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Halabja chemical weapons: A chance to find
the men who armed Saddam
4.12.2012
By John Simpson World Affairs Editor, BBC News |
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The mass graveyard for those who died in the gas
attack on Halabja, Kurdistan region of Iraq. Photo:
Getty Images
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See Related Articles
The former president Saddam Hussein gassed the
Kurdish town of Halabja on 16 March 1988, which has
left disasters effect, 5000 people killed by
chemical gas.
The former president Saddam Hussein gassed the
Kurdish town of Halabja on 16 March 1988, which has
left disasters effect, 5000 people killed by
chemical gas.
Chemical weapons deformed the face of Halabja
resident Hafsa Hama Faraj Rahman. Photo: AFP
Even animals didn't survive the gas attack.
John Simpson reports from Halabja in March 1988.
Photo: BBC
The former president Saddam Hussein gassed the
Kurdish town of Halabja on 16 March 1988, which has
left disasters effect, 5000 people killed by
chemical gas.
A memorial wall bears the names of the thousands of
people killed in Halabja. Photo: Getty Images.
December 4, 2012
Nearly 25 years ago, Iraqi forces killed thousands
of their own civilians using chemical weapons on the
Kurdish town of Halabja. Now steps are about to be
taken to discover which country - and possibly which
factory - supplied some of the chemicals.
The result of the chemical warfare attack on Halabja,
on 16 March 1988, was one of the worst sights I have
ever seen. Everywhere there were huddled bodies,
lying in the street, sheltering against walls.
When I looked closer, I could see that many of them
were protecting someone else, who was also dead: a
baby, a child, a wife.
There was no protection against the nerve agents and
gases which Saddam Hussein's men had dropped
indiscriminately on Halabja to teach its Kurdish
inhabitants a lesson.
I had seen the results of chemical warfare against
soldiers, earlier in the Iran-Iraq War; that was
terrible enough. But seeing what these insidious,
cruel gases did to wholly unprotected men, women and
children was worse.
Sometimes the gases which the Iraqi air force had
used had an almost instantaneous effect. I saw one
house where a bomb had penetrated the ceiling of a
room in which several people had been eating a meal.
All were dead; but it had clearly happened within a
second or so. One old man had died as he bit off a
piece of bread. Another was smiling, and seemed to
have been cut off in the middle of a joke.
Other people had died slowly and in the most
excruciating pain.
I saw a woman whose body was twisted almost into a
circle, the back of her head touching her feet.
There was vomit and blood on her clothes, and her
face was contorted in agony.
Why had these people died? Because, in the last
weeks of the Iran-Iraq War, Halabja had greeted the
advancing Iranian troops with joy. Saddam Hussein
and his cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as
"Chemical Ali", decided to make an example of them.
The Iraqi air force used a variety of chemicals
against the town: nerve agents like VX, Sarin and
Tabun,www.ekurd.net
and the terrible but far more primitive mustard gas,
the use of which dates back to World War I.
Nowadays, some of the bombs which were used are
displayed at the museum in Halabja. Many are
equipped with internal fans, which were used to mix
the chemicals together.
There were two days of conventional bombing before
the gas attack. It seems as though Ali Hassan al-Majid
wanted to break the windows in the town, so there
would be as little resistance to the gas as
possible.
I was flown into Halabja, together with a small
group of other foreign journalists, by the Iranian
air force.
Iran's government spotted the chance of a propaganda
victory by showing the world the crimes which Saddam
Hussein had carried out against his own people.
The Iranian authorities had prevented the survivors
of the bombing from coming back to bury the dead, so
they would still be there for us to see.
How many people died in Halabja? I wandered round
counting the bodies with a Belgian chemical warfare
specialist.
Time was short: the Iraqis knew we were there - our
helicopters had been fired on as we came in - and
their air force was thought to be coming back,
perhaps with more chemical weapons to use against
us.
Inevitably, our count was hasty and inadequate. But
it seemed to us that there were the best part of
5,000 bodies lying around the town. Others had died
on the outskirts, as they tried to cross the
mountains into Iran.
