Polish experts from Auschwitz to provide documentation training in Kurdistan

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — To further efforts in recording the violence that has occurred in the past in the Kurdistan Region, a team of Polish scientists will come to Chamchamal, Halabja, and Barzan to provide training to their Kurdish counterparts in the areas of artifact documentation and preservation, Kurdish officials announced on Thursday.

The agreement was announced on Thursday after the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) Minister of Ministry of Martyrs and Anfal Affairs Mahmood Salih Hama and the Representative to Poland Ziyad Raoof met with experts from the state museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the location of the former Nazi death camp near what is now Oswiecim, Poland, according to a statement from the representation. 

"They will be trained on how to a document and preserve objects and belongings discovered where mass graves are found. Also, they'll receive training on communication skills, to explain to visitors these crimes using the necessary evidence in a clear way,” Berivan Hamdi, the KRG’s Director General in the martyrs ministry, told Rudaw English.

The director specified that initially a team of five experts from Poland will assist workers at the monuments in Chamchamal, Halabja, and Barzan through training this spring.

"When the Polish team comes over to the Kurdistan Region, they along with the Kurdish team here will try to find out any needs to further these cases. Then they will take the requests back to Poland,” Hamdi said.

More than 1.1 million people died in the four-and-a-half years Auschwitz operated, including 1 million Jewish men, women and children.

The statement from the KRG representation in Poland specified that the goal is to “support scientists in Kurdistan Region who archive, preserve and protect evidences of the Anfal crime.”

In Al-Anfal operations, thousands of towns and villages were destroyed and more than 182,000 Kurdish civilians were killed and many others have been missing since during the Baathist campaign between 1986 and 1989.

The March 16, 1988, use of chemical weapons by Saddam Hussein's regime in Halabja killed 5,000 people, including many women and children, another 10,000 were injured and many continue to suffer lingering effects from the gas attacks.

To date the Anfal campaign has not been recognized by Canada, the US and the UN as genocide. Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom and South Korea have, in recent years, voted to recognize the campaign as a genocide.

Additionally, the training could benefit research into the August 2014 Yezidi massacres at Mount Shingal.

"The training will also be applied to Shingal,” Hamdi said. “They will also use the training to develop the case of the Shingal genocide in terms of preservation of evidence.”

Getting international recognition of the atrocities faced by people in Kurdish areas has been slow-going and officials lack the resources and expertise to record and document the evidence found.

Four experts from the Iraq Program of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) provided training to Kurdish investigators in May 2016 on everything from unearthing mass graves to protecting and preparing evidence for international presentation.