بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
اضطهاد الشيعة في تقارير هيومان رايتس ووتش ـ 1992
on of human rights abuses committed during March in a sampling of cities, drawn primarily from interviews conducted by Middle East Watch with Iraqi refugees in Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and London, as well as from press accounts and reports by other organizations.
o Basra: Iraq’s second-largest city was the first to erupt. According to a popularly believed account that cannot be confirmed, on March 1 an Iraqi tank driver fired a shell at a giant public portrait of Saddam Hussein. This act of defiance ignited an uprising by members of the hitherto underground Shi’a opposition, angry citizens, and disgruntled and weary Iraqi soldiers who had just fled Kuwait. Many of those who took part expected support from American troops who were stationed near the city outskirts, especially after President Bush’s February 15 call on Iraqis to rise up and oust Saddam.
Chaos reigned in many neighborhoods, as loyalist troops and bands of rebels and army deserters dodged snipers and fought at close quarters. At the outset, rebels slaughtered persons suspected of being government officials, Baath Party members and secret police. Meanwhile, the army rolled tanks through residential neighborhoods, firing at residential buildings and at civilians. Troops entered homes and machine-gunned civilians. The streets were littered with bodies, and loyalist troops conducted mass executions in public squares of persons who had been rounded up. Hussein Ali Kazem, 22, told The Washington Post that he watched the public execution of some four hundred people in central Basra before he fled the city on March 6. "Their hands were tied, then they tied them to tanks and shot them," he told reporters in Safwan. "The bodies are still there."53 Two refugees interviewed by Middle East Watch described watching separate incidents in which troops rounded up civilians, bound their hands and feet, attached rocks to them and tossed them into the Shatt al-’Arab waterway.
There were several independent reports that the troops used human shields to protect the tanks, either tying women and children to the tanks or forcing them to walk in front. One refugee interviewed by Middle East Watch in London saw a column of twenty tanks on March 8 coming from al-’Ashar toward the city center, with three children tied to the lead tank.
Both the rebels and the army engaged in looting in Basra, a city where war and the U.N.-imposed sanctions had created shortages and high prices.
Although the army had the upper hand within five days of the outbreak of the rebellion, it was not until April that it had completely subdued resistance in the city. By that time, the uprising had greatly compounded the devastation that Basra had suffered during the Iran-Iraq and Gulf wars.
o Najaf: The uprising in Najaf was relatively long-lived due to a higher degree of planning by the Shi’a opposition. On March 4, demonstrators, some of them lightly armed, marched through the city streets, swelling in numbers as they went along, and surrounded and seized government buildings. A refugee from Najaf told Middle East Watch: "Saddamites who resisted were killed. Those who did not resist were taken prisoner, and then killed when the army attacked."
The army’s counteroffensive began in earnest more than one week after the uprising. Its tactics were similar to those employed against other rebel-held cities: an initial phase of firing ground-to-ground and helicopter-launched missiles indiscriminately at civilian areas, followed by the entry of troops into the city, house-to-house arrests, the public execution of suspected rebels, and the invasion of Saddam Hospital and the slaughter of patients and medical staff. One refugee from Najaf told Middle East Watch, "If any resistance emanated from a house, that house was demolished." Refugees from other cities also described incidents of troops punitively demolishing houses, a form of summary collective punishment.
The last rebel stronghold in Najaf was the Tomb of the Imam Ali, one of the most important Shi’a pilgrimage sites in the world. The army pounded the shrine with mortar fire before entering it and shooting both rebels and civilians who had held out there. Other religious shrines and schools in the area were also damaged by shells, and others were demolished after the suppression of the uprising.
