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Halabja gas attack survivors still live in
agony: No help from Iraq's Kurdistan Govt
26.1.2012
By Sangar Jamal
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Halabja |
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Halabja Chemical bombarding Victim. Archive Photo:
Zohreh Soleimani.
January
26, 2012
HALABJA,
Kurdistan region 'Iraq', — The horrific gas attacks
on the Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja happened over
two decades ago. Yet survivors still suffer many
health problems. And although the government has
made promises to help, survivors say they’ve been
abandoned by their state.
Kamel was only 15 when he lost his family in the
poison gas attacks carried out by the regime of
former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein on the town of
Halabja in 1988. The gas attacks resulted in the
deaths of an estimated 5,000 civilians and injury to
thousands more.
Kamel lost his whole family – his parents and six
brothers and sisters – on March 16 1988 but his
suffering was far from over on that day. After the
attack, Kamel ended up in a hospital over the border
in Iran; Halabja is very near the border.
“I fainted after the bombing but I was told that a
member of the Kurdish military carried me to the
Iranian troops. From there I was taken to hospital,”
Kamel recalls.
The man, who is now 38 and a father himself, spent
two months in intensive care in hospital. He was
seriously burned, had problems breathing and was
blind; he was unconscious for a week and couldn’t
see for 20 days. “I remember that I lost all the
hair on my body,” he says.
After two months in hospital, Kamel left without
getting a doctor’s permission, desperate to look for
his family. “And I was told they had all died,” he
says. “The last time I saw them was during the
shelling, before the blindness.”
If that was not enough, Kamel has also spent the
past two decades suffering the after affects of the
poison gas attacks. He still has vision problems and
his lungs hardly function at all. And he is not
alone. Despite the time that has passed since the
attacks, residents in the town today are still
suffering from the ongoing effects of the gas
attacks, whether physical, psychological or
environmental.
According to statistics at the Ministry of Health in
the semi-autonomous state of Iraqi Kurdistan, of
which Halabja is a part, there are around 500 people
still ill as a result of the chemical attacks, 245
of them seriously. There are also others who have
died as a result of the attacks over the past few
years.
“Every year, a number of victims die,” Luqman Abdul-Qader,
head of the Gathering of Chemical Shelling Victims
in Halabja, an NGO created by Halabja victims’
families, told Niqash. “In 2004, 73 people passed
away as a result of the 1988 chemical attack.”
One of the most recent deaths was that of Alia Faraj,
a woman in her 50s. “She spent her life suffering,
her life was full of pain and agony,” Abdul-Qader
said. “Victims suffer when there’s a change in the
weather because many of them have respiratory
problems. The change in temperature may cause them
to have trouble breathing and in many cases, they’ll
lose consciousness.”
A number of chemical weapons were used in the attack
but the worst affected are those locals who were
gassed with mustard gas. They’re often in bad health
with severe respiratory and visual issues as well as
allergies and skin problems.
Additionally, there are more individuals suffering
as a result of the gas attacks than previously
thought. Some of them are easy to see. For example
in September last year,www.ekurd.net
an unexploded chemical bomb was found and during an
attempt to remove it, five locals were affected by
the toxic gas; US military forces eventually
intervened and removed the bomb. Several more
similar unexploded munitions were found a few weeks
later and a special committee has been formed to
seek further examples out.
But the ongoing effect of the toxic gas attacks can
also be less explicit. Parts of the land and local
buildings remain affected and in some cases,
contamination has halted building projects. There is
no doubt that lingering contamination must have
affected locals living on and around it too.
According to the Gathering of Chemical Shelling
Victims in Halabja, 69 victims of the chemical
attacks were sent out of Iraq for medical treatment
over the past few years.
“Most of these people were only able to travel
because of assistance provided by charitable
individuals or associations,” Abdul-Qader explained.
“The government didn’t really do anything to help
these victims and it has not kept up its
responsibilities to these people.”
Civil society organisations such as his own had done
their best to put pressure on the authorities
involved and Abdul-Qader said the local Ministry of
Health would have done nothing, had it not been
under such pressure.
The mayor of Halabja, Goran Adham, denied this. “The
region’s government is very concerned about the
victims and it has formed special committees to
follow up their cases, which includes sending them
abroad to receive needed medical care,” he said. In
fact, he explained the local authorities decided to
pay regular compensation to victims – although as
yet, they were still waiting on the final go-ahead
from the Ministry of Finance to see how the payouts
would be administered.
Adham blamed the central government in Baghdad for
the lack of assistance to victims. “Under
international law, the central government is
responsible for any act committed by the former
government and the former regime,” he noted.
Meanwhile Abdul-Qader thinks that elected officials
from the Kurdish region, in power in Baghdad, should
be putting more pressure on their Iraqi counterparts
in government to fulfil those obligations to the
victims of the gas attacks.
Gas attack victim Kamel knows only too well how
much, or how little, the government has done. In the
past he travelled overseas, to Austria and Italy, to
get medical treatment. The government of Iraqi
Kurdistan promised to pay his hospital expenses and
along with a group of seven others, he underwent
tests, remaining in hospital for 12 days. Doctors
then told him he would need to undergo at least a
year worth of treatment in order to have a chance at
full recovery. At this stage, the government balked.
“So I returned home without getting any medical
treatment,” Kamel says.
Kamel now has three young children and his greatest
fear is not necessarily for himself but for his
family. “I was young when I lost my parents,” he
tells, “and I do not want my children to have to
face the same thing. I really wish the government
would help me.”
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