STORIES
It really is a disturbing image. A young woman with her head swathed in bandages and dressed in black Islamic clothing lies by some steps clutching her little child. The baby is clothed in white, its face twisted back in pain, mouth open. Both have died from deadly nerve gas. The picture was snapped by Iranian photojournalist Kaveh Golestan, shortly after the town of Halabja had been bombed by air-to-ground chemical weapons. The mother and child were Kurds. It is perhaps the most powerful image depicting the bloody reign of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein (1938-2006).
The Kurdish people are the largest ethnic group in the world to have no official home land. At present they occupy eastern Turkey, northern Iraq and western Iran, and have been fighting for their independence for centuries. Many Kurds have formed the unofficial state of ‘Independent Kurdistan’ based in northern Iraq in the last few years, and have so far managed to avoid much of the chaos and bloodshed that has blighted Iraq following the American-led invasion of March 2003.
The most serious threat to the Kurds during the 1980’s came from Saddam Hussein, the brutal dictator of Iraq. When he went to war against Iran in September 1980, Kurdish militia thought they could use the situation to their advantage. By 1988, the Kurds had a guerrilla army of some 60,000 men controlling around 4,000 square miles of territory. And they were actively engaged in helping the Iranian war effort. This was causing Saddam’s Baghdad-based Baathist regime some problems, as suppressing the Kurds diverted men from the battlefront. As early as 1983, Saddam had begun using chemical weapons (mustard gas, nerve gas and cyanide) against the Iranians. Then, in April 1987, he began to use them against the Kurds.
The chief architect of chemical warfare in Iraq was Ali Hasan al-Majid, known in the west as ‘Chemical Ali’, and a cousin of Saddam himself. Ali was keen to experiment with his new nerve gas agents, purchased from several nations including the USA, Germany, Britain, France and China. The Anfal campaign was a deliberate policy of genocide against the Kurds by the Baathist government in Baghdad during the final phase of the Iran-Iraq war. The first place Ali chose to hit was Balisan, a village of around 250 households including two schools and four mosques and a population of 1,750 people.
It was drizzling in the late afternoon of 16 April when the people of Balisan returned home from the fields. The women were preparing dinner when they heard the sinister drone of approaching aircraft. They thought they knew what was coming. Some stayed in their houses whilst others dashed to makeshift air-raid shelters. Dozens of military aircraft then appeared overhead, dropping bombs on Balisan and Sheikh Wasan, a smaller settlement of 150 houses a few kilometres to the northeast.
As the bombs hit the ground and exploded, there were muffled explosions. This was bloody history in the making. Until then, no government had ever used chemical bombs against its own civilian population. Video footage shows towering columns and broad drifting clouds of white, grey and pinkish smoke. A cool breeze blowing in off the nearby mountains carried the deadly gas into the villages. Some said the gas smelt like roses, apples and garlic; others say it was pungent, like powerful insecticide.
Villages close to the impact died instantly as a dark fog descended over Balisan. Others became blind and vomited as their faces turned black. Many ran to the mountains and died there slowly. A second wave of bombers followed up the first attack an hour later and the next day Iraqi troops entered Balisan wearing gas masks. They looted the deserted homes before army engineers dynamited the two villages and bulldozers raked over the remains, effectively wiping the locations off the map of Iraq. Chemical Ali’s first experiment in deadly reprisal was marked up in Baghdad as a complete operational success.
The biggest assault on the Kurds was a hit on the Iraqi town of Halabja almost a year later on 16 and 17 March 1988. Halabja (population 60,000) was at the time held by Iranian troops and Iraqi Kurdish ‘peshmerga’ militia then allied to Tehran. Throughout the eight-year war, Iran had supplied the Iraqi Kurdish rebels with safe havens and military aid.
This attack was defined as an act of genocide by Human Rights Watch and is certainly the largest-scale chemical weapons attack against a civilian population in modern times. Yet it passed largely unnoticed by much of the western world at the time, perhaps because covert agencies of US President Ronald Reagan were actively aiding Saddam in his war campaign against Iran. In the immediate aftermath of the incident, the US State Department instructed its diplomats to state that Iran was to blame for the chemical attack. And for a while, many in the west believed this cynical lie.
On 13 March 1988, Halabja came under three days of conventional shelling by Iranian artillery units just over the border. The Iraqi forces there pulled back, leaving the town open on 15 March. The Baghdad regime could have reinforced the garrison, but did not. ‘Chemical Ali’ was now ready for his gas attack.
It began early on the evening of 16 March, when eight aircraft began dropping chemical bombs on the town. The planes emptied their payloads; flew back to Baghdad to re-arm and refuel and returned to hit the town again. The chemical bombardment continued all night. It was later learned that the attack on Halabja 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.
A survivor described what happened: “I got some gas in my eyes and had trouble breathing. I wanted to vomit and when I did, the vomit was green.” He said that he passed hundreds of dead bodies as he tried to find the nearest hospital. Those around died in a number of ways, suggesting a combination of toxic chemicals. Some just dropped dead, while others “died laughing.” Still others took minutes to die, first “burning and blistering” as they coughed up green vomit.
Recalling the horrifying scenes at Halabja, Kaveh Golestan described the sight to Guy Dinmore of the ‘Financial Times’. He was about eight kilometres (5 miles) outside the town in a military helicopter when several MiG-23 fighter-bombers flew past, heading straight for Halabja. “It was not as big as a nuclear mushroom cloud, but several smaller ones; it featured thick smoke,” he said. Later he was profoundly shocked by the mounds of corpses on his arrival in the town, though he had seen gas attacks before during the deadly war between Iran and Iraq.
He relates, “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. I went into a kitchen and 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 helicopter. They had sixteen beautiful children, begging us to take them to hospital. All the press party sat in the machine and each was handed a child to carry to medical aid. As we took off, fluid came out of the mouth of the little girl in my lap and she died in my arms.”
Before the war ended Iraqi forces moved in on the ground and destroyed much of the town, using dynamite to blow up the buildings and bulldozers to level the ground.
Just who had sold Saddam Hussein this poison he used against his own people? By far, the largest suppliers of precursors for chemical weapons production were Singapore (4,515 tons), The Netherlands (4,261 tons), Egypt (2,400 tons), India (2,343 tons) and the former nation known as West Germany (1,027 tons). An 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 the United Arab Emirates, supplied more than 4,500 tons of VX, sarin, and mustard gas precursors and production equipment to the Baathist regime in Baghdad.
However, a preliminary Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) study at the time concluded, (apparently by defining the chemicals used by looking at images of the victims), that in fact IRANIAN military forces were responsible for the gas attack on Halabja. This assessment was used subsequently by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 1988 until late 1990.
The CIA’s senior political analyst for the Iran-Iraq war, Stephen C Pelletiere, co-authored an unclassified analysis of the war, which contained a brief summary of the DIA study and its key points. Then after Saddam invaded Kuwait in August 1990, the CIA suddenly altered its position radically and cited the chemical bombing of Halabja by Iraqi forces frequently in its evidence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) held by Iraq to bolster reasons for the US-led invasion. Coalition forces, led by the powerful American military machine, later invaded Iraq in March 2003.
Joost Hilterman, principal researcher for Human Rights Watch from 1992 to 1994, conducted a two-year study, including a field investigation in northern Iraq, which managed to seize crucial Iraqi government documents. This research concluded that there were numerous other gas attacks perpetrated against the Kurds by the Iraqi armed forces under Saddam Hussein. This research culminated in the publication of ‘Iraqi’s Crime of Genocide: The Anfal Campaign against the Kurds’ by G Black, (Yale University Press, 1995).
In December 2005, a Dutch court sentenced a man named Frans van Anraat to 15 years in prison. He was a Dutch businessman who bought deadly chemicals on the world market and sold them to Saddam’s regime during the 1980’s. The court even ruled that Saddam Hussein committed genocide against the civilian population of Halabja; a bold claim that the rest of the world was somehow reluctant to echo.
Amazingly, when Saddam and his fellow officers went on trial in 2005, none of them were charged by the ‘Iraqi Special Tribunal for Crimes against Humanity’ for the chemical attacks on Halabja. However, the Iraqi prosecutors had ‘five hundred documented baskets of crimes during the Hussein regime’ and Saddam Hussein himself was condemned based on just one case.
On 18 December 2006, Saddam Hussein addressed the court, saying, “In relation to Iran, if any military or civil official claims that I gave orders to use either conventional or ‘special ammunition’, which as explained is chemical, I will take responsibility with honour. But I will not discuss any act committed against our people and any Iraqi citizen, whether Arab of Kurdish. I do not accept any insult to my principles or to me personally as President of Iraq.”
On the 2006 anniversary of the gas attack (16 March 2006), violent demonstrations erupted in Halabja against the Kurdish administration. An estimated 7,000 demonstrators protested against priorities in reconstruction, claiming that party bosses did not care about the on-going problems of the gas attack survivors. Roadblocks were set up and the gas attack Memorial Museum was set on fire. Police retaliated by firing on protesters, killing one 14-year-old boy and wounding many others.
After a hasty trial, ‘Chemical Ali’ (Ali Hassan al-Majid) was sentenced to death by an Iraqi court on 24 June 2007 for ordering the deaths of over 180,000 people during the Anfal campaign. Ali was stoic throughout. “Praise be to God. Let’s go!” he responded dismissively when the sentence was read out to him.
Saddam Hussein went to the gallows in Baghdad on 30 December 2006, exchanging taunts and insults with his masked Iraqi executioners. Illicit video footage taken on a cell phone camera showed his death in shaky but graphic detail. Few in the west mourned the death of this dreadful man, but his end was a shabby and squalid affair considering the high moral ground taken by the USA, which under President George Walker Bush has continued an enormously expensive military occupation of Iraq, both in terms of human lives and finance.
“This was an illegal invasion which was never sanctioned by the United Nations”, says one UN observer. “The USA and other western countries actively aided Saddam during the 1980’s in his brutal suppression of the Kurds. Now what remains of the coalition forces are desperately holding the lid down on civil war in Iraq between well-armed militias of the Sunnis and Shiites. This invasion, based on deliberately falsified intelligence and founded on lies, will define Bush’s presidency, and I doubt if history will be kind to him.
“When Saddam’s Weapons of Mass D could not be found at any of the 943 defined sites; Bush justified his invasion by claiming that ‘regime change’ had in fact been his principle aim all along. ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ was also obliquely claimed to be a reprisal for the 9/11 attack on the USA, even though there is no evidence to indicate that Saddam’s admittedly brutal regime was linked in any way to Al Qaeda operations against secular western countries.
“At first, the conquering forces of the west were hailed as liberators, but that feeling soon soured. The vast majority of Iraqis resent having western-style democracy forced on them at gunpoint in an area of the world surrounded by dictatorships. Meantime, millions of refugees fleeing the appalling violence have poured into neighbouring countries like Iran, Syria and Jordan, creating a vast strain on aid missions and other charitable organisations.
“But what does President Bush care? After creating this mess all he has to do is hand it over to whoever succeeds him as the next American President in January 2009.”