One young man described to Middle East Watch watching as soldiers went through a group of young men in their custody outside a former hotel, separating those suspected of participating in the uprising and executing them. The witness fled the scene after seeing four of the men shot dead. An Iraqi military officer who deserted told The Washington Post of a massacre in Najaf by loyalist troops: "When the Iraqi army entered…the families that had fled the fighting returned with their children. They lined them up and executed them." Among the victims were his wife and three children.54
The army also rounded up Shi’a clerics in Najaf, including the ninety-five-year-old Grand Ayatollah abu al-Qassem al-Kho’i, the revered Shi’a cleric with a worldwide following. A member of the Khoei family reported to Middle East Watch that some 105 individuals affiliated with the Grand Ayatollah _ relatives, staff, religious students and some senior clerics, including eighty-nine-year-old Ayatollah Mortaza Kadhumi Khalkhali, a top aide of the Grand Ayatollah _ were arrested in Najaf between March 20 and March 23.55 A September report by the U.N. special rapporteur on Iraq notes some of these detentions. Iraq’s October 25 reply to the report states that of the sixty-two associates of the Grand Ayatollah reportedly arrested in March and taken to Baghdad, four "are alive and enjoying full freedom" but "the competent authorities have no information concerning the others." Iraqi Shi’a sources told Middle East Watch on December 19 that the Grand Ayatollah, whose home in Najaf continues to be under surveillance by the Iraqi security forces, is living in extreme distress due to the destruction of the religious schools in Najaf and Karbala, concern about the fate of his missing family members, staff and students, and his lack of contact with followers around the world.
o Karbala: Karbala was probably the major city most devastated during and after the uprising. The rebellion began on March 5 when lightly armed rebels, joined by thousands of civilians and deserting soldiers, attacked government buildings. They had achieved full control of the city by the next morning.
Within one day, government tanks and helicopters began pounding the city with indiscriminate fire. When army troops entered the city they encountered fierce resistance. There were pitched battles at al-Husseini hospital, which was used to treat wounded rebels. A physician from Karbala who fled to Iran told Middle East Watch:
[The hospital] was run by the rebels. Doctors there treated the wounded, people donated blood and whatever medicine they had at home. The army, when it attacked, concentrated its artillery on the hospital. When they invaded, they rounded up doctors and nurses, tied their hands and blindfolded them. They were later released, only to be rounded up again later and killed. The rebels put up strong resistance in defending the hospital.
The shrines of Abbas and Hussein, which became the city’s rebel headquarters, were heavily damaged by artillery fire and by rockets fired from helicopters between March 7 and 11, as were the buildings near them. Further damage occurred when Iraqi troops burst into the shrines, in which rebels and civilian sympathizers had barricaded themselves. Hundreds of rebels and their supporters are said to have died during the siege, either from the artillery and rocket fire, or from the gunfire of the invading troops.
When security forces established daytime control again on about March 19, they took vengeance on both rebels and civilians who had not fled. They moved from district to district, rounding up young men suspected of being rebels, shooting some of them on the spot and executing others in large groups. In both Najaf and Karbala, there were reports that Shi’a clerics who walked on the streets were shot on sight, and that young men were "systematically collected," taken to stadiums, and never seen again. Summary killings occurred "in a manner that made a point," one Iraqi Shi’a told Middle East Watch. "Dead bodies were mined and they were not allowed to be removed from the streets." John Simpson, foreign affairs editor of the British Broadcasting Corporation, wrote about the authorities’ round-up of the clerics earlier in the year. He visited Najaf in late April and found the city’s center deserted: "Thousands of Shi’a clerics have been rounded up in Najaf and Karbala and disappeared," he wrote. "Normally the streets would be full of them. Not now."56
Civilians fleeing Najaf and Karbala were strafed by helicopters as they traveled on the road between the two cities. A refugee from Najaf who was interviewed by Middle East Watch in Iran that on March 17, "People were told on the loudspeakers to evacuate the city, for their own safety, within 24 hours and head north, in the direction of Karbala. When thousands of people had gathered in the northern outskirts of the city _ it was afternoon already, around 3 o’clock, and they were mostly women and children _ helicopters opened fire from machine guns at them. Between 250 and 300 were killed."
o Suleimaniyya: On March 7 and 8, the nearly all-Kurdish city of Suleimaniyya became the first major city to fall to Kurdish rebels. Four weeks later, it was the last to be recaptured by Iraqi forces.
The ouster of government forces came in an uprising led by a small contingent of pesh mergas. Uprisers overwhelmed the government forces who had sought refuge in the headquarters of the dreaded security service (mudiriyat al-amn), capturing and summarily executing agents of the security forces and freeing prisoners held in grim cells. An English teacher recounted that the pesh merga and their supporters "took three hundred Baathist prisoners….We punished those who had martyred our brothers and looted our homes. We killed them without trial….During the first days after the pesh merga took over, some escaped. We caught many and killed them by shooting them and with axes. The mothers of martyrs killed twenty-one escaping soldiers with axes and stones."
During the next three weeks, Suleimaniya remained under pesh merga control. Kurdish refugees streamed into the city from other Kurdish towns that were coming under attack.
