ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – A Canadian Member of Parliament for Calgary Shepard, Tom Kmiec, has forwarded a motion which aims to officially recognize the mass killings of Kurds by the Saddam Hussein regime during the so-called Anfal campaign as a genocide.
“Given that the Kurdish people were systematically targeted for extermination based on their ethnicity, there can be no question this qualifies as genocide,” Kmiec said on Wednesday. “Canada has a long tradition of standing up for persecuted people and condemning atrocities.”
While Canada hasn’t officially recognized the Anfal campaign as a genocide the Canadian parliament has passed motions in the past. In 2008, it recognized the mass killings of Ukrainians in the 1930s Holodomor as a genocide. In 2004, it did the same for the mass-killings of Armenians during World War I.
Kmiec, the chairman of the Parliamentary Friends of the Kurds, is not the first Canadian member of parliament to forward a motion to recognize the Anfal campaign as genocide.
Liberal Party MP Jim Karygiannis began an online petition in 2013 that tried to urge the United States government and the United Nations to recognize the suffering of the Iraqi Kurds under Saddam in the 1980s as genocide.
Canada too, Karygiannis told Rudaw at the time, should “recognize the genocide, because first it is genocide, and by recognizing the genocide Canada will not offend anyone.”
Karygiannis also pointed out that Canada has “a large number of Kurdish citizens; we have to consider their needs.”
To date the Anfal campaign has not been recognized by Canada, the US and the UN as genocide. Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom and South Korea have, in recent years, voted to recognize the campaign as a genocide.
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