Britain, Iraq, and the Politics of Genocide: The 1963 Ba’ath Government Campaign Against the Kurds

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Kurds of Iraq were the victims of a claimed genocide during the rule of the Ba’ath regime in Iraq in 1963. The Iraqi Ba’ath Party first came to power in February of 1963 and was ousted in November of that year; between June and October, it conducted military offensives against the Kurdish minority in Iraq in the name of destroying the Kurdish autonomy movement, then spearheaded by the nationalist Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP). No estimated numbers exist on how many people were killed in that period, but an array of international and other reports, presented in this research, concurrently stated that the Iraqi government’s mass violence against the Kurds amounted to genocide. These included private recognition by the relevant UK diplomats and officials. This article examines the foreign policy of the UK in relation to that reported genocide. It explores how the Cold War, regional interests, and a long-held aversion to Kurdish desires for self-rule led Britain not only to overlook the mass violence perpetrated by the Ba’ath government against Iraq’s Kurdish minority in 1963 but also to support the regime. This policy was adopted in the face of credible information available to British officials reporting the Iraqi actions as a genocide. Britain continued to take the public position that the Kurdish issue in Iraq was an internal Iraqi matter while simultaneously seeking to foster good relations with the Ba’ath government by providing it with arms and diplomatic protection and seeking to undermine the Kurdish autonomy movement. Thus, a case study in the politics of genocide and how politics determines the response to these is investigated.