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Visible Scars 20 Years After Chemical Attacks
By: Dr. N. Hawramany Mar 21, 2008 16th March 2008 marks the 20th anniversary of Saddam Hussein’s massacre of an estimated 5,000 Kurds in the Iraqi Kurdistan's towns of Halabja and Khurmal .using a lethal air-delivered mixture of mustard gas and nerve agent, killed or mai med virtually every man, woman, and child in the town (5000 deaths and at least 10000 injured or incapacitated). The attacks -- or what the Kurds, many human rights groups, Iraqi Special Tribunal and a Dutch court have labeled genocide -- took place during the Iran-Iraq war, when the region was liberated from Iraqi army control and fell under the control of Kurdish Peshmerga fighters.Over a period of four days, in mid March 1988, Iraqi warplanes dropped bombs on the town and the surrounding area. The chemical attack on Halabja was the precursor of even more horrific campaign of mass murder that Saddam named Al Anfal — “the Spoils of War,” from a passage in the Koran. It was the high-water mark of his regime’s barbarity against the Kurds. The Anfal campaign, carefully planned by Saddam's cousin Ali Hassan Al-Majeed ( known since then as Chemical Ali) and executed meticulously by Iraqi army, resulted in the deaths of over 182,000 Kurds — women and children included, and in fact specifically targeted. Entire regions of Kurdistan were depopulated, and more than 4500 Kurdish villages disappeared from the map of Iraq. Those two events and the muted response from international community dealt a massive blow to the moral of Kurdish people who felt abandoned from entire world, hundreds of thousands more Kurds fled in terror to become refugees within the borders of their historical enemies, Iran and Turkey. This ethnic cleansing of Kurds, were only some steps in the implementation of the Saddam government's sinister master plan of the so-calle d “Arabization”. The Kurds were predominant in the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and its environs as well as around Mosul and Diala ( Sheikhan, Shangal, Makhmour, Khanaguin) were deported in tens of thousands to southern deserts of Iraq and Arabs were brought from the other parts of Iraq to poulate those Kurdish cities. It`s naive to think that Saddam was solely responsible for those atrocicities. The entire Iraqi leadership, as well as tens of thousands of Iraqi army personnel and security forces as well as Kurdish collaborators (Jash), were culpable in these sickening crimes against humanity that continued until Saddam was removed from power in April 2003 by coalition forces. At the time of those genocides, the world took no direct action to stop the genocide, the USA confused the matters more when it initially declared that Iranian forces used Chemical weapons and later again washed out the Iraqi responsibility by sponsoring a security council resolution accusing both Iraq and Iran for using chemical weapons in the war without specifically mentioning Halabja !!. The United States of America , saw Iran as the greater regional threat and supported Iraq in the Iraq-Iran war 1980-1988, during which time those heinous genocides where perpetrated, Saddam saw this support ( with active European blessing and support) as a green light to develop nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and to invade Kuwait a few years later. The lesson is clear — tolerating genocides anywhere threatens everyone everywhere. From Ottoman Turkey to Nazi Germany to Khmer rouge Kampochia to Ruanda, to Baath`s Iraq, to Darfur, history has taught us that sooner or later we will suffer the consequences o f such cowardly, passive and immoral complacency to such evil. Given the brutal fact that the Kurds — an ancient Mesopotamian non-Arab people speaking own language — have suffered cruel and prolonged persecution at the hands of the Arab majority, the Iraqi government owes them the reversal of all the ill effects of decades of Genocide and ethnic cleansing including abiding by the constitutional resolution of the contentious Kirkuk issue as it's stipulated in article 140 of Iraqi constitution. The Kurds simply cannot trust a central Iraqi government not
to resort to similar tactics in the future. But they find themselves hemmed in
by neighbours - Turkey, Iran and Syria - that are hostile to their ambitions and
have the power to curb these. 16 March is also the second anniversary of the destruction of the Halabja monument by the angry mobs from townspeople themselves, many of them surviving relatives. They were enraged by the habit of the Kurdistan Regional Government to shepherd foreign dignitaries on a tour of the town's mass graves and memorials, while doing little to rehabilitate the town itself and its people, many of whom complain of debilitating delayed effects of mustard-gas. The townsfolk say promises of more development have been made and are still being made by officials, but nothing has come of them. They claimed the regional government had not provided enough aid or resources, or even had siphoned off funds bound for Halabjah. The angry mobs torched this regional government monument to Halabjah's victims in 2006. Officials accused fundamentalist Kurdish islamist movements to be behind the riots aiming at destabilising the KRG, but admit that reconstruction has been limited, given the extent of the damage to Halabja itself and its surrounding hamlets. There has been some limited small scale international aid relief to Halabjah, the role of United Nations is conspicuously lacking. People of Halabja are still skeptical about repeated verbal promises of aid and reconstruction from Kurdish officials. In January 2008, the Kurdistan Regional Government organized its first major conference commemorating the Anfal genocide attended by some international experts; Halabja attacks were not thoroughly discussed. Yet Halabja and the Anfal genocides are inextricably linked, it's sinister aims were to deliver a final and deadly blow to Kurdish national aspirations within Iraq and probably the surrounding countries too ( Turkey was a staunch supporter of Saddam's efforts then). The Anfal was ruled to constitute genocide by a Dutch court that in 2006 convicted a businessman who had provided the Iraqi regime with the chemical precursors it needed to manufacture lethal agents). The Iraqi Special Tribunal in 2007convicted to death, Chemical Ali, the mastermind of Anfal operations, and two senior military officers who executed the operations, including previous defence minister and intelligence chief to death for crimes against humanity during Anfal genocide campaigns. Halabja is still having painful scars 20 years on, people feel that they were let down by the international community, Iraqi and Kurdish authorities and rightly demand a firm commitment by International, Iraqi and Kurdistan circles to finally lend a helping hand to this martyred city.
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