Hazhir Teimourian - Middle East Analyst and Commentator
Home : Contact : Archives

1x1gif

printer friendly text only (hold shift for new window)

Never mind the genocide: just carry on trading

The Tablet, 24th March 1990

Late last week, I was involved in a televised debate in front of a large studio audience in Birmingham on the execution of the late Farzad Bazoft of the Observer in Baghdad. Looking back upon it, I am extremely pleased that despite suffering from a particularly disabling strain of flu, I dragged myself to the city to be present.

The debate began with the Iraqi ambassador in Paris saying that he was surprised the British were at all bothered about the fate of a man who was not one of their citizens. The Conservative MP, Mr Terry Dicks, supported the Iraqi position, saying that Bazoft had not only been a foreigner (an Iranian), but had also robbed a building society some years ago. The day before the reporter was executed, Mr Dicks had said that he deserved to be hanged and the remark had been transmitted to Iraq.

Fortunately, the audience was not as morally underdeveloped as the ambassador or the MP. It disagreed with the suggestion that it should only care for British citizens, that the value of human life depended on its nationality.

But it became clear to me early on in the debate that if the discussion were allowed to hover around the hanging alone, little would be gained. After all, said Mr Dicks, it was not important whether we in Britain thought that Bazoft was a spy or not. What was really relevant was that the IRAQIS thought he was. This, of course, might not have been necessarily so. President Saddam Hussein of Iraq has so little respect for human life that he would not think twice before killing an innocent man to make a political point. But, for the audience, considerations of national security were legitimate areas of concern for any responsible government.

In the event, it proved quite easy to take the discussion onto another plane where the Iraqis and their British supporters would be trapped. The day happened to be the second anniversary of Halabja, the city of 70,000 Kurds which was destroyed on the afternoon of March 16, 1988, when President Hussein ordered his air force to bomb it with a deadly mixture of mustard and nerve gases, and a book of pictures I had taken with me that showed the city's streets and houses a few hours after the attack, with small children, pets and farm animals frozen in the struggle with death everywhere, instantly revealed to the cameras what kind of a government we were discussing.

To my great sorrow, the member of Parliament for Hayes and Harlington stuck to his position, saying that Halabja was just the kind of repression that went on all over the Third World and that poor Iraq was the victim of a "media hype".

Another Conservative MP, also on the panel, merely defended the British Government's decision to temporarily withdraw its ambassador from Baghdad, while the representative of a major company active in Iraq - its profits guaranteed by the British Government's Export Credit Guarantees - said that it was important for Britain to have strong trading links with Baghdad.

Their meaning was quite clear. The genocidal destruction of all those thousands of Kurdish children at the hands of Arab nationalists, the razing to the ground of some 3,000 villages in the Kurdish highlands, the deportation of the inhabitants of many towns and their concentration in camps from which they might never emerge, had absolutely nothing to do with us here. Furthermore, if we could make a profit helping the Iraqi government in some way, including helping its police and army become more efficient in their murderous campaigns, it was legitimate business and part of the hallowed process of wealth creation. Mr Dicks actually had the effrontery to say that Iraq was no more repressive than India.

The anger caused by Farzad Bazoft's death is now subsiding, and the Foreign Office will, in a few months' time, quietly send back its ambassador to Baghdad to soothe the feelings of "the Pol Pot of the Arab world", reasoning that Saddam Hussein sits on the world's second-largest reservoir of oil after Saudi Arabia.

In examining such immorality, I feel that I should not have to declare that I am a Kurd. The Crimes committed by Saddam Hussein are so awesome that, as with those of Hitler and Pol Pot, they ought to be the business of all of us. But sadly, this is apparently not so. On the second anniversary of Halabja, I also spoke to the only meeting in London that commemorated its victims. The audience consisted of only about 40 people, almost exclusively Kurds.

Given such apathy, would not the world's tyrants be right in thinking that our much-flaunted concern for human rights is politically motivated? Should we be surprised if greater outrages follow as many more of the governments of the Third World acquire chemical weapons?

Please, Mrs Thatcher, as your civil servants in the Department of Trade and Industry prepare to allocate 250 million pounds of the tax payer's money to guarantee companies against loss in bankrupt Iraq, remember that some of that money will finance the wholesale destruction of a nation of hill-farmers who have never done you any harm during the 5,000 years they have inhabited their present land*.

*In fact, the Thatcher government increased Iraq's Export Guarantee to £320. Nine months later, British soldiers were dying to evict Saddam's army from Kuwait.
Back to top of page
Copyright © 2007 [Hazhir Teimourian] All rights reserved.

Valid HTML 4.01!  Valid CSS!  
Webdesign by cooleague.com