ANKARA (AFP) -- Ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein sought Turkey's cooperation in a deadly campaign against the Iraqi Kurds in the 1980s, but was flatly rejected, a retired Turkish ambassador has said.

Nuzhet Kandemir, a special representative for relations with Iraq at the time, told the Milliyet daily that the proposal was made by then vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan when he met him in Baghdad ahead of the 1988 Anfal campaign against the Kurds.

"We will drive the Kurds to the north. Then you will press them there and we can finish this problem fundamentally," Kandemir quoted Ramadan as saying Saturday. Heeding the orders of then Turkish prime minister Turgut Ozal, Kandemir said he responded: "We definitely advise you against such a move... Turkey will in no way act together with you. It will stand against you and condemn you." Kandemir was commenting on a memo by an Iraqi commander from the Anfal campaign, presented Thursday to a court trying Saddam Hussein, ordering Iraqi officers "to cooperate with the Turkish side, according to the cooperation protocol with them to chase all the refugees."

It was presented by prosecutors seeking to prove that the former strongman ordered the slaughter of 182,000 Kurds in what they describe as genocide.

No detail was given of the alleged agreement between Turkey and Iraq.

Kandemir said he believed the Iraqi Kurds, whose relations with Ankara have markedly deteriorated since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, were behind the apparent accusation against Turkey.

"These are documents produced deliberately to turn the international public opinion against Turkey," he told Milliyet.

Kandemir suggested the memo might be referring to a security accord signed between Ankara and Baghdad in the early 1980s allowing them to cross each other's borders in hot pursuit of rebels.

The deal served as a ground for Turkish incursions into northern Iraq to pursue the Kurdistan Workers' Party, a Turkish Kurd separatist group which has traditionally found save haven in the area.

"The Iraqi commander might have expressed an expectation that the Turks will help them (under the accord), but that protocol was limited to struggle against terrorism," Kandemir said.

Ankara has long opposed the idea of an independent Kurdish homeland in northern Iraq, worried that it would fuel separatism among its own restive Kurdish minority in adjoining southeast Turkey.

Despite misgivings, Ankara let some 500,000 Iraqi Kurds, fleeing an Iraqi military crackdown on a Kurdish rebellion in the wake of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, to take refuge in Turkey.

It also allowed U.S. and British warplanes to use a southern Turkish base between 1991 and 2003 to enforce a "no-fly" zone over northern Iraq to protect the Kurds.