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Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)

16 December 2002

Experts Say Iraqi Regime's Crimes Exposed by Its Own Documents

(U.S. government preserved evidence for international and Iraqi use)
(1570)
By Phyllis McIntosh
Special to the Washington File
Washington -- If Saddam Hussein and his associates are ever tried for
war crimes, there is a mountain of evidence already organized, waiting
to help convict them.
Some 18 tons of Iraqi secret police and intelligence agency files -- 5
million pages in all -- were seized by Kurdish rebels a decade ago and
turned over to the United States. Painstaking analysis of the
documents by international human rights groups and the U.S. government
has revealed a long list of crimes against humanity committed by the
regime, including executions, elimination of Kurdish villages, and use
of chemical weapons against the Kurds and during the Iran-Iraq war.
The documents "provide a thorough overview of how the Iraqi police
state maintained its grip on power," says Joost Hiltermann, who
supervised initial review of the documents in 1992-94 for Human Rights
Watch, an independent, nongovernmental organization. "They did include
some 'smoking gun' documents showing Iraqi government culpability for
a great number of atrocities."
"It is highly usual that these documents have fallen into open hands
at a time when the regime that produced them is still in power," said
Bruce Montgomery, archives curator at the University of Colorado at
Boulder, where the documents are now stored.
The documents surfaced in March 1991, at the end of the Gulf War, when
Kurdish rebels revolted against the Iraqi government and stormed
police stations and government offices throughout the Kurdish region.
They removed huge caches of files and hid them in the mountains before
Iraqi troops returned to squelch the uprising.
Under an agreement with representatives of the U.S. Senate Foreign
Relations Committee and Middle East Watch (now a part of Human Rights
Watch), two Kurdish groups, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and
the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) turned over the documents to the
U.S. military, which airlifted them to the United States. Under the
arrangement, the Senate committee was to turn the documents into
official records of the U.S. Congress and store them in the National
Archives. Middle East Watch agreed to study the documents for human
rights abuses and to prepare a case before the International Court of
Justice charging the Saddam Hussein regime with genocide against the
Kurds.
Once in the United States, the documents were read and catalogued by
researchers from the Defense Intelligence Agency and Middle East Watch
over the next two years. The papers, which included memoranda,
correspondence, arrest warrants, background information on suspects,
official decrees, and activity and investigation reports dating
primarily from the 1980s, were mostly handwritten. Pages were
sometimes held together with pins or filed in folders secured by
shoestrings. Eventually the entire collection was digitized and stored
electronically on CD-ROM to make it more accessible to researchers.
In 1994, Middle East Watch-Human Rights Watch issued a report entitled
"Bureaucracy of Repression" that summarized findings from the
documents. While no master plan to exterminate the Kurds emerged from
the papers, the report said, "the evidence is sufficiently strong to
prove a case of genocidal intent."
Most notable among the findings, it added, "is the unequivocal
evidence we have been able to accumulate of Iraq's repeated use of
chemical weapons against the Kurds." Researchers also unearthed "an
impressive documentary record" of an Iraqi campaign to raze all
Kurdish villages and deport their populations, as well as considerable
evidence of executions and other illegal reprisals.
One important document from 1989 also outlined a "plan of Action for
the Marshes," which called for poisoning the water, burning homes, and
imposing an economic blockade in Iraq's southern marsh areas.
Missing from the files is any direct reference to torture and rape of
political detainees or the fate of the "disappeared." The most likely
explanation, the report says, is that such documents "were considered
so highly classified that they were never distributed to the branches
in the north but kept under lock and key in central headquarters."
Not surprisingly, the regime has maintained throughout that all the
documents are forgeries, a claim that experts consider preposterous,
considering their sheer volume and the fact that only a small fraction
contain specific evidence of crimes and violations of human rights.
The "Bureaucracy of Repression" report concludes: "There is not a
shred of evidence that any one of the documents in the possession of
Middle East Watch was falsified, much less all four million of them."
The next leg of the journey for the Iraqi documents came in 1998, when
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee decided to transfer the
collection to the University of Colorado at Boulder, which already was
