Kurds struggle to transcend Saddam Hussein's legacy

At what was once a place of torture, a Kurdish boy comes to remember his father.

Twelve-year-old Shirwan Dartash views an exhibit of photographs at a complex of buildings here that formerly housed the Iraqi security forces. One of the pictures is of a neatly lettered chalk inscription on the wall of a detention cell. It says that on Oct. 16, 1990, Bakr Dartash was sent to Baghdad to be executed.

No one knows exactly when Bakr was killed, but it was probably before his son's first birthday. Shirwan has seen the photograph many times. It makes him feel proud. "When I come here, I become happy," he says.

His words seem incongruous in such a sorrowful place. They seem a testament to the power of love to overcome hatred and loss.

As Iraqis and the rest of the world begin to assess the horrors of 35 years of Baath Party rule, the country's Kurds have a head start. They began their reckoning in 1991, when then-President Saddam Hussein pulled his officials out of northern Iraq and allowed the Kurds to rule themselves.

They have turned the Sulaymaniyah complex, known as the "Red Security" because of the ochre tint of its exterior paint, into a memorial to their suffering under Iraqi regimes. "If we will not remember what happened," says Hero Khan Ahmed, the organizer of the memorial effort, "we cannot be strong for the future."

Iraq's Kurds seem to have concluded that they must defeat the rage and injustice caused by the Baath Party's oppression, in part because they are committed to integrating themselves more tightly into Iraqi society. Kurdish leaders say they have put their dreams of independence on hold.

Even so, the Kurdish process of reconciliation remains in its infancy. The Kurds say they have much to do to account for the dead and the missing, build a nation that offers some redemption for their suffering, and ease their sadness and anger.

More than a decade ago Kamaran Aziz Ali spent day after day in a torture chamber at the Red Security, his big hands manacled behind his back. His interrogators attached the handcuffs to a hook suspended from a pipe near the ceiling, hanging him so his shoulders dislocated. They spat in his mouth, whipped him with cables, shocked him with electricity.

In late 1990 and early 1991 the Iraqis detained him, Bakr Dartash, and 29 others because of their involvement with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, a political party that was agitating against Iraqi rule and that today administers the eastern portion of northern Iraq. Mr. Ali still serves the PUK as an education official.

He hasn't forgotten his torture and isn't inclined to forgive those who carried it out. "I want everyone who served the regime even for one day," he says calmly, "to be exterminated."

The peak of Kurdish suffering under the Baath Party was a genocidal campaign known as the Anfal - the Arabic word for "spoils" and the name the Iraqi government gave to its effort to suppress the Kurds. It was the culmination of decades of strife between Kurdish groups seeking independence and central governments in Baghdad.

In the late 1980s Iraqi forces destroyed thousands of Kurdish villages and killed as many as 100,000 people, according to human rights organizations. Iraq used chemical weapons against its own civilians, including those in the city of Halabja in 1988, when 5,000 people died after an Iraqi attack.

Government officials moved the inhabitants of the destroyed villages to austere "collective towns" in the north or to other parts of Iraq, declaring vast areas of the north off limits to civilian habitation. The idea was to eliminate support for the PUK and the other main Kurdish political group, the Kurdistan Democratic Party.

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