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Saddam's WMDs: The 20th Anniversary of the Halabja Gassing |
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Wednesday, 22 August 2007 |
War is madness. War is one of civilized man's most obtuse inventions. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn’t know war or violence, but Homo sapiens invented war and fell in love with it and have ever since been constantly improving its technologies and its methods. The technologies modern man discovered varied over the many centuries, man was at war with his fellow sapiens and one the most bizarre discoveries was weapons of mass destruction and especially the chemical weapons. Chemical weapons were used many centuries ago by primitive tribes here and there when they were able to improve the deadly efficiency of their arrows by adding to the tips of their arrows some plant derivatives they were known to be poisonous which proved to be very useful during their conflicts with other tribes! The first application of chemistry in warfare in modern times was the use of Chlorine gas during the so called trench wars between the Germans and the allies during the First World War in the second battle of Ypres in 1915, later on phosgene and mustard gas were used. More recently the obvious and strongest advocate of weapons of mass destruction was Saddam Hussein.
Saddam Hussein's fascination with weaponry stems from his very early association with them. He believed that his survival against known or imagined enemies was greatly helped by having them. Before he was ten years old he was carrying a large metal bar that he used to heat to a red point and attack with it the small stray animals that were unfortunate enough to appear in his trail during his wanderings, during the long nights in the desert when his family were asleep. A little later he was given a revolver by a relative, a nomad who was living nearby who was greatly impressed by the boy's enthusiasm with deadly weapons and his readiness to use them. Saddam’s infatuation with all sorts of weapons reached absurd levels when he came to power. Saddam was actually and from the first days of the second Baathist party, took over of the government and was in charge of the most important institution of the state, the army. With his capitulation in 1975 in Algiers when had to accept very humiliating demands by the late Shah of Iran for his agreeing [the Shah] to stop Iran's support for the Kurdish rebellion which was becoming an increasing and a very serious threat to the survival of his regime. Saddam had to capitulate but he started to plan his revenge the very same day. He returned home and initiated a massive program of modernizing and equipping his army with all sorts of weapons including weapons of mass destruction.
A program to acquire WMDs was started on a small scale in 1975 and continued and expanded almost without stopping until only few months before the end of Saddam’s era. This infatuation with the WMDs was for two main reasons, it was very good for his ego, imagine the first Arab leader who would be sitting on an atomic bomb. Secondly this program was created from technologies that were bought secretly from the black market. Iraq was at different times under different kinds of sanctions which prevented them from acquiring certain items needed for certain industrial uses but the black market was always there but everything from that source was at least four times the normal price of any item. The difference in price goes to the pockets of the middlemen and the huge commissions, which the leader demanded from the suppliers. Saddam's experiment with the WMDs cost Iraq over the years 200 billions dollars. This was not for scientific purposes Saddam used them against the Iranians during the Iran Iraq war and against his own people.
The Kurds were not the only victims of Saddam's chemical arsenal, Iranian troops had been subjected to gas attacks on many occasions during the long Iran Iraq war as early as 1982. The Iranians used a very suicidal technique against the huge minefields that were used by the Iraqis to strengthen their defenses, the technique was sending tens of thousands of old and young people waking over the deadly fields which was retaliated by the Iraqis using artillery and air power very often that was not enough to stop the Iranians who were in a hurry to meet the lord, they have been promised by the mullahs in Tehran that if they die they would go directly to heaven, so every wave of would be martyrs was followed by another bigger one until the Iraqi weapons jammed so they were now being treated by gas. Against the Kurds gas was used in May of 1987 when dozens of Kurdish villages were attacked in attempt to deter the population in Kurdistan from collaborating with the Iranians who were then advancing very menacingly towards Iraqi territories. The attacks were also aimed at areas in the north were the Kurdish fighters, the peshmerga had training camps. The most appalling attack against the Kurds took place in March 19, 1988 when an attack of an unprecedented scale was carried out against the city of Halabja.
Halabja is a relatively small town in Iraqi Kurdistan near the Iranian border with a population twenty years ago at around 40,000. It is situated in one of the most fertile valleys in northern Iraq, Halabja was attacked on March 19, 1988 by waves of Iraqi warplanes showering it by a mixture of mustard gas, Tabun, Sarin and VX which resulted in the immediate death of at least 5,000 men, women and children plus an inestimable number of lost animal life with an additional 15-20 thousand injuries amongst the remaining civilians. Saddam has always denied responsibility for this massacre. This denial has always been refuted by many independent bodies and experts and reporters from regional and the international media who confirmed the crime and witnessed the horrifying piles of dead bodies in the streets and houses very soon after the attack. Today, 20 years after the tragedy a great deal has been done by the Kurdish authorities to remedy the damage. The basic health, education and the other essential services are much better but the tragedy is still remembered in and its consequences are felt in practically every house. Congenital abnormalities are at least four times more than in non-exposed areas, figures about miscarriages and stillbirths are even more alarming, cardiopulmonary disorders, blindness, cancer and Neuro-Psychiatric problems continue to overwhelm the community. The effects of the tragedy are becoming even more difficult to cope with because there is no known treatment for multiple exposures and the technology needed for the scientific study of the problem are not available and the efforts of various organizations to determine the kind of agents used and whether any are still present in the environment had always been disencouraged and hampered when Saddam was in power.
Nothing was said about the attack on Halabja officially, all the arms of the information ministry were silent, but the 8:00 PM program on Iraqi TV showed the president inspecting the work which was undertaken to restore the remains of the historical city of Babylon which is located near the extant city, al-Hillah. Babylon was built by Hamurabi but was later on destroyed, was rebuilt by Nebuchadnezzar who used to inscribe his name on the bricks, which were used to rebuild the famous city that was initially built by Hamurabi. Saddam was smiling happily and was very satisfied by the work, which was carried out by his masons. Saddam was emulating the practice of the old hero, he was insisting that his name should be inscribed on every brick used in the reconstruction so that the world a thousand years hence would know who rebuilt Babylon again. There was a very senior British colleague with me that night in my house who was on a short visit of consultations, operating and teaching, we were listening the two of us to a detailed account on the Halabja attack given by the BBC world service which was describing incredible scenes of loss of life of humans and animals who were frozen to death in few seconds, my friend stared at me and for few seconds then he said, “what cold blood and what a tragedy.”
If Halabja was a tragedy then it was not the only one, which the unfortunate Iraqis have suffered under Saddam during his 35 years of tyranny. When Iraq and its people were subjected to a terrible rule which resulted in a lot of death and destruction and impoverishment and it was hoped that with his demise the Iraqis should have learned some lessons from that terrible period but it is becoming increasingly evident that our people have not learned any lessons from that nightmare. This inability to learn from history is to a large extent responsible for the new nightmare Iraq is languishing in now.
Najeeb Hanoudi
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Amman/Jordan
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