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Letter from Kurdistan, March 16th
16.3.2010
By Vahal Ali Abdulrahman |
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March
16, 2010
22 years ago today, the former Iraqi regime ordered
its air force to bombard the Kurdish town of Halabja
with chemical weapons, instantly poisoning to death
5000 men, women and children. I went to Halabja for
the first time in the spring of 2006 to pay my
respects to the dead. I walked in the alleys of the
martyred town where time seemed to have stopped on
that bloody Wednesday. As I walked those narrow
alleys, I remember thinking of the photo of Omar
Khawer, the Kurdish man holding his infant son in
his arms as they both lay lifeless at the doorsteps
of one of those houses in one of those alleys.
5000 dead and there were no campaigns to find the
missing, no effort to list the dead, no Le Monde
article crying, “We Are All Kurds,” no eulogies for
the the infant whose last breath was taken in his
father’s arms and subsequently photographed so that
his brutal ending could have shook the conscience of
humanity. It didn’t shake anything. The next day,
the news in Iraq were celebrating victories in the
northern battlefields while Western newspapers were
busy reporting on the indictment of Oliver North for
the Iran-Contra affair and a Colombian airplane
crash. And there was nothing about the Kurdish town
along the Iraq-Iran border which had been turned
into a mass grave.
The corpse-littered streets of Halabja were as if
they were not part of the map of this earth.
When a Kurdish delegation asked a Kuwaiti official
to condemn Saddam’s use of chemical weapons, his
disgusting response was, “what did you expect to be
sprayed with, rose water?” No, sir, not rose water,
but not mustard gas, either! Two years later, Kuwait
would be on the receiving end of Saddam’s brutality
as he annexed and occupied the sovereign state of
Kuwait.
This anniversary is especially memorable because the
man who ordered the attacks, Ali Hassan al-Majid was
executed this past January for, among other crimes,
the genocidal attack on Halabja. But it doesn’t stop
there, the garbage can of history still reserves
spaces for those who supplied Saddam with the
weapons,www.ekurd.netfor
those who helped his military industry, for those
Western politicians who stood idly by, for those
Arab politicians who should have spoken up, for the
newspaper editors who ignored Halabja, for the
clergymen who did not express disgust.
Because Halabja was a moment in humanity’s history
when cruelty triumphed over goodness, when the
promise of “never again” was broken and the
international community watched, not long
thereafter, how Slobodan Milosevic and his gangsters
massacred civilians in Srebrenica, how Hutu warlords
macheted Rwandans of Tutsi origins and now how the
Janjaweed are massacring and displacing the
innocents of Darfur.
So on this 22nd year anniversary of Halabja,
wherever you are, whatever you are doing, I ask that
you please stop to take one moment of silence in
honor of victims of genocide everywhere.
Copyright, respective author or news agency,
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