Surviving after Violence and Loss – Supporting Anfal Women Survivors
Table of Contents
Background
The Anfal-Operations 1988
In 1988, the Iraqi regime carried out a large-scale military operation against Kurdish areas in the north of Iraq under the code word ‘Anfal’. More than one hundred thousand men and women were abducted, murdered and buried in mass graves. The individual fate of most of them remains uncertain to this day.
Thousands of Kurdish villages were razed to the ground. Thousands of women, men and children were imprisoned in camps and prisons for months; many died of hunger and exhaustion. After their release, the survivors were taken to forced resettlement camps. The city of Rizgary, which today has a population of 40,000, grew out of one such resettlement camp.
Surviving after Anfal
After Anfal, the survivors spent another 15 years in uncertainty about the fate of their loved ones, provisional living situations and extreme hardship. Their economic foundations and social networks were destroyed. The legal and social situation of single women with children among the survivors was unclear; in the patriarchal and traditional environment of Kurdish rural society, they were subject to control and stigmatisation and restricted in their mobility and the development of new life perspectives.
Despite all the adversities, Anfal surviving women developed enormous energy, doing all kinds of hard labour to survive and raise their often numerous children without male and social support. Their most important driving force was their children; their most important resource was their strong solidarity structures among themselves and their collective way of dealing with the situation as a group of Anfal surviving women.
Only after the fall of the Baath regime in 2003 did they learn that their relatives had been murdered. Their economic and social situation stabilised; Anfal survivors have rebuilt their families, their social and economic networks. Today, their continuing grief over the extreme violence they experienced and the losses they suffered is coupled with pride in having survived and resisted the aggressors’ will to destroy. They bring their demands for a speedy opening of the mass graves, for justice, compensation and for political and social recognition of their experiences into the public debate.
The Project Remembrance Forum for Anfal Surviving Women
Since 2009, HAUKARI e.V. has been supporting a group of Anfal surviving women in Rizgary who are committed to a self-designed and self-managed Anfal memorial.
The ‘Memorial Forum for Anfal Surviving Women’ is intended to represent their specific experience as women during and after Anfal, their suffering as well as their strengths, and to be a place of mourning, remembrance of the victims and social exchange. The remembrance forum is intended to open up spaces for dialogue with other social groups in Kurdistan and throughout Iraq.
As part of the project, Anfal surviving women worked with local and international consultants, artists and architects to develop design concepts for the remembrance forum, organised social and political support in the Kurdish Region of Iraq through events, exhibitions and lobby talks, visited memorials to the victims of the Holocaust in Germany and exchanged ideas with survivors of genocidal violence in Rwanda and Bosnia. They won a building site in the heart of the city from the Rizgary city council and a commitment from the Kurdish Regional Government to realise the construction of the memorial forum. The memorial forum is to be built according to a design by the German-Mexican architects Zeller & Moye.
With the initiative for the Forum of Remembrance, Anfal surviving women are taking a step out of the long state of waiting and towards jointly dealing with their experiences of violence and loss and strengthening their collective structures of solidarity. They are countering the prevailing discourse in Kurdistan and Iraq about Anfal women as passive victims and symbols of suffering with their own memories, narratives and strengths and are actively engaging in the debate about dealing with the past and the public shaping of memory.
Current State
Due to the renewed conflict situation and the ongoing financial crisis in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq since 2014, the start of construction has been delayed. Anfal surviving women from Rizgari continue to campaign for the remembrance forum. HAUKARI e.V. is supporting them in this process, creating spaces for discussion and exchange as well as decentralised commemorative actions. In 2022, a previously vacant building in the immediate vicinity of the construction site was renovated. It will now be used as a social space for Anfal survivors and a workshop for the development of exhibitions and archives for the future remembrance forum. The aim is to ‘anticipate’ parts of the Forum of Remembrance and increase the pressure on the Kurdistan Regional Government to realise the Forum.
For more information on the history and design of the Forum of Remembrance, click here. More details on the Anfal Documentation Centre Maryam can be found on our Anfal Forum of Remembrance project page.
Supporters and Partners
The memorial forum is to be built by the Kurdish Regional Government in close cooperation with the Ministry of Martyrs and Anfal. HAUKARI e.V. received funding from the Federal Foreign Office of Germany to support the process from 2009 to 2016 and is seeking further funding. Currently, activities are financed by donations.