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m4zlum:

Kurdish exodus, 1991 by Bruno Barbey

Halabja was not the first time Iraq had turned its chemical arsenal on the Kurds. Thousands, and most likely tens of thousands, of civilians were killed during chemical and conventional bombardments stretching from the spring of 1987 through the fall of 1988. The attacks were part of a long-standing campaign that destroyed almost every Kurdish village in Iraq, along with a centuries-old way of life, and displaced at least a million of the country’s estimated 3.5 million Kurdish population.

And I knew the enmity of the Turks for the Kurds. In May 1989, I was a camp leader of 17,000 Kurdish refugees near Mardin. The Turks and the Iraqis devised a plan to kill us; with poisoned bread. For what crime? For the crime of being Kurdish! Our only crime was that we were Kurds. And that is no crime! God created us as a Kurd, as a human being. Even when we’d go to market, the Turkish soldiers would beat us, going and coming, when we’d go to buy food for the camp. They would always pick out one of us, a good-looking woman, and beat the living hell out of her. —  Jemil Mahmoud Suleiyman Besefky

The refugees blame Iraq and Turkey for three large-scale poisonings: June 8, 1989 in Mardin, December 17, 1989 in Mus and February 1, 1990 in Diyarbakir. No one has proven the involvement of either government, though Turkey did block independent investigation of the matter.

The three events were remarkably similar. Following a new delivery of bread, several hundred people fell ill: about 2,000 in Mardin, 100-200 in Mus and 700-1,000 in Diyarbakir. Few died but several hundred people were hospitalized. Though the bread for each of the camps comes from different bakeries, the victims all had similar symptoms, including abdominal pain, sleepiness, diminished vision and difficulty breathing. Several women miscarried.

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