The British government is reluctant to recognize that Saddam Hussein's regime committed genocide against the Kurds of Iraq, because it is 'not for governments to decide'. The UN Genocide Convention defines genocide as 'any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such' - with 'killing members of the group' as the first such act specified. One might imagine a number of members of the given group so small as to make the term 'genocide' obviously inapplicable to their deaths by violence; but this can't be relevant to the case of the Iraqi Kurds. A Human Rights Watch report of 1993...
... details the systematic and deliberate murder of at least 50,000 and possibly as many as 100,000 Kurds. The killings occurred between February and September 1988. "Genocide in Iraq" shows that the Kurdish victims were targeted on the basis of their ethnicity. [My emphasis - NG.]
And you can find higher estimates of the death toll than that. The position of the British government is pusillanimous. Naturally, a government is not a judicial body such as can deliver a legally authoritative verdict. But that is no reason for governments not to declare a view where there is abundant evidence for it.
