Foreign Correspondence

[Amaunet]

Kurds seek justice for '88 gassing

History:

March 28, 1988 -- Uses chemical weapons against Kurdish town of Halabja, killing estimated 5,000 civilians.

[From Iraq's first use of chemical weapons in 1983, the U.S. took a very restrained view. When the evidence of Iraqi use of these weapons could no longer be denied, the U.S. issued a mild condemnation, but made clear that this would have no effect on commercial or diplomatic relations between the United States and Iraq. Iran asked the Security Council to condemn Iraq's chemical weapons use, but the U.S. delegate to the U.N. was instructed to try to prevent a resolution from coming to a vote, or else to abstain. An Iraqi official told the U.S. that Iraq strongly preferred a Security Council presidential statement to a resolution and did not want any specific country identified as responsible for chemical weapons use. On March 30, 1984, the Security Council issued a presidential statement condemning the use of chemical weapons, without naming Iraq as the offending party. (Battle.)

At the same time that the U.S. government had knowledge of that the Iraqi military was using chemical weapons, it was providing intelligence and planning assistance to the Iraqi armed forces. (Patrick Tyler, "Officers Say U.S. Aided Iraq In War Despite Use Of Gas," New York Times, Aug. 18, 2002, p. 1.)

When Iraq used chemical weapons in March 1988 against Halabja, there was no condemnation from Washington. (Dilip Hiro, " which at least 50,000 and possibly 100,000," The Observer, September 1, 2002, p. 17.) "In September 1988, the House of Representatives voted 388 to 16 in favor of economic sanctions against Iraq, but the White House succeeded in having the Senate water down the proposal. In exchange for Export-Import Bank credits, Iraq merely had to promise not to use chemical weapons again, with agricultural credits exempted even from this limited requirement." (Rubin, "The United States and Iraq: From Appeasement to War," p. 261.)]



Kurds seek justice for '88 gassing

Posted on Fri, Jun. 25, 2004

People in Halabja would like to host the trial of 'Chemical Ali,' the man many say gave the order to gas the Kurdish town 16 years ago.

BY MARK McDONALD

Knight Ridder News Service


HALABJA, Iraq - Nobody's sure what kind of nerve gas was in that first bomb, the one that flattened the House of Charity mosque. It collapsed the dome and toppled the minaret, and within minutes hundreds of townspeople were twitching and blistering to death in the dust of Mokhtar Street.

About 5,000 people -- more than half of them children -- died in Halabja on that warm Wednesday morning on March 16, 1988. On that day, Saddam Hussein's air force was nothing if not thorough.

The terrible clouds of sarin, cyanide and mustard gas caught up with 15,000 other Halabja residents, blistering their skin and lungs, unwiring their nervous systems or forever clouding their minds. Even today, this little Kurdish hill town is full of the slow, the blind, the lame and the halt.

The chemical attack on Halabja was a principal reason cited by the U.S. administration for going to war in Iraq.

There is also widespread sentiment for sleepy little Halabja, a farming town in northeastern Iraq, to host the war-crimes trial of Ali Hassan al Majid. The former general, a cousin of Hussein's, is widely believed to have ordered the attack on Halabja, earning himself the nickname ``Chemical Ali.'

ALLEGED KEY MAN

Majid is accused of helping orchestrate the Anfal campaign of terrorism that killed an estimated 132,000 people in northern Iraq in 1988, almost all of them Kurds and Turkmens. Majid, who was captured last August, was the king of spades in the coalition's deck of cards of most-wanted Iraqis.

Halabja, with a population of 53,000, is too small and remote to handle a full-blown trial for Hussein. But with some preparations, local officials think it could hold the Chemical Ali trial. They've petitioned the Iraqi government to be the venue.

The people along Mokhtar Street -- the shopkeepers, the idlers, the workmen, the fruit-cart vendors -- remember the day quite clearly.

The Iran-Iraq war was under way, and about 1,400 Iranian troops had taken over Halabja three days earlier. It was an easy march for them across the border, just eight miles away. Large numbers of pro-Iranian guerrilla fighters -- the renowned Kurdish peshmerga -- also had taken shelter in the town.

All this movement had put Halabja in harm's way.

People grew nervous when some low-flying Iraqi airplanes began to circle the town slowly around 10 a.m. They were puzzled when crewmen in the planes began tossing out scraps of white paper.

'They were gauging the wind,' said Muhammad Amin Hassan, 54, who's still working the same job, as the security guard at the primary school. ``A little later, the first bomb went directly into the mosque.

``People were dying all up and down the street. It was like they had suddenly fallen asleep. Cows and dogs died. All the hens, too.'

LIKE A HEAVY FOG

More bombs followed, some of them detonating in great bursts in midair, others exploding on impact. The gases hugged the ground like a heavy fog and seeped into wells, basements and bomb shelters.

Some of the planes dumped chemicals directly from their cargo doors, and Hassan remembered they looked 'quite beautiful' as they fell to earth.

``It was like snow. But it was blue. Blue snow. When it hit your clothes it burned right through them. It boiled your skin. It ate your flesh.'

Hassan and his wife gathered their eight children and began running into the foothills of the Shenearwea mountains on the Iranian border.

