The unimaginable blood of others - Terrorism/Human Rights/Iraq/Africa/Global
Inga Clendinnen; 6/2/08
A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq and the Gassing of Halabja; By Joost R. Hiltermann; Cambridge University Press, 346pp
Darfur’s Sorrow: A History of Destructionand Genocide; By M.W. Daly; Cambridge University Press, 388pp,
Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur; By Ben Kiernan; MUP, 768pp
All three books under review are concerned with genocide: the intentional destruction, in whole or in part, of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Ethnic cleansing is regarded as a subcategory in that its primary intent is the expulsion rather than destruction of a group, but in both cases massacre is a common tactic. Joost Hiltermann used to work for Human Rights Watch. Now he directs research for the International Crisis Centre into the fluid, murky politics of the Middle East. He walks the narrow path between despair and hope like the professional he is, but he is fully engaged here. He knows these people. He is telling the Kurds’ own story. In A Poisonous Affair, Hiltermann taught me two words I had not previously known: Halabja, the name of the town in Iraqi Kurdistan “lost” to a combined force of Iranian and rebel Kurdish soldiers in the eighth year of the Iraq-Iran war and then “regained” by Iraq through the first confirmed use of mustard gas since World War I, and Anfal, the systematic operation launched by Saddam Hussein in the last phase of that war to settle his “Kurdish problem” for good. The technique was simple. Kurds were flushed out of their villages and into the fields by a few gas canisters dropped among the houses, then rounded up, sorted by age and sex and trucked to killing sites in the western desert. Mass graves are still being uncovered.
See: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23125528-25132,00.html