The Legacy of Fratricide: Civil War Government and Injustice in Kurdistan

Megan Connelly
Sep 2, 2018 · 5 min read

During the final days of August, many in Kurdistan observed three somber commemorations: the International Day of the Disappeared, the infamous Iraqi Army-backed KDP conquest of Erbil in 1996, and the PUK’s assassination of Marxist poet and activist, Bakr Ali in 1994. These memorials reopen the wounds of the region’s civil war (the bra kuzhi, or “fratricide” as it is called in Kurdistan) from 1994 to 1998 during which tens of thousands of people were displaced, thousands of peshmerga killed, and hundreds of civilians “disappeared” or assassinated. Although the war was primarily a contest for dominance between the two major Kurdish nationalist parties, the KDP and the PUK, nearly every political party participated in the conflict and was complicit in war crimes. The KDP and PUK officially ended with the signing of the Washington Agreement, intermittent fighting between the PUK and various factions of the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan (IMK), continued until 2003. While the inter-party conflicts have largely ceased, closure and justice for the families of the dead and vanished have been unattainable in a political system that shields perpetrators and continues to justify arbitrary and violent intimidation tactics.

Elusive justice

The ghosts of the civil war have not been exorcised, but have instead been institutionalized by its participants. Despite some feeble efforts to unite the KRG as a coherent political entity, it remains a relic of the civil war, divided along the ceasefire line between KDP and PUK administrative zones. Each party has its own Peshmerga, police, Asayish, and intelligence units. The KDP and PUK remain power-sharing partners on the condition that they are able to manage their respective zones of influence without interference from the other. Other conflict actors have embraced participation in the KRG as well. Although no longer armed, the IMK and its splinter parties, Komal and Yekgirtu hold 17 seats in the Kurdistan Parliament. The Democratic Socialist Party of Kurdistan (HSDK), has only one seat in parliament, but retains its own militia of approximately 700 peshmerga in Ruwanduz.

It is not surprising, given that all of the conflict’s participants now participate in government, that transitional justice has been lacking or even nonexistent. No public officials have been held legally accountable for war crimes. Most of the displaced, as well as the families of those killed or disappeared, have not been compensated, and the grave sites of their relatives have not been revealed. In 2015, Minister of the Interior Karim Sinjari (himself the target of war crime accusations as the leader of the KDP’s Parastin intelligence unit during the war) declared all of the disappeared to be legally dead, without further explanation as to the whereabouts of the remains or the circumstances under which they vanished. Other parties, such as the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan (IMK), Komal and Yekgirtu, have remained silent on the matter.

Peyman Azedin, a former MP and member of the Kurdistan Region Parliament’s Human Rights Committee revealed to journalist Niyaz Abdulla that the PUK provided her organization with 115 documented cases of disappearances of PUK peshmerga and cadres who are believed to have been arrested by KDP forces during the war. However, according to Azedin, the KDP has prevented families within its zone from coming forward with claims, or has “compensated their families on their own”. No mention was made of claims with regards to IMK or HSDK-related disappearances. Families have few options in their pursuit of justice. KRG courts are heavily influenced by KDP and PUK interference and are therefore unlikely to provide a remedy. Furthermore, because the Kurdistan Region is not a state and Iraq is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, families also are given little, if any, recourse under international law in pursuing justice.

The war that never ends

Peyman Azedin believes that the primary reasons for the KRG parties’ reluctance to come forward with information about disappearances during the civil war are primarily attributable to the their belief that they have no crimes to answer for. “The essence of the parties’ decisions and political tactics, which is to disappear or arrest or kill dissidents in and outside of their parties, is not something that they want to acknowledge as being wrong because they believe in continuing this.”

Although no longer focussed on purifying their zones of one another’s influence, the parties’ security forces continue to carry out many of the same functions as they did in during the civil war. In fact, with so much attention given to Coalition-backed attempts to integrate and professionalize the Peshmerga, it is easy to forget that Asayish and intelligence services — responsible for many of the executions and disappearances during the civil war — remain fully within the de facto jurisdiction of the KDP and PUK, and now with a legal mandate to arrest and detain those suspected of political crimes. Asayish jails are designed to temporarily hold those arrested and charged with corruption, narcotics trafficking, terrorism, and other serious political offenses, but detainees are sometimes held on civil offenses or trumped up political charges. They often face long periods of detention, torture, and an an opaque hearing process of questionable legality. Security forces have also been involved in disappearances and assassinations. In July, PUK Asayish kidnapped of three activists in Piramagrun, whose whereabouts remain unknown. December and March saw the mass arrests and use of force by KDP and PUK security against protestors during the Sulaimaniyah and Erbil protests. In 2016, journalist Widat Hussein Ali was beaten to death following his arrest by the KDP Asayish. Asayish has been cited for human rights violations by Human Rights Watch, the U.S. Department of State, and the UK Foreign Ministry.

Party loyalists and cadres defend acts of violence committed by the KDP and PUK security forces as necessary to disrupt conspiracies and insurrections. Shex Jafr, commander of the PUK’s 70 Forces justified his armed attack on opposition party Gorran’s headquarters after May’s elections based on his party’s allegations that Gorran was plotting to seize ballot boxes. Similarly, various political leaders from both the KDP and PUK pointed to Iranian interference or manipulation of insurrectionist political factions to defend their decisions to violently suppress of protests in Sulaimaniyah and Erbil. “Intellectual Terrorism”, a phrase coined by PM Nechirvan Barzani to describe the opposition in Sulaimaniyah, perfectly encapsulates the parties’ approach to dissent as a security issue.

Although none of the parties have explicitly defended disappearances and assassinations, they are often carried out in such a way that leaves little doubt as to who is responsible. As popular dissatisfaction with corruption and political bankruptcy increased over the past 4 years, so did the brazenness of the crackdowns and the level of force used to silence opposition. The escalation and flagrancy of these intimidation tactics sends a clear message that the parties are undeterred by appeals to human rights, rule of law, and justice for victims. For the KDP and PUK, as well as for their victims, the recent disappearances, assassinations, and mass arrests are all part of a long process beginning in the 1990s through which the fratricide evolved — became sanitized, institutionalized, and was repackaged as “security” or “anti-terrorism” — but it did not end.

Megan Connelly

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Ph.D./JD Student, SUNY University at Buffalo. Armed conflict, power sharing. Focus on the Kurdistan Region–Iraq