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Iraqi Kurd gas victims sue Dutchman
businessman who sold Saddam chemicals
23.12.2009
By ekurd.net staff
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Iraqi
Kurd gas victims sue Dutchman for damages
December 23, 2009
THE HAGUE,
Netherlands, — A Dutch court has begun hearing a
suit filed by 16 Iraqi Kurds seeking compensation
from a businessman who sold chemicals to Saddam
Hussein's regime.
The chemicals were turned into mustard gas that was
unleashed on Iranians and Kurds, including relatives
of the plaintiffs.
The businessman, Frans van Anraat,
was convicted of war crimes in his native
Netherlands and
sentenced to 16
1/2 years in prison.
Victims' lawyer Liesbeth Zegveld said she is
discussing written filings at Wednesday's hearing in
The Hague. She said the suit is strong,www.ekurd.netgiven
that Van Anraat's conviction was upheld by the Dutch
Supreme Court. However, recovering damages will be
difficult. |
Frans van Anraat, a Dutch businessman who sold
chemicals to Saddam used in gas attacks on Kurdish
villages in Iraq in the 1980s |
Van Anraat says he spent
all his money fleeing from country to country after
Saddam's regime fell.
The Dutch ruling marks the first time a court has
ruled that Saddam committed genocide in Iraq with
the 1988 massacre of Kurds in the town of Halabja.
The attack, which killed more than 5,000 Kurds in a
single day.
Saddam was hanged in December 2006 for the killing
of 148 Shiite residents of Dujail following an
abortive 1982 assassination attempt against the then
president in the mainly Shiite town north of
Baghdad.
Saddam's cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid was
sentenced to death in June
2007 for genocide after ordering the
deaths of tens of thousands of Kurds during the 1988
Anfal campaign,www.ekurd.net
when Iraqi forces
strafed villages with poison gas, the source of his
grim nickname.
Anfal was an anti-Kurdish campaign led by the former
regime between 1986 and 1989 and involved a series
of military campaigns against the Kurdish Peshmerga
fighters as well as the mostly Kurdish civilian
population of southern Kurdistan 'northern Iraq'.
The campaign,
in which chemical weapons were used, The Anfal
operation crackdown that killed nearly 200,000
Kurdish civilians and guerrillas.
In February 2008, Iraq's presidency
endorsed the execution
of Saddam Hussein's cousin "Chemical Ali,"
He was also given a second death penalty for war
crimes and crimes against humanity over a bloody
crackdown on Shiites during their ill-fated uprising
after the 1991 Gulf War.
About Frans van Anraat
Frans Cornelis Adrianus van Anraat (born August 9,
1942 in Den Helder) is a Dutch businessman who sold
raw materials for the production of chemical weapons
to Iraq during the reign of Saddam Hussein.
During the 1970's Van Anraat worked at engineering
companies in Italy, Switzerland and Singapore that
were building chemical plants in Iraq. Having
learned about the trade in chemicals, he founded his
own company, "FCA Contractor", based in Bissone,
Switzerland. From 1984 he supplied thousands of tons
of chemicals to Iraq.
Among these chemicals were the essential raw
materials for producing mustard gas and nerve gas.
Both gases were used during the Iran-Iraq war
between 1980-1988 as well as during an attack the
military carried out on Iraqi Kurds in 1988, in
which some 5,000 people were killed. This attack was
part of the Al-Anfal campaign of the Iraqi regime
against Kurds in the north of the country.
After his arrest and release in Italy in 1989, Van
Anraat fled to Iraq, where he lived for the next 14
years. When Saddam's regime fell in 2003, Van Anraat
returned to the Netherlands. He was arrested on
December 6, 2004 for complicity to war crimes and
genocide. On December 23, he was sentenced to
fifteen years in prison for complicity to war
crimes, but the court argued the charges of
complicity to genocide could not be substantiated.
The public prosecutor appealed the verdict. This
case is also notable, because it established that
the chemical bombings in North Iraq constituted
genocide according to the Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
Soon after his arrest, Dutch newspapers reported
that Van Anraat had been an informer of the Dutch
secret service AIVD.
Copyright, respective author or news agency,
ekurd net | AP | Agencies
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