IF YOU need a check on my True Crime series of stories, published in the Hua Hin Observer, here is a complete list to date:
April 2002 -The Green Bicycle case, 1921. May 2002 - The Craig/Bentley Case, 1952. June 2002 - The A6 Murder Case, 1961. July 2002 - Murder of the Earl of Errol, 1941. August 2002 - The O J Simpson murder trial, 1995. September 2002 - The Aileen Wuornos case, 1989. October 2002 - The Ronald Opus case, 1993. November 2002 - Madame X, 1929. December 2002 - The Spree Killer, 1984. January 2003 - Shootout at Smiths' Club, 1966. February 2003 - The Christine Dryland case, 1991. March 2003 - Poisoned Pie in Essex, 1982. April 2003 - The Heydrich assassination, 1943. May 2003 - The Diana Davidson Murder case, 1969. June 2003 - The death of Alkibiades, 404 BC. July 2003 - The headsman of Colmar, 1780. August 2003 - The Ruth Ellis case, 1955. September 2003 - The Mel Jones Murder case, 1975. October 2003 - The Bluebeard of the bath, 1915. November 2003 - Murder in a combat zone, 1966. December 2003 - The Barn Restaurant murder case, 1972. January 2004 - The assassination of JFK, 1963. February 2004 - Judge Falcone and the Mafia, 1992. March 2004 - Gilles de Rais/Bluebeard, 1404-1440. April 2004 - The hand in the sand case, 1885. May 2004 - The body in the bag, 1979
Curbing the global arms bazaar
By Alan Boyd
An ambitious arms-control initiative is under the gun from a new generation of manufacturers as negotiators race the clock to secure a global agreement that will keep conventional weapons out of the hands of extremists.
A deadline for the adoption of the United Nations’ Arms Trade Treaty expired recently with China expected to lead a Third World revolt against tougher controls. And it may have found an unlikely ally in the United States.
When support for the pact was first tested in the UN General Assembly in December, the US was the only one of 178 participating countries opposed. China and 24 other countries abstained.
Under a compromise deal, negotiators were given until April 30 to present their cases for a treaty that would impose a more responsible marketing code on arms manufacturers and distributors, especially in volatile developing countries.
Britain, France, Germany and Spain, four of the biggest weapons dealers, have said they will vote in favor. But the coalition of non-government organizations (NGOs) and human-rights activists behind the treaty is more worried about the emerging proliferation of smaller producers.
There are an estimated 1,300 arms companies in almost 100 countries vying for a US$1 trillion market that sells eight million new weapons each year. A decade ago there were far fewer manufacturers, and they had a totally different motivation.
“Arms sales have traditionally been packaged as part of foreign-policy or national-security objectives ... this was certainly the case during the Cold War years, but now there is more of an economic motivation,” said a diplomat involved in arms-control negotiations.
“Naturally, it becomes harder to find common ground for a treaty when you have so many countries with an economic stake. This is a situation that is harder to control, as there is the risk they may have fewer scruples in selling to what I would consider to be unstable regimes.”
The US, Britain, France, Germany and Russia collectively account for about 85% of global arms sales, with China next in the rankings. US firms alone cornered $14 billion of the market in 2005, three times more than any other country.
But since 1990 the number of new firms in the top 100 manufacturers has more than doubled. India and South Korea now have three companies each on the list, Israel four and Singapore one. Data on Chinese producers are not released, but three are believed to be of this scale.
Arms Without Borders, a study released by non-government organizations last year, reported that participation of Asian countries at a regional defense exhibition between 1999 and 2006, one gauge of increased production activity, rose threefold.
There were 17 Indian manufacturers at the Kuala Lumpur show in 2006, up from zero in 1999. Malaysia had 55 representatives (increasing from 36 in 1996) and South Korea 15 (eight in 1996).
“While these figures do not necessarily equate to increased defense sales from emerging producers, they do clearly show a trend of increasing numbers of companies from non-traditional arms exporting countries seeking a foothold in the global arms market,” the report noted.
What worries arms-control advocates is that many of the Third World countries lack explicit criteria or guidelines for authorizing arms transfers that comply with the source nation’s obligations under international law.
A raft of UN legislation negotiated since the 1990s with support from the European Union, Organization of American States and other bodies already bans the sale of weapons to countries with records of human-rights abuses. Regional codes of conduct specifically blacklist unstable regimes such as Myanmar and North Korea.
But the standards are not binding and are applied inconsistently. Often they are not incorporated into national laws, while some emerging arms-exporting countries have not signed up to any of the measures.
Sophisticated weapons are still reaching pariah countries. A report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute on arms sales between 1995 and 2005 reveals that North Korea was supplied by Russia, China and Kazakhstan in defiance of US and European embargoes. The North Koreans then adapted and modified these technologies for their own defense industries, making shipments in the same period to Yemen, Pakistan, Iran, Libya and Myanmar.
