The Aftermath of the Halabja Genocide through its Photographs: Post-Memory and Commemoration

• Název práce v češtině: Následky genocidy v Halabdže ve fotografiích: post-paměť a vzpomínání
• Název v anglickém jazyce: The Aftermath of the Halabja Genocide through its Photographs: Post-Memory and Commemoration
• Klíčová slova: Halabdža, Kurdové, Kurdistán, genocida, paměťová studia, postpaměť, fotografická studie
• Klíčová slova anglicky: photography, collective memory, social media, witnessing through visuals
• Akademický rok vypsání: 2022/2023
• Typ práce: diplomová práce
• Jazyk práce: angličtina
• Ústav: Katedra sociologie (23-KS)
• Vedoucí / školitel: doc. Maria Alina Asavei, D.Phil.
• Řešitel: skrytý - zadáno vedoucím/školitelem
• Datum přihlášení: 24.02.2023
• Datum zadání: 24.02.2023
• Datum a čas obhajoby: 27.06.2024 10:00
• Místo konání obhajoby: Areál Jinonice, B228, 228, seminární místnost ISS
• Datum odevzdání elektronické podoby: 30.04.2024
• Oponenti: Mgr. Sandra Lábová, Ph.D.

Zásady pro vypracování

I would like to study the impact of the photographs of the Halabja chemical attack on the memory of the Kurds and its impact on their current content shared on the day of the attack remembrance. The methodological approach that suits best my selected visual data is multimodal analysis, combining classical semiotics and critical visual analysis. In my exploration, the context and content of the visual data will be analyzed in tandem.

Seznam odborné literatury

1. Away From Anfal: Catastrophe in Halabja on 16 March 1988. kurdistanmemoryprogramme.com/story-of-anfal.
2. Bengio, Ofra. Kurdish Awakening: Nation Building in a Fragmented Homeland. The University of Texas Press, 2015.
3. Bozarslan, Hamit, et al. The Cambridge History of the Kurds. Cambridge UP, 2021.
4. Glaw, Xanthe, et al. “Visual Methodologies in Qualitative Research.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods, vol. 16, no. 1, SAGE Publishing, Dec. 2017, p. 160940691774821. https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406917748215.
5. Greer, Stuart, et al. “Halabja Gas-Attack Survivors Fight for Lives, Justice 30 Years On.” RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty, 15 Mar. 2018, www.rferl.org/a/halabja-gas-attack-survivors-fight-for-lives-and-justice/29098998.html.
6. Marzolph, Ulrich, and Philip Kreyenbroek. Oral Literature of Iranian Languages: Kurdish, Pashto, Balochi, Ossetic, Persian and Tajik: Companion Volume II: History of Persian Literature a, Vol XVIII. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010.
7. Memory Studies, a Brief Concept paper-White Rose Research. eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/117289.
8. Meyers, Oren, et al. On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
9. Murphy, Caryle. “SITE OF IRAQI GAS ATTACK IS BEING REBUILT.” Washington Post, 16 Nov. 1992, www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1992/11/16/site-of-Iraqi-gas-attack-is-being-rebuilt/f414d31a-d024-4405-8b10-8b462f28c7c.
10. Niemeyer, Katharina. Media and Nostalgia: Yearning for the Past, Present and Future. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
11. Norman, Wilbert Reuben. “Photography as a Research Tool.” Visual Anthropology, Taylor and Francis, Jan. 1991, https://doi.org/10.1080/08949468.1991.9966560.
12. Stansfield, Gareth, and Mohammed Shareef. The Kurdish Question Revisited. Oxford UP, 2017.
13. Tejel, Jordi, et al. Writing the Modern History of Iraq: Historiographical and Political Challenges. World Scientific, 2012.
14. Wang, Qi. “On The Cultural Constitution of Collective Memory.” Memory, vol. 16, no. 3, Taylor and Francis, Mar. 2008, pp. 305–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658210701801467.
15. Watts, Nicole F. “The Role of Symbolic Capital in Protest: State-Society Relations and the Destruction of the Halabja Martyrs Monument in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Duke UP, Jan. 2012, https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-1545327.
16. Zelizer, Barbie. “Reading the Past Against the Grain: The Shape of Memory Studies.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, vol. 12, no. 2, Routledge, Jan. 1995, eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ506379.
17. Zelizer, Barbie, and Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt. “Journalism’s Memory Work.” Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, Palgrave Macmillan, Jan. 2014, pp. 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137263940_1.

