Preparations underway for conf. on mass graves in Jan.

ARBIL / IraqiNews.com: A conference on mass graves to be held in the Kurdish city of Arbil on January 9-11, 2011 has set the objectives of the event on Thursday in a bid to secure international recognition of a “genocide and ethnic cleansing” against Kurds in the 1980s, according to the preparatory committee. “The 3rd conference is working on having a law on mass graves amended and consider what has happened in the Iraqi Kurdistan region as a genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Kurds,” Khalid al-Shami, the event’s official spokesman, said during a press conference held at the headquarters of the Ministry of Martyrs & Anfal Affairs of the Kurdistan Region Government Kurdistan RegionG). “The two previous conferences had been held in London in 2006 under the aegis of New Iraq Center for Information & Studies and the holy Shiite city of Najaf (160 km) southwest of Baghdad, in 2008,” Shami said. Anfal was an anti-Kurdish campaign led by the former regime between 1986 and 1989 and involved a series of military campaigns against the Kurdish Peshmerga fighters as well as the mostly Kurdish civilian population of southern Kurdistan. Independent sources estimate there were 50,000 to more than 100,000 deaths in the campaign, in which chemical weapons were used, while Kurds claim about 182,000 people were killed. AmR (S) 1