Bulletin de liaison et d'information - Institut kurde de Paris

Revue de Presse-Press Review-Berhevoka Çapê-Rivista Stampa-Dentro de la Prensa-Basm Ozeti
gravestones, erasing the past, putting in new ones with Arab names," he said. "He wants to show that Kirkuk has always been Arab."
Some of.the Kurds crossing the demarcation line between Saddam's forces and the Kurdish zone, it is said, are not being expelled but
are fleeing for economic reasons. But in camps across Kurdistan I met refugees who told me stories of visits from the secret police in
the middle of the night.
Many of the refugees from Kirkuk live in tent camps built on boggy fields. I visited one such camp at Beneslawa, not far from Erbil,
where the mud was so thick that it nearly pulled off my shoes. The people at the camp-several hundred, according to two estimates
I heard-are ragged and sick. A man named Howar told me that his suffering could not have been avoided even if he had agreed to
change his ethnic identity.
"When you agree to change your nationality, the police write on your identity documents 'second-degree Arab,' which they know
means Kurd," he told me. "So they always know you're a Kurd." (In a twist characteristic of Saddam's regime, Kurdish leaders told
me, Kurds who agree to "change" their nationality are fined for having once claimed falsely to be Kurdish.)
Another refugee, Shawqat Hamid Muhammad, said that her son had gone to jail for two months for having a photograph of Mustafa
Barzani in his possession. She said that she and her family had been in the Beneslawa camp for two months. "The police came and
knocked on our door and told us we have to leave Kirkuk," she said. "We had to rent a truck to take our things out. We were given
one day to leave. We have no idea who is in our house." Another refugee, a man named Ibrahim ]amil, wandered over to listen to the
conversation. "The Arabs are winning Kirkuk," he said. "Soon the only people there will be Arabs, and Kurds who call themselves
Arabs. They say we should be Arab. But I'm a Kurd. It would be easier for me to die than be an Arab. How can I not be a Kurd?"
Peter Galbraith told me that in 1987 he witnessed the destruction of Kurdish villages and cemeteries-"anything that was related to
Kurdish identity," he said. 'This was one of the factors that led me to conclude that it is a policy of genocide, a crime of intent,
destroying a group whole or in part."
9. IRAQ'S ARMS RACE
In a series of meetings in the summer and fall of 1995, Charles DueIfer, the deputy executive chairman of the United Nations Special
Commission, or UNSCOM-the now defunct arms-inspection team-met in Baghdad with Iraqi government delegations. The subject
was the status of Iraq's nonconventional-weapons programs, and Duelfer, an American diplomat on loan to the United Nations, was
close to a breakthrough.
In early August, Saddam's son-in-law Hussein Kamel had defected to Jordan, and had then spoken publicly about Iraq's offensive
biological, chemical, and nuclear capabilities. (Kamellater returned to Iraq and was killed almost immediately, on his father-in-Iaw's
orders.) The regime's credibility was badly damaged by Kamel's revelations, and during these meetings the Iraqi representatives
decided to tell Duelfer and his team more than they had ever revealed before. "This was the first time Iraq actually agreed to discuss
the Presidential origins of these programs," Duelfer recalled. Among the most startling admissions made by the Iraqi scientists was
that they had weaponized the biological agent aflatoxin.
Aflatoxin, which is produced from types of fungi that occur in moldy grains, is the biological agent that some Kurdish physicians
suspect was mixed with chemical weapons and dropped on Kurdistan. Christine Gosden, the English geneticist, told me, "There is
absolutely no forensic evidence whatsoever that aflatoxins have ever been used in northern Iraq, but this may be because no
systematic testing has been carried out in the region, to my knowledge."
Duelfer told me, "We kept pressing the Iraqis to discuss the concept of use for aflatoxin. We learned that the origin of the
biological-weapons program is in the security services, not in the military-meaning that it really came out of the assassinations
program." The Iraqis, Duelfer said, admitted something else: they had loaded aflatoxin into two Scud-ready warheads, and also
mixed aflatoxin with tear gas. They wouldn't say why.
In an op-ed article that Duelfer wrote for the Los Angeles Times last year about Iraqi programs to develop weapons of mass
destruction, he offered this hypothesis: "If a regime wished to conceal a biological attack, what better way than this? Victims would
suffer the short-term effects of inhaling tear gas and would assume that this was the totality of the attack: Subsequent cancers would
not be linbd to the prior event."
United Nations inspectors were alarmed to learn about the aflatoxin program. Richard Spertzel, the chief biological-weapons inspector
for UNSCON,put it this way: "It is a devilish weapon. Iraq was quite clearly aware of the long-term carcinogenic effect of aflatoxin.
Aflatoxin can only do one thing-destroy people's livers. And I suspect that children are more susceptible. From a moral standpoint,
aflatoxin is the cruellest weapon-it means watching children die slowly of liver cancer."
Spertzel believes that if aflatoxin were to be used as a weapon it would not be delivered by a missile. "Aflatoxin is a little tricky," he
said. "I don't know if a single dose at one point in time is going to give you the long-term effects. Continuous, repeated
exposure-through food-would be more effective." When I asked Spertzel if other countries have weaponized aflatoxin, he replied,
"I don't know any other country that did it. I don't know any country that would."
It is unclearwhat biological and chemical weaponl> Saddam possesses today. When he maneuvered UNSCOMout of his country in
1998, weapons inspectors had found a sizable portion of his arsenal but were vexed by what they couldn't find. His scientists
certainly have produced and weaponized anthrax, and they have manufactured botulinum toxin, which causes muscular paralysis and
death. They've made Clostridium perfringens , a bacterium that causes gas gangrene, a condition in which the flesh rots. They have also
made wheat-cover smut, which can be used to poison crops, and ricin, which, when absorbed into the lungs, causes hemorrhagic
pneumonia. . .
According to Gary Milhollin, the director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, ~hose Iraq ~atch ,proJect m?mtors
Saddam's weapons capabilities, inspectors could not account for a great deal of weaponry beheved to be ID Iraq s posseSSIOn,
including almost four tons of the nerve agent VX; six hundred tons of ingredients for VX; as much as three thousand tons of other
poison-gas agents; and at least five hundred and fifty artillery shells filled with mustard gas. Nor did the inspectors find any stores of
aflatoxin.
Saddam's motives are unclear, too. For the past decade, the development of these weapons has caused nothing but trouble for him;
his international isolation grows not from his past crimes but from his refusal to let weapons inspectors dismantle his
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