SADDAM CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY
War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity

Saddam Hussein seized power in 1979. The list of war crimes and crimes
against humanity committed by Saddam Hussein and his regime is a long one.
It includes:

The use of poison gas and other war crimes against Iran and the Iranian
people during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. Iraq summarily executed thousands
of Iranian prisoners of war as a matter of policy.

The "Anfal" campaign in the late 1980's against the Iraqi Kurds, including
the use of poison gas on cities. In one of the worst single mass killings in
recent history, Iraq dropped chemical weapons on Halabja in 1988, in which
as many as 5,000 people — mostly civilians — were killed.

Crimes against humanity and war crimes arising out of Iraq's 1990-91
invasion and occupation of Kuwait.

Crimes against humanity and possibly genocide against Iraqi Kurds in
northern Iraq. This includes the destruction of over 3,000 villages. The
Iraqi government's campaign of forced deportations of Kurdish and Turkomen
families to southern Iraq has created approximately 900,000 internally
displaced citizens throughout the country.

Crimes against humanity and possibly genocide against Marsh Arabs and Shi'a
Arabs in southern Iraq. Entire populations of villages have been forcibly
expelled. Government forces have burned their houses and fields, demolished
houses with bulldozers, and undertaken a deliberate campaign to drain and
poison the marshes. Thousands of civilians have been summarily executed.

Possible crimes against humanity for killings, ostensibly against political
opponents, within Iraq.

Holding Saddam Accountable

The United States wants to see Saddam and his close aides investigated,
indicted, and if possible, prosecuted by an international tribunal. The
Yugoslav war crimes tribunal's May 1999 indictment of Slobodan Milosevic for
crimes against the Muslim Kosovar Albanian people shows that when crimes are
committed on the scale that Saddam Hussein has committed them, justice
should be done not just in the name of the victims, but in the name of all
humanity.

The United States is helping international efforts to gather evidence.

The U.S. Government helped human rights and opposition groups collect 5.5
million pages of captured Iraqi documents from the "Anfal" campaign against
the Iraqi Kurds in the 1980's. These documents show the routine nature of
the atrocities and abuses committed by Saddam Hussein's regime against the
Iraqi people. These documents are being catalogued, indexed, and
electronically transcribed for use by investigators and prosecutors.

Tens of thousands of pages of Iraqi documents captured during Operation
Desert Storm in 1991 are also now being indexed and computerized. The
originals themselves will be returned to Kuwait and computerized copies will
be made available to human rights groups, scholars, investigators and
prosecutors.

The U.S. has large amounts of information on Iraq's campaign to destroy the
Southern Marshes and repression of the people of southern Iraq.

We are preserving videotapes of Iraqi war crimes that can be used for
eventual prosecution of Iraqi war crimes. The United States also has
classified documents, some of which can be declassified and shared with an
international tribunal or commission.

Saddam Hussein's Iraq is a brutal police state and so the collection of
evidence of the crimes of the regime is difficult to obtain. Opposition
groups work with great courage to bring this news to the world. We are
working with Iraqi opposition and human rights groups in support of their
efforts to collect additional evidence of Saddam's war crimes. Opposition
and human rights groups' efforts include:

Locating witnesses to Iraqi war crimes and help build evidence that could be
used to justify the arrest of senior Iraqi officials traveling outside the
country.

Helping analyze captured Iraqi documents and translate them so that the
world can be educated about Iraqi war crimes.

The U.S. Government is providing grants to a number of NGO's working on
Iraqi war crimes issues. Grants have been provided for gathering evidence,
translating captured Iraqi documents written in Arabic into other languages,
making evidence of Iraqi war crimes available on the Internet, and taking
steps to preserve written, visual and testimonial evidence of the crimes
committed by Saddam Hussein's regime.

International efforts to draw attention to the war crimes record of the
Iraqi regime has already begun:

Efforts were made to arrest Izzat Ibrahim, Vice Chairman of the
Revolutionary Command Council, while he was visiting Austria in August of
1999.

A few weeks later, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz decided not to
travel to Italy to attend a conference entitled, "Peace, Prosperity, and an
End to War." As one human rights group said, "The only suitable venue for
Tariq Aziz to express his opinions is that of a courtroom where we will all
have a chance to hear about his government's record on peace, prosperity and
war."

SADDAM CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY
War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity