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Iraq
under Saddam Hussein was the only contemporary
nation to use chemical weapons against civilians.
During 1987 and 1988 -- while Iraq was at war with
Iran -- Saddam gassed dozens of villages in the
Kurdistan region. The worst of these attacks
devastated the city of Halabja on March 16, 1988.
About 5,000 civilians were killed. Thousands more
were blinded or maimed, and would die later.
Wednesday marked the 17th anniversary of that
horrible day.
Halabja stands as a symbol for the larger genocide
campaign -- often called the Anfal -- that Saddam
inflicted on Iraqi Kurdistan in 1987-1988. And that
genocide is itself part of the constellation of
cruelties imposed by Saddam's murderous Ba'athist
regime.
This is a time we remember not only the fallen
Kurds, but also our brothers and sisters among the
Madan, the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq, whose
ancient habitat was destroyed by Saddam, and is only
now being rebuilt. We also remember our brothers and
sisters in the Shi'a Arab community, whose
courageous intifada in the wake of the first Gulf
War was so viciously repressed by Saddam's troops.
And we remember the Christians whose villages were
razed in 1988 as part of the same campaign that slew
so many Kurds.
The people of Kurdistan knew well Saddam's murderous
nature even before Halabja. Kurds had already been
slaughtered by the thousands in the Anfal campaign.
And many more had passed through the paramilitary
camp of Topzawa, near Kirkuk, on their way to remote
execution sites that even now have yet to be found.
Still, March 16, 1988, managed to create a new
standard in cruelty. It marked a defining turning
point in the history of the Kurdish people.
We must ask ourselves how it was that the truth of
Halabja was so long denied by much of the world. And
how was it that its perpetrator managed to escape
justice for more than 15 years? These are important
questions to answer if we are to prevent the next
Halabja. As with other genocides, we must do our
best to make good on the words "never again."
The horror of Halabja, the sickening pictures of
children murdered by chemical weapons, should have
forced world leaders to question whether Saddam was
just another leader to be dealt with in the world's
geo-strategic chess game. Instead, most capitals
responded with denial or equivocation. The murder of
thousands of innocents was minimized and
marginalized so as not to disrupt relations with
Saddam.
The route of silence was also embraced by numerous
Middle Eastern pundits -- the same men who denounced
the liberation of Iraq but rarely found a bad word
to utter about Saddam. The late Edward Said, the
Columbia University professor widely lionized for
his support of the Palestinian cause, cast doubt on
Saddam's use of chemical weapons at Halabja. One
former CIA analyst, Stephen Pelletierre, made a
career of spouting propaganda on Saddam's behalf.
Pelletierre most recently plied his shameful trade
in a New York Times op-ed that attempted to blame
Iran for Halabja. Not surprisingly, al-Jazeera has
recently peddled similar
A brave few, from across the political spectrum,
told the truth. Organizations such as Amnesty
International, Human Rights Watch, Medecins Sans
Frontieres and Physicians for Human Rights spared no
effort on behalf of Halabja's victims. The same was
true of writers such as William Safire, Christopher
Hitchens, Michael Ignatieff, Edward Mortimer and
Gwynne Roberts.
Politicians and personalities such as U.S. Senators
Claiborne Pell, Jesse Helms and Al Gore, British MP
Anne Clywd, Madame Danielle Mitterrand and Dr.
Bernard Kouchner stood up for the victims with
compassion and outrage. In the United States, Dr.
Najmaldin Karim, and Ambassador Peter Galbraith,
then a congressional staffer, battled the
indifference of the foreign policy elite.
The Halabja genocide perfectly reflected Ba'athism.
Like Nazism, which inspired the early Baathists,
Saddam's ideology embraced ethnic cleansing. Just as
the Nazis planned to change the ethnic map of
Eastern Europe by exterminating Jews and decimating
Poles, and by dispatching Germans to colonize newly
conquered territories, Baathists sought to wipe out
the Kurds who inconveniently lived near Iraq's
northern borders.
Indeed, the Holocaust, the greatest crime in human
history, was the ideal to which the Baathists
aspired. If they could have, the Baathists would
have eliminated not only the Kurds, but also
everyone else who opposed their fascistic Arab
nationalist ideology. Saddam's uncle and political
mentor, Khairullah Talfah, was a Nazi sympathizer
who wrote a pamphlet entitled Three Whom God Should
Not Have Created: Persians, Jews and Flies. This
manifesto of hate was reissued by Saddam Hussein in
1981. Indeed, the gassing of Halabja and other
Kurdish communities is now known to have been part
of a larger experiment to test the effectiveness of
Saddam's poisons.
In Iraq today, we are determined to create a
pluralistic nation in which such crimes are
unthinkable. That is why we voted in such large
numbers on Jan. 30 -- because we are determined to
create a democracy, because we will never again
allow the power of the state to be vested in the
hands of a dictator.
The mission of Iraq's Kurds is to remind Iraq and
the world of the crime of Halabja, and by doing so
to show what can happen when evil is permitted to
flourish.
Howar Ziad is Iraq's ambassador to Canada. This
essay is adapted from a speech delivered on March 16
at Carleton University in Ottawa.
http://www.canada.com
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