When tens of millions starved in the Great Leap Forward, the single greatest political crime of the twentieth century, Mao Tse-tung told the few brave officials who condemned themselves to death by speaking out: ‘A few children die in the kindergarten, a few old men die in the Happiness Court. If there’s no death people can’t exist. From Confucius to now it would be disastrous if people didn’t die.’
Hitler committed suicide and Italian partisans hung Mussolini from a meat hook, but Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Franco and Amin died in their beds. Because of the American and British armies, I’m glad to say that at the time of writing Saddam Hussein and Comrade al-Majid are on trial in Baghdad. Unfortunately, it seems likely that the ‘realism’ of the UN route in Darfur has allowed the Islamist government of Sudan to get away with genocide.
Al-Majid had sound historical grounds for thinking that he could ‘fuck’ the international community and that there would be many among its statespersons and foreign policy analysts who would lie back and enjoy the experience. He launched the Anfal (‘spoils’) campaign to solve the Kurdish ‘problem’ with the reasonable expectation that he would never be held to account. Waves of Iraqi troops plundered and destroyed 4,000 Kurdish villages. Any man, woman or child who lived in the ‘prohibited zone’ outside the government’s authorized centres was a legitimate target.
The Kurds’ initial attempts to rally international support got nowhere. They would have been a total failure had it not been for Peter Galbraith, son of John Kenneth, and a staff member for the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He used his pull to persuade the Baathists to allow him to travel into Kurdistan. He drove north with mounting confusion. Kurdish villages that appeared on his maps weren’t there on the ground. He would stop at what should have been a busy settlement and see nothing but rubble. Galbraith made a stink when he returned to Washington and got an international campaign going. Despite his efforts, the massacre of the Kurds would have meant as little to the world as the massacres of the Armenians and boyars had not al-Majid ordered the bombing of Halabja with a mixture of VX gas, mustard gas and sarin.
Like Makiya, I’ve tried to avoid the pornography of violence. Atrocity stories are a species of blackmail. The writer – or more often broadcaster these days – is in effect saying ‘agree with me or you are guilty by association’. It is too easy.
I have therefore spared you the sacks filled with starving cats, the rape rooms and the plastic-shredding machines. In the case of the Anfal campaign, however, you cannot understand it without understanding the thoroughness with which the Baath slaughtered a minimum of 100,000 Kurds. All over northern Iraq, staggered bewildered people with stories of the utmost poignancy. Abdel-Qadir al-Askari will serve for all of them. He was on a hill above his village of Guptapa when he saw planes flying in low over the rooftops. He ran down and found his mother collapsed by the river, her mouth biting the mud bank. ‘I wanted to kiss her but I knew that if I did, the chemicals would be passed on. Even now I deeply regret not kissing my beloved mother.’ He continued along the river and found the bodies of his children, his brother, his father, his nieces and his nephews. ‘At this point I lost my feelings. I didn’t know who to cry to anymore.’
No one outside Kurdistan would know what you meant if you talked about Guptapa. Halabja’s name flew round the world, not because it was the apogee of the genocide, but because the Baathists blundered by wiping out civilians fifteen miles from the Iranian border. Journalists were able to get in without permission from Baghdad and see the poisoned corpses for themselves: the husband holding the hand of the wife; the father flattened against a wall with his arms round his infant son; the mother caught with her back arched to protect her child … hundreds of bodies frozen at the moment of death, as if fossilized in the ash of a new Vesuvius.
Moynihan’s Law had no jurisdiction, and Halabja joined Guernica, Katyn and My Lai in that eccentric but necessary list of comparatively small twentieth-century massacres which act as shorthand notes for atrocities that are too colossal to comprehend. There was a media storm, but that quickly passed as media storms do. Galbraith persuaded the US Senate to pass a bill to impose sanctions on Iraq, but the House of Representatives blocked it. George Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State, condemned Iraq, but the State Department was a true friend to dictators in adversity and his officials calmed him down.
To its enormous credit, the only political faction to stand up consistently against fascism and genocide was the liberal-left. Human Rights Watch established itself as an alternative to Amnesty International on the strength of its investigations in Iraq. The book that was to become Republic of Fear didn’t originate in discussions with a major publishing house but with debates Makiya had with fellow Trotskyists. They gathered around New Left Review, a journal for socialist intellectuals that was based in Soho and edited by Perry Anderson, an English Marxist of the upper class. Before Makiya published, Tariq Ali, a Pakistani Marxist of the upper class and New Left Review board member, made a documentary with him about Iraq’s suffering. The most left-wing MPs in the Labour Party lined up to denounce Saddam as a ‘fascist’, while the racial persecution of the Kurds in Iraq and Turkey moved Harold Pinter, the left-wing playwright, poet and future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, to produce Mountain Language.
‘Your language is forbidden,’ a concentration camp officer bellows at a Kurdish woman. ‘It is dead. No one is allowed to speak your language. Your language no longer exists. Any questions?’
The play’s conceit was all too realistic: the world would never know of the suffering of the Kurds because the Kurds would never be allowed to speak.
The Left, which had thrown the accusation of ‘fascism’ around so freely, still had the sense to fight the real thing and offer fraternal support to its victims.
Their struggle was our struggle. Truly, it was.
There was one exception. The Tories who made excuses for the judicial murder of Farzad Bazoft and the other crimes of Saddam Hussein did have their counterparts in a small group on the Left in the Seventies and Eighties. It barely seemed worth bothering about at the time, but in retrospect you can see that it beat the path from the Left to far right that was to turn into a six-lane highway in the twenty-first century.
The Workers’ Revolutionary Party was one of the ugliest political movements the British left has produced. It was a cult of the personality that venerated the squat, bald figure of Gerry Healy. According to his account of his life, Healy was a poor Irishman who began work on a ship at the age of 14. Disgusted by the poverty and the hardships he and his contemporaries endured, he became a communist in the Thirties. He switched to Trotskyism because of the Hitler – Stalin pact and spent the rest of his life fighting the sectarian wars of the far left, whose hatreds were in inverse proportion to their impact on British society. Officially, the WRP programme was to seize power in Britain, as the Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia, and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat on behalf of the British working class. Because it knew how Stalin had corrupted the Russian Revolution, there would be no mistake this time. The errors of the past would be avoided, and Healy would follow the shining path of Leon Trotsky and create a communist Utopia in the Britain of the Seventies.
Maybe Healy believed it could be done, he certainly never lacked self-confidence, but the sole practical effect of his life was to exercise a dictatorship over his party’s members.
There are plenty of personality cults in mainstream politics. The adulation accorded to Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair in their prime and pomp by moist-eyed journalists destroyed any sentimental notions of the cussedness of the freeborn Englishman and the fearlessness of the British press. Public scrutiny and the chance of removing a leader at a democratic election keep the cultism under control, however. In the little universes of the late twentieth-century totalitarian sects, it flourished without restraint. Lenin and Trotsky had driven the far left round the bend by proving that a minuscule party governed by fanatical leaders could change the course of history, if, and only if, it followed the correct strategy.