'I was blinded; my eyes were burning,' Hassan said. ``We were all holding hands. The 10 of us were strung together in a chain. Holding hands, that's how we ran up the mountain.'

As he ran, he said, he kept tripping over dead villagers who had dropped in their tracks, felled by the gas.

MEDICAL PROBLEMS

Along with many other Halabja residents, Hassan and his family made it to Iran, where they received medical aid, food and shelter. They stayed about two months, then warily went back home.

Today, Hassan can make out only shapes and colors, and the pupil of his right eye is clotted and gray. His family has had all sorts of medical problems, which they attribute to the gassing, but Hassan is saddest about his son, Ohmed, who was a third-grader at the time.

'The chemicals disturbed him very much,' the father said, his milky eyes brimming with tears. ``He has lost all his senses.'



http://www.miami.com/


Reference:

History
From 1973-75, the United States, Iran, and Israel supported a Kurdish insurgency in Iraq. Documents examined by the U.S. House Select Committee on Intelligence "clearly show that the President, Dr. Kissinger and the [Shah] hoped that our clients [the Kurds] would not prevail. They preferred instead that the insurgents simply continue a level of hostilities sufficient to sap [Iraqi] resourcesY. This policy was not imparted to our clients, who were encouraged to continue fighting. Even in the context of covert action, ours was a cynical enterprise." Then, in 1975, the Shah and Saddam Hussein of Iraq signed an agreement giving Iran territorial concessions in return for Iran's closing its border to Kurdish guerrillas. Teheran and Washington promptly cut off their aid to the Kurds and, while Iraq massacred the rebels, the United States refused them asylum. Kissinger justified this U.S. policy in closed testimony: "covert action should not be confused with missionary work." (U.S. House of Representatives, Select Committee on Intelligence, 19 Jan. 1976 [Pike Report] in Village Voice, 16 Feb. 1976, pp. 85, 87n465, 88n471. The Pike Report attributes the last quote only to a "senior official"; William Safire, Safire's Washington, New York: Times Books, 1980, p. 333, identifies the official as Kissinger.)]

March 28, 1988 -- Uses chemical weapons against Kurdish town of Halabja, killing estimated 5,000 civilians.

[From Iraq's first use of chemical weapons in 1983, the U.S. took a very restrained view. When the evidence of Iraqi use of these weapons could no longer be denied, the U.S. issued a mild condemnation, but made clear that this would have no effect on commercial or diplomatic relations between the United States and Iraq. Iran asked the Security Council to condemn Iraq's chemical weapons use, but the U.S. delegate to the U.N. was instructed to try to prevent a resolution from coming to a vote, or else to abstain. An Iraqi official told the U.S. that Iraq strongly preferred a Security Council presidential statement to a resolution and did not want any specific country identified as responsible for chemical weapons use. On March 30, 1984, the Security Council issued a presidential statement condemning the use of chemical weapons, without naming Iraq as the offending party. (Battle.)

At the same time that the U.S. government had knowledge of that the Iraqi military was using chemical weapons, it was providing intelligence and planning assistance to the Iraqi armed forces. (Patrick Tyler, "Officers Say U.S. Aided Iraq In War Despite Use Of Gas," New York Times, Aug. 18, 2002, p. 1.)

When Iraq used chemical weapons in March 1988 against Halabja, there was no condemnation from Washington. (Dilip Hiro, " which at least 50,000 and possibly 100,000," The Observer, September 1, 2002, p. 17.) "In September 1988, the House of Representatives voted 388 to 16 in favor of economic sanctions against Iraq, but the White House succeeded in having the Senate water down the proposal. In exchange for Export-Import Bank credits, Iraq merely had to promise not to use chemical weapons again, with agricultural credits exempted even from this limited requirement." (Rubin, "The United States and Iraq: From Appeasement to War," p. 261.)]

Aug. 2, 1990 -- Invades Kuwait.

[The chronology omits one of Saddam Hussein's most egregious atrocities, his Anfal campaign against the Kurds from 1987-89, in which at least 50,000 and possibly 100,000 Kurds were systematically slaughtered. (Middle East Watch, Genocide in Iraq: The Anfal Campaign Against the Kurds, New York: Human Rights Watch, 1993.)

The response of the new Bush administration was to increase Iraq's commodity credits from half a billion to a billion dollars, making it the second largest user of the credit program in the world. As late as April 1990, the administration was opposing sanctions against Iraq ("They would hurt U.S. exporters and worsen our trade deficit," said the State Department). (Guy Gugliotta, Charles R. Babcock, and Benjamin Weiser, "At War, Iraq Courted U.S. Into Economic Embrace," Washington Post, Sept. 16, 1990, p. A1.) The administration also blocked efforts to cut back high-tech exports to Iraq with obvious military applications. (Douglas Frantz and Murray Waas, "Bush insisted on aiding Iraq until war's onset," Chicago Sun-Times, Feb. 23, 1992, p. 17.) And the United States was providing intelligence data to Iraq until three months before the invasion. (Murray Waas, Douglas Frantz, "U.S. shared intelligence with Iraq until 3 months before invasion of Kuwait," Houston Chronicle, March 10, 1992, p. A6.)]

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