amassing papers from a number of organizations for the university's
Human Rights Initiative. Plans called for making information from the
Iraqi documents and groups such as Amnesty International and Human
Rights Watch available to the public via the Internet. But the
university has since decided that it cannot support the project, and
negotiations are under way to move the entire collection to another
location.
Ownership of the Iraqi documents still rests with the Kurds, who would
have to approve any further move. For the time being, the 18 tons of
papers, 176 discs containing the electronic version, and assorted
maps, photographs, and audio and videotapes, reside in 3,500 large
boxes at an undisclosed location somewhere in Colorado.
Meanwhile, as Iraqi opposition groups consider how to expose and heal
the wounds of their homeland, detailed analysis of information
contained in the documents continues. Researchers with a project
originally based at Harvard University and now sponsored by the Iraq
Foundation in Washington, D.C., are focused on two major sets of
documents. One, called the North Iraq Dataset, contains 2.4 million
documents, including those seized by the Kurdish rebels in 1991 and
some papers acquired directly by one of IRDP's directors, Iraqi-born
scholar Kanan Makiya. The second, known as the Kuwait Dataset,
consists of a million documents captured by American forces as the
Iraqis retreated at the end of the Gulf War.
Systematic work on the IRDP began about two years ago, says project
manager, Dr. Robert G. Rabil. Since then, researchers have processed
more than 350,000 documents, which can be accessed on the Web site,
http://fas-www.harvard.edu/~irdp/. A team of nine researchers
continues to process 5,000 documents a week, carefully sorting the
"select and political" reports from the more mundane administrative
ones. More than 100 "documents of value" have been translated into
English and are available on the Web site. They offer a chilling
glimpse into the horrors of the Saddam regime. For example,
-- A document dated August 1989 lists the names of 87 people who had
been executed so far that year in one region, along with a summary of
each case. "Crimes" included trespassing into forbidden zones and
teaching Kurdish.
-- March 1991 instructions from Baghdad Security Headquarters on how
to deal with opposition demonstrations direct officers to shoot at
demonstrators with the aim of killing 95 percent of them and saving
the rest for interrogation. Another instruction calls for the
technical unit (euphemism for chemical weapons) to be kept in reserve.
-- A 1987 letter quotes Ali Hasan al-Majid, newly appointed head of
security, military, and civil affairs for northern Iraq: "We do not
object to the decapitation of traitors, but it would have been
preferable had you first sent them to Security for interrogation."
-- A 1987 order from one Security Directorate to another calls for
executing wounded civilians and razing their neighborhoods with tanks,
bulldozers, and shovels.
-- The government personnel card of one Aziz Saleh Ahmed identifies
him as a "fighter in the popular army" whose "activity" is "violation
of women's honor." The man was a professional rapist.
Such incriminating evidence continues to inspire efforts to publicize
Iraq's crimes against humanity and to bring the perpetrators to
justice. Information from the seized documents figures prominently in
the reports, "Iraq: A Population Silenced" published December 13 by
the U.S. Department of State and "Saddam Hussein: Crimes and Human
Rights Abuses," recently published by the British government's Foreign
and Commonwealth Office.
INDICT, a London-based organization that receives some financial
support from the U.S. Government under the Iraq Liberation Act, also
is using the documents in its campaign to create an ad hoc
International Criminal Tribunal to try Iraqi leaders for war crimes.
Western and Iraqi experts familiar with the documents believe their
value cannot be overestimated. Bruce Montgomery, the curator in charge
of the stored documents at the University of Colorado, calls them
perhaps the most significant papers to fall into open hands since Nazi
files were captured by the Allies after the fall of Berlin.
"They reveal a genocidal campaign of a rogue government in its own
words," he says. "This is an extraordinary cache of materials that
should be made as widely accessible as possible to the international
community."
More information on Human Rights Watch, Iraq and the report
"Bureaucracy of Repression" is available at http://www.hrw.org/
"Iraq: A Population Silenced" published December 13 by the U.S.
Department of State and "Saddam Hussein: Crimes and Human Rights
Abuses," recently published by the British government's Foreign and
Commonwealth Office are both available on the Iraq Update Web site,
http://www.usinfo.state.gov/regional/nea/iraq/.
(The Washington File is a product of the Office of International
Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site:
http://usinfo.state.gov)



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