I once went to the village of Koreme in Iraqi Kurdistan and walked along a dirt road past a little brick school and a makeshift mosque to a dusty field of almond trees and high grass where all the males of the village — age 13 to 43 — had been taken in 1988 and told to squat, side by side. Iraqi soldiers then opened fire, and 27 Kurdish men and boys were killed. I spoke to one of the few survivors, who had hidden behind a tree with a bullet through his knee while his brother, nephew and neighbors lay dying in the dirt.
That massacre was part of the Anfal campaign, Saddam Hussein’s war against the Kurds, in which more than 50,000 people were killed. During my trip I was told, bitterly and not for the first or last time, that the West had failed to come to the defense of those who needed it. “Where were you?” one man asked.
I heard something similar from families taking shelter in a basement parking garage in southern Lebanon as bombs fell on the streets above. “Doesn’t President Clinton care what is happening here?”
