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Genocide is never a spontaneous action. Nor can it be swept under the carpet, its victims dead and their families bereft, the perpetrators free, and a softening of psychological barriers against repetition of this most heinous of crimes. The line must be drawn. Always.
These are the key lessons for me from a packed meeting last week in the House of Commons organised by the APPG with the KRG UK and the Conservative Middle East Council on the theme of genocide, accountability, and justice.
It was chaired by APPG Chairman Jack Lopresti MP and attended by the Deputy Speaker of the Commons, Rosie Winterton MP, who visited Kurdistan in 2016, and many Kurds, friends, and human rights activists, as well as a Holocaust survivor.
It was Sherri Talabany of the respected SEED Foundation that works with the Yezedi victims of the Daesh genocide between 2014 and 2016 who said that genocide is never a spontaneous action. She powerfully outlined the suffering of the victims and what SEED is doing to help the survivors recover.
Mahmood Salih Hama Karim, the KRG Minister of Martyrs and Anfal Affairs, also detailed the grim sequence of the genocide against the Yezedis: forcing them to flee towards Mount Sinjar, surrounding and killing them, while many died of dehydration and exhaustion or were traumatised, forced conversion to Islam, separating families, sexual enslavement, and destroying religious sites to erase culture and tradition.
Jalal Husein, who is also General Director at the Ministry of Interior, argued that stability in the areas liberated from Daesh control requires concerted action including police training, better security intelligence to find Daesh sleeper cells, reconciliation between Iraqi communities, psychological support for victims, and efforts to prevent foreign fighters from returning to Iraq and Syria.
As the Head of the High Committee for the Recognition of Genocide, the minister explained the department’s role in collecting evidence, interviewing victims, and gathering information about the perpetrators. It has prepared more than 5,000 cases of which 2,000 are ready to go to court. Evidence gathering is more difficult because many survivors have become refugees in Europe, Canada, the United States, and elsewhere.
The committee has handed its findings to various international organisations, but one of the key bodies, the International Criminal Court, cannot investigate because Iraq is not a member. The committee favours a special international tribunal to judge these crimes.
Karwan Jamal Tahir, the KRG High Representative to the UK, praised Britain for initiating the UN Security Council resolution, but urged the UN to speed up the process as delay would result in the loss of evidence, not least in mass graves which cannot be protected for long.
He also urged the UN investigation team to work with the ministerial team collaboratively and benefit from its evidence gathering work. He also warned that foot-dragging would delay reconstruction, the stabilisation process, and the return of almost one million IDPs who are fearful because war criminals are still at large.
The APPG will ask the British government to urgency increase its efforts to draw this to a conclusion. If genocide is not spontaneous then nor is seeking redress for the survivors and justice for the victims.
The death of former US president George H. W. Bush provides further proof of the need for perspective in history. New documents and insights challenge and change the conventional wisdom but there is, thanks to social media, a growing tendency to amnesia and distortion about the past.
Kurds of all people will know that the record of Bush senior is mixed. The credit column includes putting together a large coalition of the willing to evict Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, but the debit column includes, for some, a failure to finish the job and then encouraging internal revolt by the Shiites and the Kurds but leaving them in the lurch when they did so.
Bush senior and Brent Scowcroft explained their position in a piece in Time in March 1998. They wrote: “We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the UN’s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the US could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different – and perhaps barren – outcome.”
The massacre of the Shiites made them much more suspicious when Bush junior liberated Iraq in 2003 in case they were again abandoned.
The credit column also includes the decision by Bush senior, the UK, and France to respond to outraged public opinion and set up the no-fly zone.
Yet the nuance of all this in commenting on the death of President Bush is ignored by those seeking to wrench revisionist history into the service of anti-war politics that infantilizes local actors by blaming everything on America. One prominent tweeter, for instance, concludes that Bush senior started a decades-long imperial war in the Middle East which has killed millions and made whole countries ungovernable for generations to come.
Let’s criticise Western actions when necessary and praise them when possible. But it is wrong to only blame America. It lets those who initiated aggression and genocide off the hook, and makes it harder to hold them to account for their crimes. That applies to Saddam’s responsibility for Anfal and that of Daesh for the genocide against the Yezedis. Distorted and over-simplified history can obstruct popular support for positive Western and international interventions that the Kurds and others need if they are to recover from genocide and survive and prosper in the Middle East.
