Halabja massacre
The Halabja poison gas attack was an incident on 15 March-19 March 1988 during a major battle in the Iran-Iraq War when chemical weapons were used by the Iraqi government forces to kill a number of people in the Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja (population 80,000). Estimates of casualties range from several hundred to 7,000 people. Halabja is located about 150 miles northeast of Baghdad and 8-10 miles from the Iranian border.
The attack
Almost all current accounts of the incident regard Iraq as the party responsible for the gas attack, which occurred during the Iran-Iraq War. The war between Iran and Iraq was in its eighth year when, on March 16 and 17, 1988, Iraq dropped poison gas on the Kurdish city of Halabja, then held by Iranian troops and Iraqi Kurdish guerrillas allied with Tehran; throughout the war, Iran had supplied the Iraqi Kurdish rebels with safe haven and other military support.
The poison gas attack on the Iraqi town of Halabja was the largest-scale chemical weapons (CW) attack against a civilian population in modern times. It began early in the evening of March 16, when a group of eight aircraft began dropping chemical bombs, and the chemical bombardment continued all night. The Halabja attack involved multiple chemical agents, including mustard gas, and the nerve agents sarin, tabun and VX. Some sources have also pointed to the blood agent hydrogen cyanide.
Discovery
The first images after the attack were taken by Iranian journalists who later spread the pictures in Iranian newspapers. Some of those first pictures were taken by the Pulitzer Prize awarded Iranian photographer Kaveh Golestan.
Recalling the scenes at Halabja, Kaveh described the scene to Guy Dinmore of the Financial Times. He was about eight kilometres outside Halabja with a military helicopter when the Iraqi MiG-23 fighter-bombers flew in. "It was not as big as a nuclear mushroom cloud, but several smaller ones: thick smoke," he said. He was shocked by the scenes on his arrival in the town, though he had seen gas attacks before during the brutal Iran-Iraq war.
"It was life frozen. Life had stopped, like watching a film and suddenly it hangs on one frame. It was a new kind of death to me. You went into a room, a kitchen and you saw the body of a woman holding a knife where she had been cutting a carrot."
"The aftermath was worse. Victims were still being brought in. Some villagers came to our chopper. They had 15 or 16 beautiful children, begging us to take them to hospital. So all the press sat there and we were each handed a child to carry. As we took off, fluid came out of my little girl's mouth and she died in my arms."
Estabilishing the culprit
The most authoritative investigation into responsibility for the Halabja massacre, by Dr Jean Pascal Zanders, Project Leader of the Chemical and Biological Warfare Project at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) concluded that Iraq was the culprit, and not Iran.
Some debate existed, however, over the question of whether Iraq was really the responsible party. The U.S. State Department, in the immediate aftermath of the incident, instructed its diplomats to say that Iran was partly to blame.
A preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) study at the time concluded, apparently by determining the chemicals used by looking at images of the victims, that it was in fact Iran that was responsible for the attack, an assessment which was used subsequently by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for much of the early 1990's. The CIA's senior political analyst for the Iran-Iraq war, Stephen C. Pelletiere, co-authored an unclassified analysis of the war [1] which contained a brief summary of the DIA study's key points. In a January 31, 2003 New York Times [2] opinion piece, Pelletiere summarized the DIA's findings and noted that because of the DIA's conclusion there was not sufficient evidence to definitively determine whether Iraq or Iran was responsible. Pelletiere also felt that the administration of George W. Bush was not being forthright when squarely placing blame on Iraq, since it contradicted the conclusion of the DIA study. However the DIA's final position on the attack was in fact much less certain than this preliminary report suggests, with its final conclusions, in June 2003, asserting just that there was insufficient evidence, but concluding that "Iraq ..used chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians in 1988" [3]. The CIA altered its position radically in the late 1990s and cited Halabja frequently in its evidence of WMD before the 2003 invasion [4]
Another extensive analysis of the incident is contained in a post [5] to the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq electronic mailing list by Cambridge political theorist Glen Rangwala. Rangwala describes how the attack followed the occupation of the city by Iranian and pro-Iranian forces, leading to the conclusion that the gassing was an attack on these forces by the Iraqis. Rangwala also cites studies done by non-governmental organizations that concluded different chemicals were used than the ones cited in the DIA study. Rangwala's analysis effectively sums up the current prevailing view of the event, that Iraq was indeed responsible for the attack on Halabja, and that the DIA analysis is in error. This evidence backed up by extensive witness testimony gathered by organisations like Human Rights Watch[6] and Indict [7] has, more recently, added to the growing evidence that the initial DIA appraisal of the events was mistaken.
