Erbil, Kurdistan – Iraq (KRG.org) - The 180,000 victims of Saddam Hussein’s genocide against the Kurds were remembered yesterday in a memorial ceremony in Erbil, the Kurdistan Region’s capital. Many of those killed, including the 354 whose coffins lay in state at the ceremony, died in Saddam’s notorious 1988 ‘Anfal’ campaign in which thousands of Kurdish civilians were killed.

Miss Shokhan H. Said, a teacher and a representative of the Anfal victims’ families, said, “Our relatives had committed no crime. They were ordinary people trying to go about their daily lives. The Iraqi regime took them by force, killed them for crimes they hadn't committed and buried them in mass graves believing they would never be discovered.

We are glad they have made the final journey back home. We want justice to be done, the perpetrators tried and the families compensated.”

The Kurdistan Region’s President Masoud Barzani said, “Today’s memorial is a message for all Iraqis. This is why we insist on having guarantees for the Kurdistan Region’s future. It is also a message to the world. We want you to know what happened to the Kurds and why we are asking for international guarantees. Genocide must never happen again in our country.”

He added, “In the uprising [of 1991 against the Ba’ath regime], we didn't take revenge against the thousands of Iraqi soldiers who surrounded Kurdistan…this is the principle of the people of Kurdistan and I want us to hold firm to this principle.”

President Barzani emphasised that all Iraqis need to learn lessons from their tragic past to build on the new federal, democratic and pluralistic Iraq.

The ceremony was also attended by the Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, representing the federal Iraqi government. He said, “We are trying to locate all the victims of the Anfal and to offer compensation to their families. This is our moral and legal obligation to them. Iraq must always be alert to the threat of extremism and ultra-nationalism. We must prevent this by working together and by implementing the Iraqi constitution.”

He added, “This is an important occasion because it confirms the legitimacy of Iraq’s liberation. There may be some who doubt that, but the bodies of these victims remind us that Iraq’s liberation was legal.”

Ms Chnar Saad Abdullah, the Minister for Martyrs and Victims of Anfal, said that in August 2006 the Iraqi Special Tribunal recognised the Anfal campaign as a crime against humanity and asked that the trial of other defendants be pursued without political interference.

Kurdistan Region Vice President Kosrat Rasul, Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani, Kurdistan Regional Government officials, parliament and political party representatives also paid their respects. Mr Fuad Hussaini, representing Iraqi Vice President Tareq Al-Hashimi, Mohammed Izaddin, on behalf of the Iraqi Parliament, attended from Baghdad and Mohammed Bahr Al Ulum, the Shia religious leader, from Najaf.

The Italian Deputy Foreign Minister Senator Gianni Vernetti, Italian Ambassador Maurizio Milani, Czech Ambassador Petr Voznica, the Erbil consuls of the UK, South Korea, Russia and Iran, ICRC and UN representatives also attended.

The ceremony finally allowed the families of some of the victims to mourn for their loved ones in Kurdistan, and for all Kurds to remember the hundreds of thousands killed under Saddam Hussein’s rule.

Elite members of Kurdistan’s official army, the Peshmerga, carried the coffins to the ceremony. An orchestra, whose members were from Kurdish, Arab and other communities, played ceremonial music and the Kurdish national anthem. A choir sang new music specially composed in remembrance of the Anfal, which haunts Kurdistan’s collective memory as deeply as the Holocaust does in Europe. The victim’s relatives held their photos in their laps, and some kissed their coffins, which were draped in the Kurdish flag. They will be laid to rest near their homes in the mountainous Dukan district of Suleimaniah governorate.

The bodies of the 354 victims were unearthed hundreds of miles from their homes, where they were taken to be shot en masse and buried in mass graves. They are just a fraction of the many thousands of others buried in over 200 grave sites in Iraq. Evidence from those graves was presented by forensic experts at the Iraqi Special Tribunal’s Anfal trial. The Regime Crimes Liaison Office of the US Department of Justice helped to find and examine some of the graves. The five defendants, including Saddam’s cousin Ali Hassan Majid, were found guilty of war crimes for organising and carrying out the Anfal campaign.

View pictures of the ceremony in the photo gallery