Iraq under Saddam Hussein was the
only contemporary nation to use chemical weapons
against civilians. During 1987 and 1988 -- while
Iraq was at war with Iran -- Saddam gassed dozens of
villages in the Kurdistan region. The worst of these
attacks devastated the city of Halabja on March 16,
1988. About 5,000 civilians were killed. Thousands
more were blinded or maimed, and would die later.
Wednesday marked the 17th anniversary of that
horrible day.
Halabja stands as a symbol for the
larger genocide campaign -- often called the Anfal
-- that Saddam inflicted on Iraqi Kurdistan in
1987-1988. And that genocide is itself part of the
constellation of cruelties imposed by Saddam's
murderous Ba'athist regime.
This is a time we remember not
only the fallen Kurds, but also our brothers and
sisters among the Madan, the Marsh Arabs of southern
Iraq, whose ancient habitat was destroyed by Saddam,
and is only now being rebuilt. We also remember our
brothers and sisters in the Shi'a Arab community,
whose courageous intifada in the wake of the first
Gulf War was so viciously repressed by Saddam's
troops. And we remember the Christians whose
villages were razed in 1988 as part of the same
campaign that slew so many Kurds.
The people of Kurdistan knew well
Saddam's murderous nature even before Halabja. Kurds
had already been slaughtered by the thousands in the
Anfal campaign. And many more had passed through the
paramilitary camp of Topzawa, near Kirkuk, on their
way to remote execution sites that even now have yet
to be found. Still, March 16, 1988, managed to
create a new standard in cruelty. It marked a
defining turning point in the history of the Kurdish
people.
We must ask ourselves how it was
that the truth of Halabja was so long denied by much
of the world. And how was it that its perpetrator
managed to escape justice for more than 15 years?
These are important questions to answer if we are to
prevent the next Halabja. As with other genocides,
we must do our best to make good on the words "never
again."
The horror of Halabja, the
sickening pictures of children murdered by chemical
weapons, should have forced world leaders to
question whether Saddam was just another leader to
be dealt with in the world's geo-strategic chess
game. Instead, most capitals responded with denial
or equivocation. The murder of thousands of
innocents was minimized and marginalized so as not
to disrupt relations with Saddam.
The route of silence was also
embraced by numerous Middle Eastern pundits -- the
same men who denounced the liberation of Iraq but
rarely found a bad word to utter about Saddam. The
late Edward Said, the Columbia University professor
widely lionized for his support of the Palestinian
cause, cast doubt on Saddam's use of chemical
weapons at Halabja. One former CIA analyst, Stephen
Pelletierre, made a career of spouting propaganda on
Saddam's behalf. Pelletierre most recently plied his
shameful trade in a New York Times op-ed that
attempted to blame Iran for Halabja. Not
surprisingly, al-Jazeera has recently peddled
similar lies.
A brave few, from across the
political spectrum, told the truth. Organizations
such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch,
Medecins Sans Frontieres and Physicians for Human
Rights spared no effort on behalf of Halabja's
victims. The same was true of writers such as
William Safire, Christopher Hitchens, Michael
Ignatieff, Edward Mortimer and Gwynne Roberts.
Politicians and personalities such
as U.S. Senators Claiborne Pell, Jesse Helms and Al
Gore, British MP Anne Clywd, Madame Danielle
Mitterrand and Dr. Bernard Kouchner stood up for the
victims with compassion and outrage. In the United
States, Dr. Najmaldin Karim, and Ambassador Peter
Galbraith, then a congressional staffer, battled the
indifference of the foreign policy elite.
The Halabja genocide perfectly
reflected Ba'athism. Like Nazism, which inspired the
early Baathists, Saddam's ideology embraced ethnic
cleansing. Just as the Nazis planned to change the
ethnic map of Eastern Europe by exterminating Jews
and decimating Poles, and by dispatching Germans to
colonize newly conquered territories, Baathists
sought to wipe out the Kurds who inconveniently
lived near Iraq's northern borders.
Indeed, the Holocaust, the
greatest crime in human history, was the ideal to
which the Baathists aspired. If they could have, the
Baathists would have eliminated not only the Kurds,
but also everyone else who opposed their fascistic
Arab nationalist ideology. Saddam's uncle and
political mentor, Khairullah Talfah, was a Nazi
sympathizer who wrote a pamphlet entitled Three Whom
God Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews and
Flies. This manifesto of hate was reissued by Saddam
Hussein in 1981. Indeed, the gassing of Halabja and
other Kurdish communities is now known to have been
part of a larger experiment to test the
effectiveness of Saddam's poisons.
In Iraq today, we are determined
to create a pluralistic nation in which such crimes
are unthinkable. That is why we voted in such large
numbers on Jan. 30 -- because we are determined to
create a democracy, because we will never again
allow the power of the state to be vested in the
hands of a dictator.
The mission of Iraq's Kurds is to
remind Iraq and the world of the crime of Halabja,
and by doing so to show what can happen when evil is
permitted to flourish.
Howar Ziad is Iraq's ambassador to
Canada. This essay is adapted from a speech
delivered on March 16 at Carleton University in
Ottawa.