The most categorical proof is the many further well-documented incidents of deliberate attacks on Kurdish civilians occurring at the same time throughout Kurdish northern Iraq also perpetrated without doubt by Iraqi forces during the Al-Anfal Campaign. Joost Hiltermann, who was the principal researcher for the Human Rights Watch between 1992-1994, conducted a 2 year study, including a field investigation in northern Iraq, capturing Iraqi government documents in the process. This research culminated in Iraq's Crime of Genocide: The Anfal Campaign Against the Kurds (by G. Black, Yale Univ. Press, 1995). According to Hiltermann, the literature on the Iran-Iraq war reflects a number of allegations of CW use by Iran, but these are "marred by a lack of specificity as to time and place, and the failure to provide any sort of evidence". (Potter, p.153) He calls these allegations "mere assertions" and adds: "no persuasive evidence of the claim that Iran was the primary culprit was ever presented".(Potter, p.156)
International responsibility
The massacre at Halabja did not raise protests by the international community in March 1988. At the time, it was admitted that the civilians had been killed "collaterally" due to an error in handling the combat gas. Two years later, when the Iran-Iraq War was finished and the Western powers stopped supporting Saddam Hussein, the massacre of Halabja was attributed to the Iraqi government.
According Iraq's report to the UN, the know-how and material for developing chemical weapons were obtained from firms in such countries as: the United States, West Germany, the United Kingdom, France and China.[1] By far, the largest suppliers of precursors for chemical weapons production were in Singapore (4,515 tons), the Netherlands (4,261 tons), Egypt (2,400 tons), India (2,343 tons), and Federal Republic of Germany (1,027 tons). One Indian company, Exomet Plastics (now part of EPC Industrie) sent 2,292 tons of precursor chemicals to Iraq. The Kim Al-Khaleej firm, located in Singapore and affiliated to United Arab Emirates, supplied more than 4,500 tons of VX, sarin, and mustard gas precursors and production equipment to Iraq.[2]
The trial
Neither Saddam Hussein nor Ali Hasan al-Majid (who commanded Iraqi forces in northern Iraq in that period) have been charged by the Iraqi Special Tribunal for crimes against humanity relating to the events at Halabja. The tribunal has made a point of avoiding directly charging President Hussein with the crimes committed at Halabja. Hussein has repeatedly denied the Tribunal's legitimacy (claiming it to be a "play" of American "theatre"), and refused to sign documents reflecting the charges against him during his first public court appearance.
References
- ^ The Independent. Wednesday, 18 December, 2002. U.S. Corps In Iraq.
- ^ See What Iraq Addmitted About its Chemical Weapons Program: http://www.iraqwatch.org/suppliers/nyt-041303.gif
- Lawrence Potter, Gary Sick. Iran, Iraq, and the legacies of war. 2004, MacMillan. ISBN 1-4039-6450-5
Video
See also
External links
- Halabja gas attack and the Al-Anfal campaign, Human Rights Watch
- Eyewitness report from Wildcat no.13 1989
- Lessons Learned: Iran-Iraq War. Army War College unclassified report by Dr. Stephen C. Pelletiere and LTC Douglas V. Johnson II
- Section of a report on Iraq Weapons of Mass destruction program relating to Halabja, CIA
- The 1988 Chemical Weapons Attack on Halabja, Iraq - Christine M. Gosden, Professor of Medical Genetics, University of Liverpool
- A War Crime or an Act of War?," New York Times, January 31, 2003.
- Report on Halabja gas attack, U.S. State Department
- Rumsfeld should know : Who minded Iraqi mustard gas in 1983? International Herald Tribune, discusses the US role of shifting the blame for the gassing of Halabja off of Saddam and onto Iran
- A timeline of US relations with Iraq by Glen Ringwala and Nathaniel Hurd, two human rights researchers at the University of Cambridge