In March 1987, Hussein’s cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, was appointed secretary general of the Ba’ath Party of the northern region, which included the Kurdish dominated area. He had a reputation for brutality and following the Iraqi’s army control of the Kurdish insurgents, he took the matter into his own hands. His new campaign of terror became known as ‘al-Anfal’ (The Spoils), which took place between 23 February and 6 September, 1988. The campaign was broken down into eight different stages, with seven of them directly targeting areas controlled by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which had been founded in 1975 by Jalal Talabani.
Al-Majid amassed around 200,00 soldiers, supported by air attacks, against a poorly-matched few thousand Kurdish guerillas. They went to work rounding up all the villagers, regardless of gender or age, and transported them to detention centres, where they were subjected to gendercidal selection. Any adult or teenage males (those considered to be of fighting age) were separated from the remainder of the community. Small children were allowed to stay with their mothers, while the elderly or infirm were taken away to separate living quarters.
The men were divided into smaller groups and hustled into large rooms or halls, which soon became grossly overcrowded. Beatings were almost routine and after several days of inhuman treatment, they were trucked out of the centres to be killed in mass executions. Many of the prisoners were lined up in front of pre-dug mass graves and shot from the front. Others were made to lie down in pairs next to mounds of fresh corpses, before they too were killed. Others, who had been bound together, were made to stand on the edges of the graves and shot from behind so they fell face-first into the pits. When they had finished their killing spree, the soldiers used bulldozers to roughly cover the graves of literally thousands of Kurdish males. Some of the men did not even make it as far as the ‘slaughter stations’. they were simply lined up and shot at their point of capture, by firing squads.
Although the aim of the al-Anfal campaign was to cleanse the Kurdish population of its males, thousands of women, children and elderly people perished as well. Mass executions of women and children were known to have taken place at a site on Hamrin Mountain, between the cities of Tikrit and Kurkuk. Those who did not die in the executions were trucked off to resettlement camps, where conditions were both squalid and insanitary, resulting in the death of thousands more, the majority of whom were children.
The infrastructure of the Kurdish population was almost destroyed by the al-Anfal massacre. By the time the genocidal frenzy was over, 90 per cent of the Kurdish villages and more than 20 towns and villages had literally been wiped off the map.
In August 1988, with the al-Anfal campaign coming to an end and many months of vicious chemical attacks on civilian populations, the UN Sub-committee on Human Rights voted to condemn Iraq for its human rights violations. It is blatantly obvious that the influence of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship affected all levels of Iraqi society, whether through the influences and actions of the Ba’ath Party or the Iraqi army and security forces. Hussein’s use of strong patriarchal control over ministers and senior party officials led to their loyalty and subservience to their leader, resulting in the unthinkable terror and cruelty that existed during his term of power.
How does Saddam Hussein defend his treatment of the Iraqi people? By arguing that he had to use powerful methods in an effort to unite such a large and diverse nation as Iraq, that had Kurds in the north, Sunni Muslims in the middle and Shi’ites in the south. When asked by a very nervous reporter why Hussein had used such extreme measures under his regime, he simply replied, ‘Of course. What do you expect if they oppose the regime?’
In 1998, Saddam Hussein failed to conform to the requests of UN weapons investigators, which instigated the issuing of the Iraq Liberation Act, authorizing the removal of his regime. The USA tried its hardest in 2002 to try and topple the Iraqi leader, but Hussein kept insisting that he didn’t possess any weapons of mass destruction. In March 2003, the USA led the war on Iraq to try and oust Hussein and to end his regime once and for all.
On Sunday, 14 December, 2003, the toppled leader was found hiding in a tiny dirt hole by the American Special Forces. His accommodation was a far cry from his former palaces of unadulterated luxury. When he was discovered, he was sitting among filth and squalor, surrounded by rubbish, plastic bags, empty bottles, rotten fruit and just one broken chair as furniture.
Hussein and his 11 top known associates (dubbed ‘Saddam’s Dirty Dozen’), faced preliminary charges on July 2003 before an Iraqi Special Tribunal, on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The actual trial started on 19 October, 2005, in Baghdad, and Hussein was charged with killing 148 people in Dujail, following an attempted assassination on him when he visited the village. On 5 November, 2006, the tribunal reached its decision and Hussein was sentenced to death by hanging. On top of this it is thought that he will be charged with further atrocities against the Iraqi people. Below is a list of his alleged crimes that will be raised by the tribunal.
1974
Five known, and possibly many more, Shia religious leaders are killed.
1970–2003
After the discovery of 270 mass graves, Hussein faces being charged with killing tens of thousands people.
1982
Following a failed assassination attempt on Hussein, 148 people were killed in the village of Dujail.
1983
About 8,000 male members of the Kurdish Barzani tribe were arrested and deported to southern Iraq, but no trace of them has ever been found.
1988
Up to 182,000 people were killed or died from cold and hunger when Hussein attempted to depopulate Kurdish regions. About 5,000 people were killed in a chemical attack on the village of Halabja in just one day.
1990
When Iraq was invaded in 1990, hundreds of citizens of Kuwait were rounded up and tortured. 700 oil wells were set alight, which polluted the Persian Gulf.
1991
In the aftermath of the Gulf War thousands of people died when Hussein’s regime suppressed uprisings by Kurds and Shias.
The trial of the dethroned Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was flawed right from the start with lawyers and witnesses being murdered, judges dismissed because they were deemed to be biased, and considerable outside political interference. The trial began on 19 October, 2005, and the following day a defence attorney was kidnapped and later killed. On 8 November a lawyer for a co-defendant was killed. The trial reconvened on 28 November and on 4 December one of the five trial judges stepped down. Defence lawyers walk out of the court the following day when they are denied the right to challenge the trial’s legitimacy. On 7 December, Saddam refused to attend court proceedings and on 21 December claimed that he had been tortured by Americans whilst being held in detention. The chief judge, a Kurd, resigned on 15 January, 2006 and another Kurd is named to replace him. On 21 June another lawer for Saddam Hussein is kidnapped and killed. Hussein goes on hunger strike and is force-fed through a tube and on 23 July he is hospitalized. The first trial is adjourned on 27 July and the new trial does not reconvene until 21 August.