MESOP : HALABJA 2014 – AND THE UNIFINISHED GERMAN CRIME / By Eric Bruneau

 In march 1988, Halabja, a Kurdish town on the Iranian border, found itself on the frontline of the Iran-Iraq war. Saddam Hussein’s army was fighting there both the attacking Iranians and the Kurdish peshmergen (insurgents) of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, then allied against the common foe. To avoid having Halabja falling in enemy hands, the Iraqi dictator ordered an air attack on the town and the 16, his warplanes bombed it with chemical weapons. After the initial onslaught, the planes came back to drop more toxics on the columns of panicked refugees trying to escape towards Iran. There was no military presence in Halabja, the target was its civilian population. It was a terrible collective punishment, in which an estimated 5000 Kurds were gased at once.

 But the actual number of victims is very much higher. There were, at first, the ones who died in the refugees’ camps opened for them in Iran by the authorities.

And there are the ones dying today. For, all observers agree, the death toll keeps rising.

At the Halabja anti-torture centre, a dispensary treating victims of the toxics epanded on the town 26 years ago, therapists say that 2 or 3 of their patients who died in 2013 are time-delayed, but direct, casualties of the 16/03/1988 attack. “They died from the wounds sustained that day.”, are they saying. “Others are still suffering today. For people hit by combat gas like Yperite, used on Halabja, there is no known cure. We can alleviate the pain, prevent their condition to worsen, but we can not bring a solution.”

The doctor Faik Golpy attended casualties of the attack in the refugees’ camps in Iran during two years. “With neurotoxics, like sarin gas, if you survive the initial attack, you have good chances to not sustain permanent damages. It is not the case with Yperite. The substance attacks the flesh. It causes dermatologic problems, affects the eyes, the lungs, the immunitary system, causes genetic anomalies, and blood and skin cancers.”, did he already explain in 2009. “Unlike sarin, Yperite kills slowly. It is a time-delayed death. There is no treatment.”

His assessment is confirmed by the Halabja anti-torture centre staff. “We are confronted to breathing problems, dermatologic ones, breast and uterus cancers, leukemia, and genetic anomalies. The rate for certain kind of cancers can be more than 10 times higher than for a similar population elsewhere.” Azad Mustapha, director of the centre, confirms.”I worked, in the past, in the delivery room in Sulaimaniya’s maternity. One half of lip cleavages we saw came from Halabja.” “There is more.”, says the centre’s psychiatrist. “The psychological problems, which until now have not been addressed. 80% of the victims of the chemical strike are confronted to psychological troubles. It is what we call PTSD (post Traumatic Stress Syndrom). It translates by: low self-esteem, depression, unprovoked anger, paranoia or even schizoid tendencies, loss of interest. The problem is that psychological treatment is very new in Kurdistan, very alien to our society. People do not admit they have a problem because they fear to be perceived as mad. As a result they keep their problems inside themselves. It is what we call negative insight.”

Not unlike the genetic anomalies, the psychological troubles are transmitted to Halabja’s new generation. “We attended a seminar in Germany”, says the centre’s psychiatrist. “It was about transgenerational transmission of trauma and violence: second generation victims. Very useful for us.” In 10/2013, does he say, there was an incident in a village nearby. Some people were contaminated when moving corpses from a mass grave.

http://www.basnews.com/en/News/Details/Halabja-Mass-grave-spreads-cancer/3608

“From the wounds, we think it was Yperite, but we are not sure. The villagers who were not directly affected experienced flashbacks: they lived again what they endured during the chemical strike. We sent a mobile team there and were able to treat the casualties, both physical and psychological.”

 This incident is not the first of this kind, and is probably not the last. Some of the bombs did not explode during the air attack, but buried themselves in the ground. Their toxic filling is likely to re-surface one day or another. Once or twice, there have been serious alerts.

At the Halabja memorial, at the gates of the town, a guide explains: “The contamination in 10/2013 had its precedents: in 2006, two persons died. And in 2011, a non-exploded ordnance was discovered in town. An American team had to come to dispose of it.” 

