Selective silence: the United Nations and the Anfal campaign

This article conceptualises selective silence as an institutional outcome through which the United Nations avoids recognising genocide when such recognition would conflict with dominant power interests. The article uses the Anfal campaign against the Kurds in Iraq as a critical case to argue that UN non-recognition was the result of four recurring institutional mechanisms: agenda prioritisation, reluctance to investigate, substitution of humanitarian action for security measures, and avoidance of legal declarations that could trigger enforcement obligations. As such, the article disputes commonly accepted explanations for the UN’s non-intervention during the Anfal campaign, which claim that non-intervention was due to insufficient information, normative absence, or isolated moral failure. The analysis demonstrates how early exclusion of Anfal from actionable atrocity categories produced a path-dependent legacy of non-recognition that persisted beyond the Cold War and survived subsequent normative reforms, including the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). By locating failure at the level of recognition rather than response, the article contributes to critical debates on global governance, institutional accountability, and the structural limits of humanitarian norms in a power-stratified international system.