This figure, vague though it is, is pretty much
accepted by the various experts on the attack.
Yet a quarter of a century later, the horror is not
over. Some of the mustard gas which was used is
still present in the cellars of the town, where
people took refuge during the bombing.
Unlike the nerve agents, which evaporated very fast,
mustard gas is heavier than air. It sinks down and
forms pockets which are still dangerous today.
When my team and I went down the steps of one house
into the cellar, the gas residue, caught there in
the old carpeting, made our eyes prickle and gave us
headaches for hours afterwards.
On the floor lay the contorted bodies of a couple of
rats and the skeleton of a cat which had died from
breathing the gas. We were told that a man had died
recently from inhaling it in another cellar nearby.
The leading British expert on chemical warfare,
Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, who used to work at the
Porton Down establishment - Britain's military
scientific facility - is discussing with the Kurdish
government how to decontaminate Halabja.
"We have a problem around here when they are
building new buildings, they dig the foundations,
they come across these pockets of mustard gas... and
people have died recently doing that," he says.
"That is one task we are hoping we'll help with -
setting up our monitoring here, so that if we get an
indication of gas in the area we can take measures
[to ensure] that people aren't exposed.
"Once Halabja is clean, if you like, the ability to
develop the place at the rate the rest of the
country is going, should be realised."
Mr de Bretton-Gordon says it may also be possible to
identify who supplied Saddam Hussein's government
with the basic chemicals used at Halabja.
"We expect to find samples of mustard gas in the
mass graves, as we have done in the cellars," he
tells me.
"And if we can break it down to its base molecule
components, we will be able to see what its
signature is, and then we can match it against a
sample.
This, he believes, will make it possible to work out
which country, even which factory, supplied the
original chemicals for the mustard gas - it will not
be possible to trace the source of the nerve agents.
"It's going to be difficult to get a test sample
from the manufacturers who allegedly made it... if
they handed it over and it matched, that's
irrefutable evidence, which the International
Criminal Court and others would take a view on.
"But we know there are still some chemical
stockpiles in Iraq that are being dealt with, which
is open source information, and we can probably get
a sample from there and match it against what we've
found here to provide conclusive evidence - so
technically it is possible."
For now, the Kurdish Regional Government has yet to
approve such plans. It says it wants to consult with
a range of companies and with towns-people before it
agrees to let so many mass graves be disturbed.
But there is a clear political sense that as long as
those foreign companies that knowingly supplied
these awful weapons remain unpunished, this tragic
chapter will never fully be closed.
"I think we owe it to ourselves, to the victims, to
really take a more in-depth look at what happened,
how it happened," says Qubad Talabani, a senior
minister in the regional government and the son of
Iraq's current president.
And if the foreign companies who supplied the
chemicals can be identified, might some kind of
action be considered?
"Absolutely, absolutely. It's something that we're
very serious about - the families of the victims are
serious about."
The Soviet Union, with its large chemical warfare
capability, seems to have given Saddam Hussein the
materials he asked for.
West Germany's chemical industry was exempted at the
time by the Bonn government from the international
agreements forbidding the sale of chemical weapons.
Other countries may have been involved.
So, has anything positive come from the terrible
suffering of Halabja? Strangely, yes. The revelation
of what had happened stirred the conscience of the
outside world, and three years later led directly to
the imposition by Britain and the US of a no-fly
zone over northern Iraq.
This prevented Saddam from attacking the Kurds, and
enabled them to flourish independently from the
control of Baghdad.
The oil wealth of the 1990s and later has completely
transformed the main cities of Kurdistan - Halabja
included.
But no-one in the town can forget what happened that
day in 1988. Discussing it still reduces entire
classes of schoolchildren to tears.
Even now, men and women are developing cancers that
may well be linked to the chemical effects of the
bombing.
And thousands of people died in the most terrifying
way imaginable.
Copyright ©, respective author or news agency, bbc.co.uk
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