In 01/2014, the German parliamentarian Jan Van Aken came to Halabja. A former UN inspector for biological weapons, he went there to have a picture of the effects the 16/03/1988 attack has on the nowaday’s population. “I want”, he wrote in an e-mail, “that anyone having illegally exported precursors for Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons and biological weapons programmes in the 1980s be convicted of crime against humanity, as it happened in Netherland. It is my demand to the German parliament.”

Herr Van Aken here points to a disturbing issue: the help Western powers, eager to counter Iran’s revolutionary regime, gave to Saddam Hussein, encouraging him in his war against the feared Ayatollahs.

And not taking care about what it would imply.

In 1982, USA withdrew Iraq from their list of states supporting terrorism, so allowing hundreds of millions of dollars to be sent to support Iraq’s agricultural policy. It could sound anecdotic. But agricultural development includes the use of pesticides, whose manufacture follows the same steps than the ones for manufacture of chemical weapons.

If Herr Van Aken brings the issue of the help provided to Saddam Hussein to build his extermination arsenal in front of the Bundestag, it is because German industries were deeply involved.

When general al-Saadi, in charge with Project 922, Iraq’s chemical weapons programme, prospected to find technicians and suppliers of chemical precursors for nerve agents, he met several refusals across europe. But in Germany he met positive answers. There was there third reich nostalgics who considered Saddam Hussein, then presenting himself as the champion of Arab nationalism, as a strong leader along which they could pursue their unfinished task: the chemical weaponry they would help to build could one day be turned against Israel ( http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13487404.html ) .

The connections between Arab nationalism and nazism were not a new thing: German scientists who had been working for the third reich were hired by Nasser to work at the “factory 333”, where Egypt was developping rocket technology, to provide itself the means to hit Israeli territory. The Iraqi putschist officers in 1941 were admirators of Adolf Hitler, who intended to send them aid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%BChrer_Directive_No._30 ), and whose codename amongst them was “Abu Ali”. And, after the war, some nazi war criminals became welcomed “advisors” for some Arab totalitarian regimes, like Alois Brunner, who was sheltered by the Syrian dictatorship.

In the case of Project 922, these noxious sympathies proved useful. Unrepentant third reich supporters could reasonably expect the Iraqi dictator to one day use his new toxic weapons against the jewish state: in 1981, an Israeli air raid had destroyed the Osirak nuclear plant, reducing to nothing Saddam’s nuclear ambitions. nOther German companies acted out of business interest. Dieter Backfisch, a director of one of the companies involved, the Karl Kolb GmbH, is quoted to have said: “For people in Germany poison gas is something quite terrible, but this does not worry customers abroad.”

And the help provided proved to be efficient. It is the Karl Kolb, precisely, which supervised the building of a very particular “pesticide factory” south of Baghdad. Another factory was built in Samara, close to Saddam’s own fiefdom Tikrit. These “pesticide production facilities” were set in bunkers able to resist air attacks, and defended by AA missile batteries; the German engineers were under the protection of the Iraqi secret services. It is estimated that 52% of the international help Iraq received to build his chemical weapons came from Germany alone. France provided 21%, and other european countries supplied shells and rockets which could be filled with toxic agents.

Halabja has been the direct victim of these criminal plans. The combat gas used to stop the Iranian human waves threatening to overwhelm Iraqi lines, or which some were thinking to be used against Israel, were ultimately turned against the Kurds. At Halabja, but too during the Anfal campaign, a military operation directed against Kurd civilians, which saw the systematic use of chemical weapons.

Herr Van Aken consider that the responsabilities of the Western countries in this tragedy must now be assumed, hence his demand to the Bundestag. The sentences given in precedent prosecutions were, in his own terms, “rather lame”. He wants firmer sentences, and cites the case of the Dutch businessman Frans Van Anraat, condemn to a 15-year prison sentence by a Dutch court the 23/12/2005, which recognised the Halabja attack as “genocide”

And today, in nearby Syuria, chemical weapons have been used again. Outside the Halabja anti-torture centre, a large banner was calling to a protest. Staff members are aware of the long term effects the summer 2013 attack, and the more recent one, are likely to have, and try to mobilise attention. “The German government authorised the export of controlled chemicals (sarin precursors and differnet kind of fluorides) to the al-Assad/Syrian regime from 2000 to 2011.”, writews again Herr Van Aken. “We do not know what companies are involved, the federal government refuses to disclose their names.”