IMAGINE looking down on thousands of little creatures.
And then spraying them with a giant can of Raid. That
is essentially what Saddam Hussein's air force did in
1988, when pilots doused the Kurdish town of Halabja with
a cloud of deadly toxins, including large quantities of
the nerve gas found in household insecticides.
When Hussein and his henchmen finally appear in an
Iraqi courtroom to answer for their war crimes, the Halabja
massacre will be Exhibit A for the prosecution, and the
Kurds who survived his reign of terror will have front
row seats. The question is whether the long-awaited trials
will also expose key American and European officials who
played a role in arming the Iraqi regime with industrial
insecticides and a variety of other deadly components
that the West knew were being used against the Kurds.
Over the years, Halabja survivors have shared with
me the grisly reactions of those who perished. In the
initial moments, I am told, some victims spurted blood
from their ears, some vomited, and others fell down laughing
as they choked to death.
Human rights
monitors say that more than 180,000 Kurds were killed
or "disappeared" in Iraqi Kurdistan in the
1980s, the period when Hussein's regime received billions
of dollars in aid from the West. Halabja is the best-known
of more than 200 sites in northern Iraq where chemicals
were sprayed. A Kurdish doctor I know estimates that 40
percent of Kurdish lands were contaminated. He and others
fear that the "cocktails" of mustard, VX, and sarin gas
used on the Kurds may have caused long-term damage to
the soil and water table.
I have visited
the area frequently since 1991, and residents have repeatedly
raised questions why so many
friends and relatives still suffer from cancers, cleft
palates, stillbirths, miscarriages, and birth defects.
On one Halabja trip, my translator told me that his uncle
died in 1996 after being bitten by a "poison snake" who
had feasted on uncollected corpses that lay on the streets
following the 1988 attack. Such stories make up the grotesque
folklore of Halabja and other contaminated areas of Kurdistan.
No one knows the truth -- because no Western government
or health agency has wanted to spend the money to do comprehensive
soil and water tests. Just as there has been no deep investigation
of Hussein's helpers, little is known about long-term
health hazards to Kurds who still live in these areas.
In both cases, the lack of information increases the risk
that little has been learned and that similar catastrophes
may be repeated.
Some of the
broad outlines of Hussein's US support are known: the
courting of the Iraqi regime by the Reagan-Bush
administration in the early 1980s as a foil against the
Islamic Republic of Iran; Reagan's handwritten letter
to Saddam Hussein soliciting better relations; multiple
visits by special White House envoy Donald Rumsfeld, who
also represented the Bechtel corporate efforts to build
an oil pipeline across Iraq; the administration's decision
to remove the regime of Saddam Hussein--who was known
in those days as the "Butcher of Baghdad" -- from the
list of sponsors of terror; the sworn affidavit of Howard
Teicher, who worked at Reagan's National Security Council,
that the United States actively supported the Iraqi war
effort against Iran by supplying the Iraqis with billions
of dollars of credits, providing military intelligence
and advice to the Iraqis, and closely monitoring arms
sales to Iraq to make sure Iraq had the military weaponry
required, and the fact that Hussein's technicians fitted
some US-made helicopters with nozzles and used them to
spray gas on Kurdish villages.
It appears
that Iraq's use of weapons of mass destruction was known
at the highest levels in Washington. A State
Department official has stated that he informed Secretary
of State George Shultz that Iraq was making "almost daily
use" of chemical weapons against Iranian troops, and evidence
exists that the CIA provided satellite photos to Iraqi
generals that enabled them to pinpoint the positions of
Iranians for chemical attacks.
The Kurds were fighting for their rights in Iraq, but
in the war between the two countries they found themselves
on Iran's side. For the United States, defeating Iran
was all that mattered. Even after chemical weapons were
used on the Kurds, the White House blocked trade sanctions
against Iraq, and the Commerce Department continued to
approve military exports to the brutal regime. The message
to Saddam Hussein couldn't have been clearer: You can
gas the Kurds and get away with it.
The pending
war crimes trials offer Saddam's victims -- and the world
-- the best opportunity to expose political
wrongdoing and to prevent more Halabjas. There is little
doubt that the ex-dictator and his associates will receive
their just deserts. But if prosecutors sidestep the vital
issue of the "aiders and abettors," the 5,000 Kurds sprayed
to death in Halabja and the tens of thousands other victims
-- many of them still struggling today with blindness,
cancers, and birth defects -- will be cheated in their
right to know the real story of this and other Iraqi war
crimes. Without that wider inquiry, the trials may be
seen as a form of "victor's justice."
Kevin
McKiernan, who produced and directed the PBS film "Good Kurds,
Bad Kurds," has covered the war in Iraq for ABC News
and is writing a book about the Kurds.
