Nick Cohen explains to the Kurds. posted by Richard Seymour

There's nothing especially noteworthy in this, but I want to mention a couple of things about it anyway. Cohen is talking about the Kurds - the only group of Iraqis whom he is willing to treat totally uncritically and with complete trusting, wide-eyed innocence. This is to say, he patronisingly eulogises them at every step, slavers, drools over the very political clique that many Kurds are becoming disaffected with. Credulity is not really an innocent affair, of course - Cohen is interested in the Kurdish leadership because people like Barham Saleh supported the US invasion and, coming from the leadership of a previously oppressed group, lend his own ranting a moral weight and purpose they would otherwise lack. Saleh, for Cohen, is a native informant, as is the ambassador whose backside he can't get enough of in the article.

The other thing he is talking about is a documentary about an alleged massacre that preceded the Anfal campaign, which was a particularly brutal campaign of 'Arabisation' launched on Kurdish areas, particularly involving the destruction of villages in a thirty-mile strip along the border with Iran, where Kurdish and Iranian forces had cooperated. This was not new, of course - the Kurdish leadership had sought and utilised Iranian assistance before, but I suppose what was new was that the Baath seriously lost control of many areas of Iraqi Kurdistan. Since one of the imperatives of the Ba'athist state was the preservation of the unity of Iraq (under its control of course), the government would by turns coopt and annihilate actual and perceived forces of disunity. And since its mad war on Iran had been seriously endangered by Kurdish insurgency, the state siezed the opportunity to crash down hard on the Kurdish population, reportedly killing tens of thousands of people. You might think this detail is a little pedantic - most people are aware that the Ba'athist brutally crushed the Kurds and could guess at why (although in fact I am certain that the usual explanation would be that Saddam himself was tyrannical, bloodthirsty, bigoted, mad - all of which is true, but none of which explains). Well this documentary is obviously discussing an important part of the story of Iraq in recent decades, but Cohen is only interested in it because it supposedly shames antiwar lefties. Hence, Cohen berates Channel Four for not having shown it, and wonders whether liberals and peaceniks and hippies and bedwetters will be interested in absorbing information about crimes not committed by George W Bush. He 'explains' to 'the Kurds' (ie to the select circles he occasionally gets to move in) that the reason it didn't get shown isn't because of a liberal conspiracy, but because television executives aren't interested in disseminating serious information, are concerned only with advertising revenue. In other words, he 'explains' what happens to be perfectly obvious and commonplace (liberal columnists often seem to think that these views about dreadful television and poor news coverage are their exclusive preserve, are breaking some terrible silence, are actually not widely understood truisms). If he wanted to 'explain' properly, he might have said that the spots that might be available are all used up resuscitating Empire with the obnoxious Niall Ferguson.

There is one small thing, though. The documentary is by an absolute numbskull named Gwynne Roberts, whom Cohen refers to as a "veteran reporter". He is in fact either a serial liar or blunderer, who confidently informed the world prior to the invasion of Iraq that Saddam had tested an A-bomb under Lake Rezazza (bogus), and that Iraq trained Al Qaeda fighters in chemical weapons in 1997. He was partial, prior to the invasion, to using 'defectors' who would provide lurid but fraudulent claims that would satisfactorily terrify domestic audiences. Roberts also attempted to scarify the world about Saddam's nukes back in 1991, alleging the existence of a uranium mine which later transformed itself into a secret nuclear reactor - the claim originated from Kurdish resistance forces, but neither mine nor reactor turned up. Roberts' penchant for drama and 'colour' (lots of emotive language and imagery) in place of detail, and for arresting claims that are often poorly sourced, marks him out as a hoaxter on a level with Con Coughlin. I doubt Channel Four care about that, but it would be a good reason to have a think before broadcasting anything of his.

The matter of the documentary is a set of claims about the alleged massacre of up to 8,000 members of the Barzani tribe, who were 'disappeared' in 1983. Eyewitness testimony emerged in 1985 to suggest that about 4,000 of them had been executed. It was first reported in the British press in 1986. The documentary follows Dr Mohammed Ihsan, a 'human rights' minister in Barzani's little fiefdom (where criticism of the leader gets you thirty years in prison), formerly of Allawi's National Accord, as he tries to bribe various sources into giving him documents or information proving the massacre, pointing to mass graves. It would be a fairly brief documentary were it not padded out with various asides and bits of incidental dialogue: basically, Roberts finds some people who lost family members, some eyewitnesses and they end up in Bussia where a document says that some Barzanis were executed. Repeated digging locates nothing - until five months later some informers apparently discover three mass graves only a few hundred feet from where Ihsan's crew had been digging, and allegedly 500 bodies are exhumed. I don't doubt that Saddam could easily have done this (he did much worse), but if you're bribing people for information, they'll 'discover' almost anything for you.

In what sense this rather thin documentary actually 'confronts' audience prejudices as Cohen claims, I cannot detect. Few would be surprised by instances of brutality by the Baath regime. Fewer still would be amazed by the situations in which those featured in the documentary find themselves -there are some driving scenes that look like Hollywood car chases, and there is a sequence involving Roberts shouting about a suicide attack that has happened around the corner, whose sole value appears to be to illustrate that he is taking some risks as a reporter. Roberts is hardly the shrinking violet that Cohen makes him out to be. There might be a bit of mild amazement when Roberts asks Ihsan if it wouldn't be better to destroy the documents he is amassing - because that's what you do with historical evidence that is supposed to support a case you are making. There are no "other points of view" in the film, as Cohen claims. The 'facts' could easily be "triple-checked", whatever that means, but that is because there really aren't that many to be getting on with.

If Cohen wants to 'explain' anything to the Kurds, he should say that C4 will be happy to show this flimsy documentary by this unreliable reporter the second 'The War of the World' is finished, because standards are really that low. He ought to say that any matter that doesn't actually deal with current, daily crimes being committed by the empire that Channel Four is providing the PR for, is more than welcome.