A Monument to the Gulf War
al-Khalil, Samir
In July of last year, I received a phone call from a television producer who was interested in doing a program on the idea of an American monument to Desert Storm. Somewhere in Washington...
...Everyone went on living in the past even as everyone was being proven wrong by those on the ground who stood most to lose and were begging them for help...
...One day, after the regime of the Ba'ath in Iraq has finally departed, we are going to find them...
...What ought it to signify...
...Like everyone else I was growing immune to Ba'th atrocity stories...
...My first trip to Iraq in twenty-three years, in November 1991, provided me with the framework of an answer...
...I went to Kurdistan to see those documents, to interview Taimour, and to establish the connection between the two...
...The official paperwork from the police archives refers to people who have been "lost in the heroic operations of the Anfal...
...Along with the film I was given photocopies of documents taken from the offices of the Iraqi secret police in cities like Sulaymaniyya, Kirkuk, and Arbil...
...Its code name was al-Anfal, which is a word from the Qur'an meaning the spoils of war, or booty that has been religiously permitted...
...Certainly they controlled the area in which they are located...
...Built into the earth, rather than rising above it in the phallic style of traditional monuments, Lin's memorial has been called a "gash of shame...
...Through this trip, I have good reason to believe that at least 100,000 noncombatant Kurds (and possibly as many as 200,000) were rounded up from their villages, SPRING • 1992 • 133 taken to large forts that acted as transfer points, separated out by sex, and trucked away to deserted areas of Iraq to be shot in mass graves (about one hundred people per grave...
...Kurdish villages, Kurdish livestock, Kurdish grain stocks, and Kurdish possessions of every description were lawfully at the absolute disposal of the central government in Baghdad...
...More Iraqis died as a consequence of that rebellion than during the war itself...
...There are but a few American dead to memorialize in this war, but there are masses of Iraqi dead of every kind and description...
...The Vietnam War and the Gulf War are inextricably connected in the American public conscience...
...The documents had been captured by Kurdish guerillas during the March 1991 uprising that followed the Gulf War, and their significance had hitherto been completely ignored both in the West and by the Iraqi opposition...
...The boy Taimour was caught up in this particular stage...
...Unknowingly, Allied forces—American troops in particular—had to have been encamped on top of (or very close to) those graves in March and April of last year...
...134 • DISSENT...
...The Vietnam War memorial works because it eschews patriotism while acknowledging the dead, individually and collectively, as the only worthy reason for having any kind of monument...
...If they ever do decide to built a monument for the Gulf War in Washington, then its moral underpinning is no longer a nation's shame, but its absence of compassion...
...Now suppose there had to be a monument to the Gulf War...
...Therein lies its eloquence...
...The final phase of the three-stage operation was known officially as khatimat al-Anfal, or the final Anfal...
...Neither took the conditions of the people most directly involved—be they Iraqis or Kuwaitis—as their principal point of departure...
...The choice of word seems to imply that everything inside the territory covered by the "heroic Anfal operations" was religiously permitted, halal, to the Iraqi army...
...They were camped there while they stood by watching Iraqis who had risen against the regime in the wake of the Gulf War being cut to shreds by Saddam Hussein's helicopter gunships and Republican Guard units...
...Somewhere in Washington somebody was thinking of commissioning just such a monument, and the producer wanted to preempt the national debate that was bound to ensue...
...Maya Lin, who designed the Vietnam War memorial, was a student at Yale when her entry won the competition for that monument in 1981...
...The Dean of the Yale School of Architecture had already been contacted and was willing to run a studio among students that would present alternative schemes...
...The film, recently shot in Kurdistan, depicted a twelveyearold boy named Taimour sitting cross-legged on the floor, talking about how he had survived execution by a firing squad somewhere near the Iraqi-Saudi border in August 1988...
...This is the moral framework within which a future Maya Lin needs to work to provide meaning to the Gulf War...
...In almost every detail, this object cries out against the glorification of war and the deification of power...
...To my mind Lin's low-slung tapering black granite walls, inscribed with the names of 58,132 dead Americans, signify both a nation's shame and its compassion for its dead...
...The sinking black granite walls into which one descends stand in sharp contrast to the white marble obelisk of the Washington monument...
...If those who wanted this war did so to undo the so-called Vietnam syndrome, then it has been my experience that those who opposed it were by and large satisfied with replaying that syndrome...
...Why, even Kurdish lives were permitted...
...But in September 1991 a videotape clip was passed on to me by a Kurdish colleague living in London...
...The evidence suggests that these mass graves are located in the desert just west of the southern Iraqi city of Samawa...
...The Kurds saved "three roomfuls packed floor to ceiling" of these files, according to one source...
...The program would therefore resonate with all the controversy that her great work produced, even as it took for its point of departure a new generation's attitude to a very different kind of war...
...His father, mother, three sisters, and everyone else who had been rounded up from the village of Qulatcho were not as lucky...
...What became evident is that in 1988, when Saddam Hussein was everyone's friend, a routinely administered, bureaucratic operation of extermination designed to end the Kurdish question once and for all was conducted in Iraq...
Vol. 39 • April 1992 • No. 2
