The Horrors of the Iraqi Tyranny : New evidence of atrocities against Kurds may clinch the genocide-case argument

The world may soon have the chance to take a comprehensive look at how organized mass murder, Iraqi-style, has been carried out.

A huge cache of papers, videotapes and cassette recordings documenting Saddam Hussein’s repression of ethnic Kurds in northern Iraq is being transported to the West, under prodding from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the New York-based Human Rights Watch and with logistics help from the Pentagon. The material was seized by rebellious Kurdish forces last year from jails, interrogation centers and offices of police and intelligence agencies.

Kurdish officials and representatives of Human Rights Watch say the files provide extensive details about Baghdad’s campaign to murder tens of thousands of Kurds and raze hundreds of their villages. Included are tape recordings of torture during interrogations and reports on executions of suspected guerrillas and their families.

This evidence of atrocities, human rights activists hope, might some day be used to support charges of genocide. Under the 1948 U.N. convention on genocide, which Iraq has signed, charges can be brought against both public officials and private individuals for acts aimed at destroying a “national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such.” Iraq’s Kurds have been a target of brutal government repression for two decades. The campaigns against them, including chemical bombing of Kurdish villages in 1988, seem clearly to meet the U.N. definition of genocide.

Human Rights Watch will probably become the interim custodian of the archive. It will take months--and an estimated $5 million--to organize, catalogue and copy the documents. And then? And then it will be up to the United States and other governments to seek to bring to justice those responsible for the monstrous crimes recorded by the Iraqi regime itself.

That seems to be a realistic possibility only if an internal upheaval topples Saddam Hussein, and only if a successor government is sympathetic to the Kurds’ aspirations for autonomy, something that can scarcely be taken for granted.

Meanwhile, though, a key source documenting in bureaucratic detail how a comprehensive program of mass killing and torture was conducted will soon be available. It’s vitally important, we think, that this evidence become widely known and that the horrors that tyrants are capable of be fully understood, not just because that is what the Kurds deserve but because that is what respect for human decency demands.