read Halabja (Part II).]
[Go here to read the previous item in this series.]
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