After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness?: My Encounters With Kurdistan by Jonathan C. Randal

Author:Jonathan C. Randal [Randal, Jonathan C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Middle East, General
ISBN: 9780813335803
Google: 3ZN7swEACAAJ
Goodreads: 409166
Publisher: Westview Press
Published: 1997-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

8

Ali Chemical

All that is needed for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

—EDMUND BURKE

In the summer of 1994 Simon Wiesenthal listened to me with the same amiable forbearance that I recalled from our only other meeting more than a quarter of a century earlier. Back in 1968, when I first came to the Vienna office of the tireless tracker of Nazis responsible for Hitler's "final solution to the Jewish question," I was the New York Times' correspondent in Warsaw. I was new to Eastern Europe's demons, and I needed his enlightenment to understand what struck me as the surrealistic dynamics of anti-Semitism in a country virtually without Jews after Hitler's extermination program. Such was the odd hallmark of the "anti-Zionist" campaign taking place that year inside Communist Poland's feuding nomenklatura. He patiently provided chapter and verse.

This time I was back in Vienna seeking his guidance in deciphering the horrendous punishment that Saddam Hussein had meted out to Iraq's Kurds. Their travail was immeasurably worse than that suffered by the Old Testament's Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who were cast into Nebuchadnezzar's fiery furnace (said to have been the tar pits of modern Kirkuk's oil fields in Kurdistan). Those biblical worthies, after all, were saved—not so the Kurds, who were subjected to chemical weapons, deportation, and wholesale destruction of their villages. Many tens of thousands were massacred in an inventive display of extrajudicial executions and other excesses which Saddam Hussein was accused of having raised to a "fine art." * I hoped Wiesenthal might have some special insight into what prompted modern dictators, German or Middle Eastern, to plan and carry out such terrible suffering, to keep such thorough records, and to devise their methodologies of mass murder, and insight into the larger indifference to these horrors—in fact, any clues to what had been allowed to happen and why. I had no idea whether Wiesenthal had any interest in the Kurds or knowledge of their fate, but he had a well-known soft spot for journalists, so I didn't mind asking what must have struck him as ignorant questions. There was so much I knew I didn't comprehend that I felt little compunction about bothering him: I figured a man who specialized in chronicling the century's most industrialized machinery of mass murder would likely have some answers, even if at face value the sheer scale and efficiency of the Holocaust discouraged comparisons.

Still, I was wary of approaching him. Decades spent covering African, Asian, and Middle Eastern wars and human-rights violations made me leery of overheated accusations that terrible excesses, even mass murders, constituted cases of genocide, much less a new Holocaust. These easy analogies overlooked the incontrovertible essential difference. The Jews of Europe had committed no overt acts of aggression; they had never taken up arms against their adversaries; they certainly were responsible for nothing remotely comparable to the recurring armed rebellions that studded Kurdish history or even the Armenians' anti-Ottoman nationalist temptations, which had helped trigger our century's first genocide during World War I.

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