The Absurd Cause For The Faili Kurds Holocausts

This entry is part 5 of 8 in the series Faili Kurds Holocausts

Dr. Ala Musa Hasan | Exclusive to iKurd.net

Political and Social Genocide

Political and social genocide is the process of Elimination acts that the dominant groups have the propensity to embeds in their larger political contexts, practices, and goals.

The perpetrators therefore, tend to do things to their victims, by the process of annihilation, expulsion, or incarceration of their victims through political, social, economic, and cultural consequences.

This act will have the opinionated momentous facts that force people to lose their homes, social status, cultural identity, families, and lives. The perpetrators with their elimination programs tend to weaken people who would challenge their power.

The perpetrators will purposely aim to butcher the political, social, economic, and cultural spheres of their society in order to segregate or eliminate certain minority group for the purpose of power and control.

The goal is to destroy the victims’ cultural institutions, ethnic identity, language, history, objects, and artifacts in order to undermine them. Saddam and his Baath party purposely shelled the major cultural institutions in Iraq’s capital, to eliminate the Faili Kurds people from Iraq, but also to obliterate their communal and the foundation of their cultural existences.

The process of eliminations and exterminations agenda are the most profound of any political program that takes place within their extended time period, rivaling or exceeding even the effects of major economic growth.

The perpetrators will spread their dominance through the process of complete or partial annihilations to politically and socially homogenize their country.

The perpetrators often tend to destroy and expel people because they can not tolerate their cultural ideas and practices. This is particularly evident when religion is the impetus for one leadership and group to slaughter or eliminate another.

Social and Cultural genocide involves the eradication and the destruction of cultural artifacts, such as language, history, books, artworks, and structures, and the suppression of cultural activities that do not conform to the destroyer’s notion of what is appropriate.

Their motives may include their religious, ethnicity, or nationality, as part of their campaign for ethnic cleansing to remove the evidence of a people from a locale or history, as part of an effort to delete the past, history, and its associated culture of a certain group. For example, the Faili Kurds people had a very positive and effective role in improving the economical, social, and political life in modern Iraq’s society.

For many years, the Faili Kurds were renowned for their business ethic and stature with great economical and commercial weight in Baghdad’s market, and also they have had a considerable capitals, companies, and factories in Iraq. The Faili Kurds people were part of the founders of Chamber of Commerce in Baghdad, which was one of the principle factors that made them a specific target of the Ba’ath Party.

All Faili Kurds members of the chamber were arrested in a carefully planned campaign for social and cultural genocide of the Faili Kurds population in 1980’s, which resulted in them being stripped of all of their documents, identity, businesses, community, and hasty deportation to Iran.

This represented the spark of a long campaign of intimidation, harassment and deportation process that was perpetrated against the Faili Kurds population over the following years. Thus, they are still not properly compensated for all the grief and loss that they endured, and many of their issues still going on without being addressed.

After the termination of Saddam’s regime in 2003, the Faili Kurds people pinned a great hope on the potential turning point of Iraq’s government and attitudes, in order to receive their God given rights as human-being and as Iraqi citizens.

Unfortunately, almost a decade that has past where the Faili Kurds people once again are influenced by the new government poor mentality and they were awoken to the harsh lack of justice to gain their rights and to prove their genocide internationally. Sadly today, history is repeating itself, and it seems to show a historical trend in the overlooking of our rights as citizens of this planet.

Fortunately, during the 2012 campaign, the Supreme Iraqi Criminal Court gave a ruling that ordered the Iraqi government to declare the crimes that was committed against the Faili Kurds people as Genocide with full assignment of its meaning. “Constructing the provisions of item (I) of Article (61), item (iii) of Article (73) of the Iraqi Constitution, the President of the Republic issued a Resolution No. (6) For the year 2012 on 8/2/2012” (UPF, 2016).

This advance movement and consolation holds a very little weight for what the Faili Kurds went through, if it fails to be internationally recognized, such as other more widely accepted genocides. Above all, an international effort is needed to recognize the experiences and the difficulties of the Faili Kurds and to help with the process of reinstating their assets and rights as a humans and Iraqi citizens.

The Faili Kurds, who follow the Shiit Islam, and who lived along the Iran/Iraq border and in Baghdad, were repressed as ‘Iranians’ under the Hussein regime, they are still targeted for ethnic and religious reasons. Still to this point, hundreds of Faili Kurds people are remaining stateless to this day; therefore, they are unable to access their basic rights and services.

After the removal of the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein’s regime, there were many democratic measures have been put in place to benefit others in Iraq society, the Faili Kurds population did not have the opportunity yet to reap such benefits.

It is evident that the Faili Kurds people have once again been unjustly discriminated against, both in the redressing of crimes committed against their population and in the acknowledgement of their barefaced persecution and genocide.

The Faili Kurds people once again are facing despair in the lack of efforts that is allocated for locating and identifying those youths who were perished during the old regime and duly compensating their families. Thus, they were constantly being targeted and discriminated against in all aspects of life even during the current new government.

For example, during the deportation process of the Faili Kurds in the 1980’s, the old regime illegally seized all their properties and documents and donating them to its loyalists group. The current Iraqi government failed to take the moral responsibility of giving them back what the old authorities confiscated from them, however, the present government have issued a series of laws stating the conflicts to be solved in civil courts, and failing to compensate them for the entire trauma they have gone through these long years.

Leaving them struggling through the current systematic and social barriers and paying a huge expenses only to have unsympathetic and unfair rulings that was made by Arab judges and politicians. This ridiculous process leaves them (the victims), having to ludicrously compensating the perpetrators for the crimes committed against them.

For instance, the Faili Kurds people who manage to cross back through the borders into Iraq, they were faced with the harsh reality of someone else being the owner and the occupier of their properties, and they are refusing to leave and let the original proprietor to reclaim what was originally theirs.

In conjunction, the systematic and the political barriers that purposely created for the reason to entangle the retrieval process of their rights with a dense litigation designed to make it extremely difficult if not impossible to take back what is duly and rightfully theirs.

Also the Faili Kurds people are still under represented on the ministerial or lower level of government with no group of people to represents the interests and the concerns of their population in government positions. Therefore, many Faili Kurds are still faced with many obstacles and roadblock that was created by the current government officials.

For example, the Faili Kurds people have to go under a numerous of scrutiny and obstacles for obtaining their nationality papers and documents such as Iraqi citizenship and passports that requires the production of the original documents that was confiscated from them at the time of deportation process by the Saddam Hussein regime. Thus, many of them still do not have any legal document to prove their nationality and to participate in any political movements.

In conclusion, the Faili Kurds people lost faith and trust in the current Iraqi government officials and political parties, thus, their Holocausts needs a solid international recognition, and it should be implemented on various levels of governments and social institutions, because without the international support and acknowledgment this mission will still be unaccomplished.

The Faili Kurds have been waiting a very long time for something of this magnitude to come to a resolution. This heinous act and the sorrow of an entire people is surely something that should at least be recognized if not addressed by the international community in order to bring closure to those that have suffered at the hands of this continuous persecution.

Dr. Ala Musa Hasan, a Canada-based Faili Kurd, PHD Candidates in Clinical Psychology.

The opinions are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of iKurd.net or its editors.