Sulaimaniyah, Kurdistan-Iraq, --The President of
Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, Massoud Barzani, said on
last Saturday that Kurdish government will pursue
the foreign companies who sold chemical materials to
the former Iraqi government of President Saddam
Hussein.
Addressing a mass gathering of people from Halabja,
President Barzani added “we will legally go after
those who sold chemical weapons to Iraqi government
or helped it to produce those weapons.”
However he added that “cull documentations” are
needed to win a legal case against those companies
in case of a trial.
He described a suit against such companies “as a
two-edged sword” that would turn against its user,
if mishandled. |
Massoud Barzani, President of Kurdistan
Region in Iraq |
|
In 1988, in the closing weeks of Iraq-Iran war, Iraq
gassed the Kurdish town of Halabja, on the border
with Iran, resulting in the death of more than 5000
civilians. Last year a Dutch court convicted Frans
Van Anraat, a Dutch businessman, of selling chemical
materials to Saddam’s regime. Iraq also used those
weapons against Iranian tropes during its eight-year
war with Iran.
The remarks by Barzani came a few weeks before the
start of the trial of the top officials of the
former Ba’ath regime, due in August, for massacring
Kurds during the 1980s in notorious Anfal campaigns.
During those campaigns more than 150,000 civilian
Kurds were killed.
The top defendants of the Kurdish massacre are
Saddam Hussein and his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid,
labeled as Chemical Ali by Kurds for his role in the
gassing the Kurdish town.
Barzani, however, acknowledged that Kurds have not
been able so far to find documents proving Halabja’s
massacre in a court of law. “They have either
destroyed those documents or have done (the gassing)
in a way that will not become a trials subject,”
President Barzani explained to the gathering. “But
this does not mean that the crime of killing 5,000
people within a few minutes will be hidden and
lost.”
Barzani, who is on a week-long visit to Sulaimaniyah,
promised that his government will persistently try
to find documents on the killing of Kurds by the
former regime. That was for the second time that
Barzani toured Sulaimaniyah since his assuming the
office of Kurdistan president last year.
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