These are the key lessons for me from a packed meeting last week in the House of Commons organised by the APPG with the KRG UK and the Conservative Middle East Council on the theme of genocide, accountability, and justice.
It was chaired by APPG Chairman Jack Lopresti MP and attended by the Deputy Speaker of the Commons, Rosie Winterton MP, who visited Kurdistan in 2016, and many Kurds, friends, and human rights activists, as well as a Holocaust survivor.
It was Sherri Talabany of the respected SEED Foundation that works with the Yezedi victims of the Daesh genocide between 2014 and 2016 who said that genocide is never a spontaneous action. She powerfully outlined the suffering of the victims and what SEED is doing to help the survivors recover.
Mahmood Salih Hama Karim, the KRG Minister of Martyrs and Anfal Affairs, also detailed the grim sequence of the genocide against the Yezedis: forcing them to flee towards Mount Sinjar, surrounding and killing them, while many died of dehydration and exhaustion or were traumatised, forced conversion to Islam, separating families, sexual enslavement, and destroying religious sites to erase culture and tradition.
Jalal Husein, who is also General Director at the Ministry of Interior, argued that stability in the areas liberated from Daesh control requires concerted action including police training, better security intelligence to find Daesh sleeper cells, reconciliation between Iraqi communities, psychological support for victims, and efforts to prevent foreign fighters from returning to Iraq and Syria.
As the Head of the High Committee for the Recognition of Genocide, the minister explained the department’s role in collecting evidence, interviewing victims, and gathering information about the perpetrators. It has prepared more than 5,000 cases of which 2,000 are ready to go to court. Evidence gathering is more difficult because many survivors have become refugees in Europe, Canada, the United States, and elsewhere.
The committee has handed its findings to various international organisations, but one of the key bodies, the International Criminal Court, cannot investigate because Iraq is not a member. The committee favours a special international tribunal to judge these crimes.
Karwan Jamal Tahir, the KRG High Representative to the UK, praised Britain for initiating the UN Security Council resolution, but urged the UN to speed up the process as delay would result in the loss of evidence, not least in mass graves which cannot be protected for long.
He also urged the UN investigation team to work with the ministerial team collaboratively and benefit from its evidence gathering work. He also warned that foot-dragging would delay reconstruction, the stabilisation process, and the return of almost one million IDPs who are fearful because war criminals are still at large.
The APPG will ask the British government to urgency increase its efforts to draw this to a conclusion. If genocide is not spontaneous then nor is seeking redress for the survivors and justice for the victims.
The death of former US president George H. W. Bush provides further proof of the need for perspective in history. New documents and insights challenge and change the conventional wisdom but there is, thanks to social media, a growing tendency to amnesia and distortion about the past.
Kurds of all people will know that the record of Bush senior is mixed. The credit column includes putting together a large coalition of the willing to evict Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, but the debit column includes, for some, a failure to finish the job and then encouraging internal revolt by the Shiites and the Kurds but leaving them in the lurch when they did so.
Bush senior and Brent Scowcroft explained their position in a piece in Time in March 1998. They wrote: “We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the UN’s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the US could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different – and perhaps barren – outcome.”
The massacre of the Shiites made them much more suspicious when Bush junior liberated Iraq in 2003 in case they were again abandoned.
The credit column also includes the decision by Bush senior, the UK, and France to respond to outraged public opinion and set up the no-fly zone.
Yet the nuance of all this in commenting on the death of President Bush is ignored by those seeking to wrench revisionist history into the service of anti-war politics that infantilizes local actors by blaming everything on America. One prominent tweeter, for instance, concludes that Bush senior started a decades-long imperial war in the Middle East which has killed millions and made whole countries ungovernable for generations to come.
Let’s criticise Western actions when necessary and praise them when possible. But it is wrong to only blame America. It lets those who initiated aggression and genocide off the hook, and makes it harder to hold them to account for their crimes. That applies to Saddam’s responsibility for Anfal and that of Daesh for the genocide against the Yezedis. Distorted and over-simplified history can obstruct popular support for positive Western and international interventions that the Kurds and others need if they are to recover from genocide and survive and prosper in the Middle East.
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