The army’s assault on Suleimaniyya began around March 31. Troops began firing rockets from outside the city into residential neighborhoods, and dropping rockets on residential areas from helicopters. Sensing defeat, rebel leaders urged the population to leave before the army attempted to enter the city. The city emptied between April 2 and 4, and government forces easily retook the city. The troops then engaged in widescale looting of homes and stores, according to refugees from Suleimaniyya who later returned to the city.
o Kirkuk: The battle for Kirkuk, the last major city to be captured by the Kurdish rebels, was especially fierce. An oil-rich city with an ethnically mixed population, Kirkuk has long been a bone of contention between the Kurds, who demand its incorporation into the Kurdish Autonomous Region, and Baghdad, which has sought to control it by relocating Arabs from the south to Kirkuk and evicting Kurdish families.
By mid-March, Iraqi forces already had been ousted from several Kurdish and southern cities. Fearing that Kirkuk would be next, Baghdad dispatched reinforcements to Kirkuk.
On about March 10, the security forces placed predominantly Kurdish neighborhoods of the city under curfew and rounded up several thousand men from their homes, ranging in age from young teenagers to men in their fifties. The men, all of them nearly without exception Kurdish, were transported out of the city and held in vast compounds without charge or trial under harsh conditions, although they were neither interrogated nor tortured. Most were released in mid-April but were told that they would not be permitted to reenter Kirkuk. Many of the men traveled instead to Kurdish-controlled areas or to refugee camps in Turkey and Iran.
After the massive roundup of Kurdish men, Iraqi troops began demolishing houses in Kurdish neighborhoods, using dynamite and bulldozers. In testimony corroborated by others, a university student from Kirkuk told Middle East Watch, "Troops came to Arassa, a neighborhood that is strongly pro-pesh merga. They took the women to Kara Angir [a town north of Kirkuk], and told them, ‘Go to the pesh merga.’ The next morning, the forces demolished the houses. Arassa is totally destroyed, all the houses have been destroyed."
Nevertheless, Kirkuk erupted in rebellion on March 19 and by the next day was in pesh merga hands. Unlike in Suleimaniyya, however, their victory was promptly contested. Beginning on March 21, Iraqi tanks stationed outside the city began pounding residential areas with artillery rounds day and night, while Sekhoi helicopters flew overhead by day firing missiles.
After a week of bombardment, Iraqi tanks entered the city on March 27. Among their first acts was to invade Saddam Hussein Hospital and to slaughter patients and medical staff, opening fire indiscriminately, slashing patients with knives and, according to eyewitnesses, throwing people out of windows. As in other cities, the hospital had been filled with both rebels and civilians who had been injured during the fighting. A primary school teacher told Middle East Watch, "When the tanks entered Kirkuk on March 27, they went to Saddam Hussein Hospital. My house is very near the hospital. About 150 meters away from me, I saw troops enter the hospital and then I saw pesh merga being thrown out of the windows. After they threw them on the ground, they shot those who were not dead from the fall."
As they consolidated their control, troops ordered the remaining Kurdish population of Kirkuk, predominantly women and children, to leave the city within twenty-four hours. Those who fled at this late stage reported widespread looting of homes by government troops and Arabs who had driven north from central Iraq. Kurds who attempted to return to the city in April were turned back at checkpoints that had been set up outside the city.
The Iraqi government was quick to assert that it had overcome the challenge of the insurgents, although reports of rebel attacks against government forces and installations continued throughout the year. Shi’a refugees in southwestern Iran boasted to Middle East Watch in late April that fighters were reinfiltrating Iraq and launching nighttime attacks on military targets on the roads near Basra.
Ongoing Government Abuses
On March 16, President Saddam Hussein castigated the rebels as "malicious traitors infiltrated from abroad" and declared that the uprising in the south had been crushed.57 On April 5, Iraq’s ruling Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) issued a statement, announcing "the complete crushing of acts of sedition, sabotage, and rioting in all towns of Iraq." In the same communique, the RCC announced that it had "decided to pardon all Iraqi Kurds in the autonomous region for any behavior that they could be accountable for by law _ except crimes of murder, violations of honor, and theft _ that took place during the riots and acts of treachery."58 On April 20, an RCC decision extended a similar amnesty to all Iraqis involved in the uprisings.59
There is evidence to suggest that the amnesties were honored in the breach, particularly in the south where government forces had greater control. Saddam emphasized in an April 13 speech in Arbil that those suspected of certain offenses during the uprisings would be dealt with harshly: "[T]he orders the authorities have received are very clear: go after the killers, who violate the people’s honor, and those who stole the state’s assets and have not returned them. We give no guarantees to these people."60
There were also post-uprising reports of arrests and summary executions throughout the country, purges in the Iraqi military and Baath Party,61 and the detention of security-force personnel considered "soft" during the uprising.62 A representative of the Iraqi Kurdistan Front told Middle East Watch that some four hundred Iraqi soldiers who had returned to government lines after being captured by Kurdish irregulars in August were executed on charges of having failed to put up effective resistance to the enemy.
