20 years after Halabja

 

The series of mass-murders by poison gas stretched over two years and killed 180.000 Iraqi Kurds

 

 

 

 Sissy Danninger

 

 

 

It happened during the first week of May in 1988. In the village of Askar near the banks of the Lesser Zab River a child was ailing. The grandparents decided to take the grandchild with them and to go to see a doctor in the nearby town. They left their village in the morning. Luckily, the medical check did not show anything serious. But the relief gave way to sheer horror when they returned home in the late afternoon:

 

The grandparents and the child were the only survivors out of a family, which had comprised 30 people in the morning. Eight grown-ups and 19 children had been surprised by bombardments while gathering for lunch and had evidently been killed within minutes in an attack with poison gas carried out by Iraqi armed forces.

 

Even today, in 2008, Shirin – Austrian of Kurdish origin, who had fled Iraqi Kurdistan in 1976 – fights for her countenance when she gives this report in Vienna. She has received it from her late mother, who stemmed from Askar. At the same time she feels bitter considering the fact that apart from Halabja on March 16^th, 1988 the many series of poison gas attacks causing mass murders of her people over a period of two years were scarcely noticed on an international level. Contrary to Halabja in all those cases there was no Iranian machinery of martial propaganda like the one that spread news and pictures of the dead numbered 5.000 globally.

 

In fact the so-called operation “Anfal” comprised eight series of attacks with chemical bombs in different Kurdish regions and settlement areas from February 23^rd to September 6^th, 1988 alone. The total number of fatalities is given as 180.000. Thousands of villages were depopulated and devastated. Homes left intact by Kurdish refugees as far as to the petrol-rich city of Kirkuk were Arabized, all their properties snatched.

 

By the way, the Arabic term “Anfal” is taken from Koran and means prey of war.

 

But the poison gas assaults by Iraqi forces had already begun the year before those operations. In a special dossier Institut Kurde de Paris specifies 18 attacks with dates, villages hit and numbers of wounded and dead for the period from April 15^th to September 14^th, 1987.

 

The fact that Iraq not just possessed but doubtlessly deployed weapons of mass destruction in those days tragically neither raised concern with an international alliance of states nor did it provoke any action on their behalf. This should still take a lot of time – across the Kuwait-war 1990/91 and until 2003, when the alleged menace by such weapons supplied the false pretences for the invasion by the US-led coalition and finally led to the toppling of Saddam.

 

While the dramatic social, economical and political consequences of those state-ordered mass-gassings strain the situation of the Middle East and world politics up to the presence there is still much to be done to complete the evaluation of this youngest but one tragedy of the Kurds in newer history (before the flight of millions in the aftermath of Gulf War II about Kuwait in 1991). Saddam’s overhasty execution, borne by Shiite-US-American consensus, on December 30^th, 2006 for mass murder of Shiites in Southern Iraq damaged all chances to judicially clarify the dictator’s role in regard to the Kurdish genocide.

This deficit could just partly and unsatisfactorily be made up for by the completed trial against Saddam’s cousin “Chemical Ali” Hassan Al-Majid and the (still not executed) death verdict. In any case this man – without showing any sign of remorse - confirmed in court to have headed the implementation of Operation Anfal as the then minister of defence.

 

Also, the conviction of Frans van Anraat, the Dutch supplier of chemicals needed for the production of poison gases to Iraq, in the Netherlands in 2005 did not contribute much to the clarification of international connections. The defendant was first sentenced to 15 years in prison for aiding and abetting war crimes (not for supporting genocide for lack of evidence). Upon his appeal this sentence was not reduced but extended to 17 years in 2007.

 

Not even the mix of poison gases deployed is completely analysed by experts up to now. Mustard gas or Sulphur-LOST (named after the chemists Lommel and Steinkopf in World War I), an agent affecting skin and mucous membranes, as well as the nerve gases Sarin, Tabun and possibly even VX are fairly well established as components. Yet, the fatal effect on hundreds, if not thousands, within just a few minutes could only be explained by some sort of chemical weapon based on cyanides and stopping the capacity of oxygen-transport by blood circulation, as experts in the fields of medicine and toxicology assume.

 

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To commemorate the 20^th anniversary of the massacre of Halabja a conference on the genocide against the Kurds will be held on March 15^th and 16^th in Albert Schweitzer-Haus in Vienna, accompanied by an exhibition. It is being organized by the Kurdish Centre and the Austro-Kurdish Society with the aim to inform a wider interested public.

 

 

 

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