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The
first EU citizen to be accused of involvement in
genocide appeared in court yesterday in the
Netherlands in a case that is being closely watched
by war crimes experts and human rights activists.
Under tight security, Frans van Anraat, 62, a Dutch
businessman who is alleged to have helped Saddam
Hussein to gas the Kurds of Halabja in 1988,
appeared for a pre-trial hearing in Rotterdam,
facing charges of complicity in genocide and
international war crimes.
His request to be released until the full trial
opens in November was rejected by the court.
Mr Van Anraat, who was arrested at his Amsterdam
home last December, has yet to enter a plea to any
of the charges.
Fred Teeven, the prosecutor, told the hearing that
Mr Van Anraat was fully aware that the chemicals he
was supplying were being used for chemical weapons,
adducing American, UN and Iraqi information to back
up the allegation, as well as correspondence to and
from Mr Van Anraat.
"Van Anraat was conscious of ... the fact that his
materials were going to be used for poison gas
attacks," he said. "The damage and grief caused will
not be rapidly, if ever, forgotten. What's more, the
dossier contains very strong indications that the
suspect calmly continued with the deliveries of
ingredients after the gas attack on Halabja on March
16 1988."
The defence said that Mr Van Anraat did not know
what Iraq intended to do with the materials he
provided, and that he stopped shipments to Iraq
after the Halabja attack.
There was no convincing evidence linking the
material he had supplied to chemical weapons used by
Iraq.
The businessman was first detained in Milan in 1989
after a request from the US, but was released two
months later.
He surfaced in Baghdad, which he made his home for
14 years under a new identity: Faris Mansoor Rashid
al-Bazas. After the American-led invasion of Iraq,
the portly bespectacled trader moved again in April
2003.
He took a taxi to the Syrian border, then made his
way to the Netherlands, where he moved into a small
terrace house overlooking a canal in the west of
Amsterdam.
Late last year he was about to leave the city when,
alerted by telephone intercepts indicating his
travel plans, the Dutch police arrested him.
Dubbed "Holland's Chemical Ali" by the Dutch media,
Mr Van Anraat is the first Dutchman to be charged
with international war crimes.
The Van Anraat saga goes back 20 years. The US
customs service says he has been on its 10 list of
most wanted suspects internationally for years.
Although the case focuses on dozens of allegedly
illegal shipments of chemical precursors to Iraq via
the US, Europe, Japan, and the far east, it also
appears to entail cloak-and-dagger elements and
intelligence cover-ups, aspects which are certain to
feature in Mr Van Anraat's defence, and which could
prove embarrassing to the Dutch government.
The main allegations are that between 1984 and 1989
he supplied the Saddam regime with thousands of
tonnes of chemical precursors for mustard gas and
nerve gas.
These gases Saddam then used against Iranians in the
Iran-Iraq war and, most infamously, in "Operation
Anfal" in Iraqi Kurdistan between February and
September 1988, gassing, killing and maiming tens of
thousands of civilians, including the 5,000
massacred in Halabja in March that year.
Mr Van Anraat has never denied supplying the
chemicals. But he denies knowing that they were
intended for weapons purposes, and says he was
sickened by television footage of the massacre.
"The images of the gas attack on the Kurdish city
Halabja were a shock," he said in a 2003 interview
with a Dutch magazine, Nieuwe Revu.
"But I did not give the order to do that. How many
products, such as bullets do we make in the
Netherlands?"
Arnold Karskens, a prominent Dutch journalist who
has been tracking Mr Van Anraat since 1991, said:
"He told me it all had nothing to do with the
military industry."
Wim De Bruin, an official in the Dutch prosecutor's
offices, said: "We have a list of 34 shipments of
precursors. Not all of them were investigated by the
Americans."
There is also a string of unanswered questions about
the conduct of the Dutch authorities. The Americans
dropped their arrest warrant for Mr Van Anraat in
2000.
"They didn't explain why," Mr De Bruin said.
Fleeing Iraq when the Americans invaded, but without
a valid Dutch passport after 14 years in the Iraqi
capital, Mr Van Anraat was given a "laisser passer",
a travel document enabling him to get home. "The
Dutch government helped him to get back here and
then refused to look into his case," said Krista van
Velzen, a Socialist MP who has been regularly
tabling parliamentary questions on the case.
It was then disclosed that, despite having been
under investigation since December 2003, Mr Van
Anraat was given a new passport last October, and
that the house in Amsterdam in which he was living
was, in fact, an interior ministry safe house.
There are claims that he had collaborated with Dutch
intelligence for years on Iraq's weapons programmes,
and that, in return, he was promised immunity and a
safe haven in the Netherlands.
"The justice ministry wanted to prosecute him, but
the interior ministry and the AIVD [intelligence
service] wanted to protect him," Ms Van Velzen said.
www.guardian.co.uk
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