Government opponents charged that despite the amnesties, many Iraqis had been arrested and taken to detention centers, some of them secret, in Baghdad and elsewhere. The National Security center in the Radhwaniyya district of Baghdad was identified as one such facility. In a June press release, the London-based al-Khoei Foundation claimed that some 150,000 people had been arrested in southern Iraq, including 15,000 from Najaf, a center of the uprising. The U.N. special rapporteur’s September memorandum highlighted that, despite the amnesties, arrests were continuing:
[A]llegations remain that the amnesties are…used as a means of rounding up members of opposition groups, and that the terms of the amnesties are frequently violated by government agents who arrest certain persons returning out of places of hiding….Several reports allege that persons already detained, as with several of those arrested during (and in violation of) the amnesties, rather than being released have actually ‘disappeared’ in the custody of the Government.
The special rapporteur noted "significant and repeated allegations" regarding Kurds from Arbil who had returned under the April amnesty and "were detained,…taken to the city stadium, subjected to punishments or executed, or have subsequently disappeared."
Iraqis who fled to U.S.-controlled Safwan in southern Iraq came with reports of executions in Basra as late as May. The Washington Post reported that, according to refugees, "Iraqi troops are still seizing rebels, and civilians with any rebel links, after extracting confessions from friends and neighbors."63 A teacher told The Post: "They shoot them and throw their bodies in the street to make people scared of doing anything." A truck driver claimed: "They used an execution squad right in the main square. They would blindfold their victims and then shoot them, just leaving the bodies there." One refugee said that the authorities were "torturing people into giving the names of people who are involved in rebel fighting."64 The Post reported from Baghdad in May that the city was "rife with talk that thousands of southern Shiite Muslims suspected of rebel sympathies during the anti-regime uprisings last March have been summarily tried and executed recently."65 The U.N. special rapporteur’s September memorandum noted reports of the summary execution by firing squad of seventeen people in Arbil on April 17. The memorandum also reported allegations that summary executions "are continuing to take place throughout the country, particularly in the northern Kurdish Autonomous Region, in southern Shia centers, and in the southern marshes."
The Post noted that the Iraqi authorities were continuing to respond in characteristic fashion to actual and perceived opponents: "Prisons are described as more full than ever. Families receive the coffins of sons and husbands, accompanied only by a military court order of execution, no reasons given. There are mass arrests and disappearances."66
Continued clashes between government forces and rebels often were at the expense of innocent civilians, particularly when government forces retaliated with indiscriminate artillery shelling and helicopter-gunship attacks on rebel positions. In northern Iraq, fear motivated large numbers of Iraqi civilians to flee to areas where they felt safe from government forces. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported in late October that tens of thousands of internally displaced Iraqis remained in the mountain areas of the north, "either because their towns have been destroyed or because they fear a fresh outbreak of violence."
Both sides shared responsibility for the continuing unrest. Insurgents openly took credit during the uprising and its aftermath for the capture and execution of Iraqi security force, intelligence and Baath Party personnel.67 The most highly publicized abuse by anti-government forces during the year was the October 7 summary execution by Kurdish rebels in Suleimaniyya of at least sixty captured, unarmed Iraqi soldiers. According to Reuters photographer Kurt Schork, who witnessed the killings, the men were shot, kneeling, at point-blank range.68 The Kurdistan Democratic Party, whose fighters were suspected of responsibility, condemned the incident and said it was opening an investigation. To date, the findings of this investigation have not been announced.