Pakistan was able to secure tons of weapons in the same period from no fewer than 14 countries, including China, Indonesia, the US, France, Germany, Russia and Sweden, despite concerns that many would be positioned on the tense Kashmiri frontier with India. Included in the shipments were surface-to-air and anti-ship missiles, frigates, helicopters, fighter jets, heavy artillery and torpedoes.
India was the world’s biggest recipient of arms in 1975-2005, ahead of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Turkey, Japan, Iran, Taiwan, Egypt, Libya and Greece. And it had some of the same suppliers as Pakistan - the US, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Russia - as well as Israel, Singapore, South Africa, Italy, South Korea and Poland.
About 40% of Asia’s $8 billion worth of weapons came from the US in 2005, with Russia supplying 24%, France 17%, Britain 7% and China 3%. In the Middle East, which got $12 billion of arms in the same year, the US supplied 46%, Britain 27%, France 11%, Russia 4% and China 0.8%.
India became one of the first suppliers to break openly with global arms controls when it scrapped a blacklist of “sensitive” states in 2002. Its manufacturers have since started exporting to Myanmar and Sudan, which are both under UN and European Union arms embargoes.
However, it is not only unscrupulous Third World countries that are adding to the stockpile of 640 million weapons. Nearly half of all weapons sold to developing countries come from the US, compared with 15% for Russia and 13% for Britain.
A study by the World Policy Institute found that the United States had transferred weaponry to 18 of the 25 countries involved in an ongoing war, while more than half of the buyers were defined as undemocratic by the US State Department’s annual Human Rights Report.
Washington usually justifies the sales as part of its “war on terrorism”, though many suspect it has a deeper goal of checking the expanding military power of China.
Significantly, the Pentagon is selling the F-16 fighter jet - a weapon that is regarded as having a strategic role in arsenals and is usually made available only to close allies - to both Pakistan and its bitter rival India.
“F-16s with advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles are not for fighting al-Qaeda. They are for fighting India,” Wade Bouse, research director at the Arms Control Association, said after the Pakistani deal went through. “We are creating our own market by selling to both sides of regional conflicts.”
Nonetheless, the US is likely to continue blocking arms-control initiatives as long as the anti-terrorism campaign and containment of China form the basis of its foreign-policy strategy.
There is also a domestic agenda at play: Americans own 220 million guns, nearly enough for every man, woman and child in the country and one-third of all small arms in circulation. Political leaders are unwilling to support controls that might undermine electoral support.
The UN treaty seeks to plug loopholes that allow suppliers to circumvent shipment rules by simply changing a product’s specifications or sending it from an offshore distributor.
Selling weapons as unassembled kits or in a piecemeal fashion is legal, while manufacturers often supply blacklisted countries by allowing others to assemble them under license. They are marked as originating from the country of the assembler.
Legal frameworks have not kept pace with technical advances in weaponry, with essentials such as engines and electronics often not appearing on exporters’ lists of sensitive equipment that is banned from sale.
In the study Arms Without Borders, it was reported that China was able to skirt a European and North American ban on the supply of military helicopters because the prohibition only referred to the shipment of “whole” units. Now known as the Z-10, the helicopter was manufactured from components built at separate plants in the US, Britain and Canada.
Tellingly, only a third of the weapons in circulation are being used by armed services or law-enforcement agencies in the countries that buy them.
As many as 6.4 million weapons are in the hands of militants, including terrorists, with some put to use in the two dozen conflicts under way throughout the world, including ethnic strife in Sri Lanka, the Indonesian archipelago and Myanmar, and insurgencies in the Philippines and southern Thailand.
The main victims are civilians: Oxfam, a British NGO, has estimated that at least 300,000 people a year are killed by portable weapons such as handguns, rifles, grenades and bombs.
“We are at a point in history where many of these sales are not essential for the self-defense of these countries and the arms being sold continue to fuel conflicts and tensions in unstable areas,” Daryl G Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association in Washington, said in a 2006 report.
“It doesn’t make much sense over the long term.”
Copyright 2007 www.atimes.com
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