Předběžná náplň práce

Abstract: This research investigates the post-memory of the Halabja Genocide that occurred on March 16, 1988. Through analyzing photographs of the Halabja genocide the work looks into the importance of visual documents in shaping the post-memory of this genocide. We focus on the post-memory of the affiliative kind, as these photographs have become a part of Kurdish identity through poetry, artwork, and cinema. Semiotic analysis is the main method and photo thematic analysis is employed as a submethod in analyzing the photographs of the Halabja chemical attack.

Abstrakt: Tento výzkum se zabývá postpamětí genocidy v Halabdže, ke které došlo 16. března 1988. Prostřednictvím analýzy fotografií z genocidy v Halabdže se práce zabývá významem vizuálních dokumentů při utváření postpaměti na této genocidy. Zaměřujeme se na postpaměť afilačního typu, neboť tyto fotografie se staly součástí kurdské identity prostřednictvím poezie, výtvarných děl a kinematografie. Sémiotická analýza a fototematická analýza jsou hlavními metodami použitými při analýze fotografií z chemického útoku v Halabdže

Předběžná náplň práce v anglickém jazyce

There is a chain of massacres and mass killing in the history of Kurdish people all around the four parts of divided Kurdistan, among Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. Here I want to work on the Halabja Massacre that happened in recent history, on March 16, 1988, under Baath’s regime governed by Saddam Hussain in Iraq. As a part of the Anfal campaign, “The Iraqi‒Iranian war ended with the Iraqi army’s chemical attack against the town of Halabja on 16 March 1988, in which 5,000 Kurds were killed,” (Stansfield and Shareef) Halabja, a Kurdish inhabitant city in northern Iraq, left with the deaths of an estimated 5000 civilians and injured more than 10.000.
The difference between this massacre and the other against the Kurds is that for the Halabja Massacre of 1988, there are photographs reported by international and local media outlets. This means there are visual clues, because, for the most part, Kurdish archives vanished especially due to the massacres and unawareness of their importance. However, this was not the case in the Halabja toxic chemical attack. This time, Kurds have a visual memory of the event, different from the nation’s usual mnemonic practice of oral tradition (Marzolph and Kreyenbroek), which does not consider visual data.
While the tragedy was recorded visually, the effort did not go in vain, and the aftermath paved the way for Kurds to demand their autonomy with a stronger voice and receive responses. As Watts posits “Kurdish and US officials used the memory of the horror of Halabja to help justify the overthrow of the Baath regime in Baghdad in 2003 and 2004,” (Watts). Meanwhile, “just as important as this external positioning was the way Halabja-as-martyr became a key component of the KRG’s internal efforts to reconstruct the idea of the Kurdish nation and bind its Kurdish subjects together after decades of internal fighting.” (Watts) That is how the Kurdistan autonomous region was formed “the invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the US and British forces and the chain of developments it triggered had a major impact on the fortunes of the Kurds of Iraq.”
This indicates that the Halabja massacre had a significant role in shaping the Kurdish fate. My research aim is to unpack the role played by collective memory in uniting the nation in forming a community nested on the grounds of the tragedy they shared. The social practices of collective remembering allow the members of a community to preserve a conception of their past” (Wang). Moreover, the 1988 chemical attacks on Halabja strengthened the collective memory and made it permanently engraved in Kurdish identity, supporting the case for Kurdish statehood.
According to Halbwachs, our collective memory is the active past that determines our present selves. In my dissertation, I want to go back and explore those active recollections of the past to further understand the present and what formed the current collective memory. To be able to do that, “one of the first scholarly endeavours to look at memory and the news was Lang and Lang’s 1989 consideration of how the public opinion process is shaped by past events, and it was indicative of a key entry point for thinking about journalism and memory.” (Zelizer and Tenenboim-Weinblatt). With these in mind, in this research, I want to explore how the photographs of the massacre were involved in making an impact and creating collective memory of the tragedy. How the collective memory of the Kurds evolved around them, through collecting and analyzing the photos which circulated shortly after the news of the massacre came out, one year after the occurrence, and how it is remembered now, especially among the Kurds using social media on the day of its remembrance at the 16th of March.

I plan to argue that in the Halabja case, photographs greatly changed the course of the tragedy and forced it to be seen and recognized.