Targeting of Shi’a Institutions
Representatives of Iraq’s Shi’a community reported to Middle East Watch in 1991 that the Iraqi regime intensified its deliberate targeting of Shi’a cultural and nonpolitical institutions in an attempt to destroy the fabric of Shi’a society. These attacks were part of what they called a broader campaign of post-uprising "revenge on a massive scale" in southern Iraq.69 Iraqi Shi’a point out that the regime’s retaliatory actions continue a pattern of discrimination by the Sunni-dominated government against the Shi’a religious majority in Iraq. They charge that the discrimination includes violations of religious and cultural rights including bans on publishing contemporary or traditional Shi’a written materials, transmitting radio or television broadcasts with Shi’a content, and teaching the Shi’a creed in the state school system, as well as widespread employment discrimination in Iraq’s public sector.70
Promises of Reform
Despite Iraq’s resounding military defeat by coalition forces and the turmoil of the uprisings, Saddam Hussein maintained and steadily consolidated his grip on power. Iraq’s feared internal-security apparatus appeared to have emerged sufficiently unscathed from the Gulf war and the uprisings to remain a powerful presence. By September, some opponents of the regime felt that even if some political accord with the regime was struck, the most they could hope for in the immediate future was "a softening dictatorship" in Iraq. They stressed to Middle East Watch that the in-country opposition had "no illusions" about the prospects for genuine political reform under Saddam Hussein. The government’s actions in 1991 tended to bear out this view, reinforcing the perception that the regime’s rhetoric of reform was designed more for the international community than for the skeptical and beleaguered Iraqi public.
For several months after Iraq’s defeat in the Gulf war, government leaders attempted to rebuild their domestic credibility through pledges to introduce political liberties unseen since the Baath Party’s seizure of power in 1968. In a televised speech on March 16, Saddam Hussein blamed the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war for the deferral of the political reforms originally pledged in 1979. He held out a renewed promise of reform but, notably, without specifying a timetable for implementation. "Our decision to build a democratic society based on the Constitution, the rule of law and political pluralism is a decisive, irrevocable decision," he said.
Then newly appointed Prime Minister Saadoun Hammadi, in a March 30 speech on national television, spoke directly about democracy. Terming it "an integrated system," he stated that "in organizing relationships, democracy is not confined to the top echelon of the state but extends to all institutions from top to bottom." He pledged that "the democratic reform process in all the state institutions will start gradually and in accordance with the country’s circumstances."71
In an interview in May, Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said that among the reforms being contemplated were the abolition of the ruling Revolutionary Command Council72 and replacement of the for-life presidency of Saddam Hussein with renewable seven-year presidential terms.73 In a televised speech on July 17, Saddam mentioned that a new political-parties law would soon be in effect. "We will soon start to apply the principles of pluralism in a broad manner….Pluralism will be the main pillar in the next new phase," he promised.
Despite these commitments, it soon became clear that government initiatives said to be aimed at political reform and pluralism were fundamentally flawed. Most important of these were the new political-parties law, introduced in September, and the negotiations with the Iraqi Kurdistan Front coalition, begun in April and stalled several times, about measures for nationwide democratization.
The dismissal in mid-September of Saadoun Hammadi as prime minister, and his removal from the RCC, was viewed as a setback for the putative effort at political reform. It also was seen as a signal of Saddam Hussein’s increased confidence and resolidification of power. In April, Hammadi, a Shi’a and Baath Party loyalist known for his pragmatic views, had openly advocated "the importance of strengthening the rule of law through the reform of the legal system, press freedom, and pluralism in all spheres, as well as through the change of revolutionary institutions into democratic and constitutional ones," according to the state-controlled Iraqi News Agency. One Western authority on the Arab world explained: "It was after he had expressed these views at a congress of the Baath party in Baghdad on 13 September that Hammadi was sacked."74 Some saw the move as a precursor to additional purges of reformers in the bureaucracy and the military and security establishments. The significance of Hammadi’s later partial rehabilitation, through his appointment on November 6 as a presidential adviser with cabinet rank, remains to be seen.
Political Parties
The limits of reform could be seen in Political Parties Law No. 30 of 1991, which was issued by the RCC in September after the law had been amended and approved by the National Assembly, Iraq’s rubber-stamp parliament. The statute states in part that "political parties constitute one of the basic pillars of the democratic system through which the citizen exercises his rights, duties and freedom." But the law grants the government significant latitude in vetting political parties. Under Article 3, parties must support Iraq’s territorial integrity and national unity, effectively foreclosing the legalization of any Kurdish party that uses nonviolent means to advocate separatism or an independent Kurdish state.75 Article 3 also mandates that parties "value and be proud" of the 1958 and 1968 revolutions, in effect a pledge of political allegiance to the ruling Baath Party. In addition, Article 19 prohibits the organizing of political parties among the "armed forces, the internal security force and the other security organs"; only the Baath Party is entitled to recruit members in these key sectors.
