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IMAGINE looking down on thousands of little
creatures. And then spraying them with a giant can
of Raid. That is essentially what Saddam Hussein's
air force did in 1988, when pilots doused the
Kurdish town of Halabja with a cloud of deadly
toxins, including large quantities of the nerve gas
found in household insecticides.
When Hussein and his henchmen finally appear in an
Iraqi courtroom to answer for their war crimes, the
Halabja massacre will be Exhibit A for the
prosecution, and the Kurds who survived his reign of
terror will have front row seats. The question is
whether the long-awaited trials will also expose key
American and European officials who played a role in
arming the Iraqi regime with industrial insecticides
and a variety of other deadly components that the
West knew were being used against the Kurds.
Over the years, Halabja survivors have shared with
me the grisly reactions of those who perished. In
the initial moments, I am told, some victims spurted
blood from their ears, some vomited, and others fell
down laughing as they choked to death.
Human rights monitors say that more than 180,000
Kurds were killed or "disappeared" in Iraqi
Kurdistan in the 1980s, the period when Hussein's
regime received billions of dollars in aid from the
West. Halabja is the best-known of more than 200
sites in northern Iraq where chemicals were sprayed.
A Kurdish doctor I know estimates that 40 percent of
Kurdish lands were contaminated. He and others fear
that the "cocktails" of mustard, VX, and sarin gas
used on the Kurds may have caused long-term damage
to the soil and water table.
I have visited the area frequently since 1991, and
residents have repeatedly raised questions why so
many friends and relatives still suffer from
cancers, cleft palates, stillbirths, miscarriages,
and birth defects. On one Halabja trip, my
translator told me that his uncle died in 1996 after
being bitten by a "poison snake" who had feasted on
uncollected corpses that lay on the streets
following the 1988 attack. Such stories make up the
grotesque folklore of Halabja and other contaminated
areas of Kurdistan.
No one knows the truth -- because no Western
government or health agency has wanted to spend the
money to do comprehensive soil and water tests. Just
as there has been no deep investigation of Hussein's
helpers, little is known about long-term health
hazards to Kurds who still live in these areas. In
both cases, the lack of information increases the
risk that little has been learned and that similar
catastrophes may be repeated.
Some of the broad outlines of Hussein's US support
are known: the courting of the Iraqi regime by the
Reagan-Bush administration in the early 1980s as a
foil against the Islamic Republic of Iran; Reagan's
handwritten letter to Saddam Hussein soliciting
better relations; multiple visits by special White
House envoy Donald Rumsfeld, who also represented
the Bechtel corporate efforts to build an oil
pipeline across Iraq; the administration's decision
to remove the regime of Saddam Hussein--who was
known in those days as the "Butcher of Baghdad" --
from the list of sponsors of terror; the sworn
affidavit of Howard Teicher, who worked at Reagan's
National Security Council, that the United States
actively supported the Iraqi war effort against Iran
by supplying the Iraqis with billions of dollars of
credits, providing military intelligence and advice
to the Iraqis, and closely monitoring arms sales to
Iraq to make sure Iraq had the military weaponry
required, and the fact that Hussein's technicians
fitted some US-made helicopters with nozzles and
used them to spray gas on Kurdish villages.
It appears that Iraq's use of weapons of mass
destruction was known at the highest levels in
Washington. A State Department official has stated
that he informed Secretary of State George Shultz
that Iraq was making "almost daily use" of chemical
weapons against Iranian troops, and evidence exists
that the CIA provided satellite photos to Iraqi
generals that enabled them to pinpoint the positions
of Iranians for chemical attacks.
The Kurds were fighting for their rights in Iraq,
but in the war between the two countries they found
themselves on Iran's side. For the United States,
defeating Iran was all that mattered. Even after
chemical weapons were used on the Kurds, the White
House blocked trade sanctions against Iraq, and the
Commerce Department continued to approve military
exports to the brutal regime. The message to Saddam
Hussein couldn't have been clearer: You can gas the
Kurds and get away with it.
The pending war crimes trials offer Saddam's victims
-- and the world -- the best opportunity to expose
political wrongdoing and to prevent more Halabjas.
There is little doubt that the ex-dictator and his
associates will receive their just deserts. But if
prosecutors sidestep the vital issue of the "aiders
and abettors," the 5,000 Kurds sprayed to death in
Halabja and the tens of thousands other victims --
many of them still struggling today with blindness,
cancers, and birth defects -- will be cheated in
their right to know the real story of this and other
Iraqi war crimes. Without that wider inquiry, the
trials may be seen as a form of "victor's justice."
Kevin McKiernan, who produced and directed the PBS
film "Good Kurds, Bad Kurds," has covered the war in
Iraq for ABC News and is writing a book about the
Kurds.
© Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company.
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