The law empowers the Council of Ministers to approve or reject parties’ requests for legalization, but the law gives oversight of political parties to the feared Ministry of Interior. The law clearly envisions the creation of Interior Ministry dossiers on all nascent political-party leaders and activists. Parties must register their applications with the Interior Ministry and submit the names, addresses, professions and brief personal histories of their founding members, who must number at least 150. Under Article 22, each January the Interior Ministry, as part of its ongoing monitoring, must be provided with the names, addresses and professions of all new party members as well as the names of those whose membership has lapsed.
The law provides for government aid to political parties and lays the groundwork for grants to be made on a political basis. Among the factors for grant decisions set forth in Article 24 is a political party’s "role in the national struggle."
In an August interview, then-Prime Minister Hammadi was asked how much competition the ruling Baath Party would tolerate, and whether opposition political parties would ever be allowed to form a government. His answer was evasive: "[W]e may be ready to share power with another party if the situation allows and if there was such a party."76
One unexpected byproduct of the turmoil in Iraq in 1991 was the unprecedented exposure of the regime’s past human rights abuses. While the abysmal record was generally known, precise information had been difficult to come by. However, during the uprising in March, when rebels seized control of prisons, they captured huge amounts of documentary evidence of past abuses. Following the ouster of the rebels, the exodus of refugees brought to the world’s attention thousands of victims of past repression who were unafraid for the first time in their lives to speak frankly to foreigners. In addition, with the pesh merga in control of much of northeastern Iraq, Kurds and foreigners were able to travel extensively through rural Kurdish areas for the first time since the Baghdad regime had mined and sealed them off.
These developments helped to flesh out knowledge of past atrocities, particularly with regard to the government’s campaign to empty the Kurdish countryside, the disappearances of scores of thousands of Kurds, and the harsh conduct of Iraq’s security agencies throughout the country.108
At year’s end, human rights workers were still sifting through the mounds of documents, videotapes and material evidence captured from Iraqi security agencies. The evidence made the case strongly that past reports of the regime’s brutality toward suspected dissidents was, if anything, understated. The discovery of several mass graves _ which are due to be analyzed by forensic experts _ may finally provide answers to the cases of tens of thousands of Kurds who disappeared during the 1980s.
U.S. Policy
The manner in which the Iraqi government suppressed the Shi’a revolt in the south and the Kurdish revolt in the north produced some of the most extensive and severe violations of human rights in 1991. Although Human Rights Watch is highly critical of the role of the Bush Administration with respect to these abuses, we do not espouse the view that military intervention was required for humanitarian purposes. Iraq was not the only country in which it might be argued that such intervention was required during 1991 to avert human rights disasters of great proportion.
Yet there are many arguments against military intervention even in such urgent circumstances. Without attempting to set forth those arguments here, it should be noted that the difficulties that attend this question are so great that Human Rights Watch has not yet adopted a policy on this question.
Nevertheless, we think that the Bush Administration deserves criticism because the conflicting signals that it gave probably contributed greatly to the tragedy that took place in Iraq when Saddam Hussein’s forces massacred thousands in putting down the revolts and when nearly two million were forced to flee their homes. In part, the Bush Administration’s actions may have reflected a lack of sufficient concern for the consequences of the signals it gave; in part it may be due to miscalculation; and in part it may be attributed to primary concern with political considerations unrelated to the well-being of the residents of Iraq. Whatever the reasons, the Administration contributed to the making of a tremendous human rights tragedy.
In other ways as well, despite the Bush Administration’s persistent castigation of Saddam Hussein, the protection of human rights within Iraq was not a high priority in 1991. The Administration’s pre-war criticism of the Iraqi government’s human rights violations focused almost entirely on abuses committed in occupied Kuwait; the previous history of systematic atrocities inside Iraq was barely noted. A similar selective vision could be discerned once the Gulf war ended and the unprecedented uprising against the Baathist regime was met by the government’s brutal suppression of the revolt and the unexpected mass flight of civilians. The Bush Administration expressed concern for human rights violations during this period, but acted forcefully only insofar as those fleeing the carnage became allied responsibility as they huddled in winter weather on the Turkish border. Three times as many Kurdisالمزيد
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