By: Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett
As Americans and others around the world note the 10th
anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq (the American military
commenced hostilities on March 20, 2003), it is equally appropriate to
recall another anniversary connected to wars of aggression in the Middle
East—the 25thanniversary of Iraqi chemical weapons attacks
against the town of Halabja, in Iraqi Kurdistan (on March 16, 1988).
For those who want to appreciate what happened at Halabja—and the
context in which it happened—we highly recommend a post by Jean-Pascal
Zanders, Senior Fellow at the European Union Institute for Security
Studies, on Dan Joyner’s excellentArmsControlLaw.com. We append a substantial excerpt from Zander’s excellent post below but highly recommend reading it in its entirety, see here (lihat website: armscontrollaw).
Halabja marked something of a turning
point in the United States’ scandalous support for Saddam Husayn’s war
of aggression against the Islamic Republic—including his use of chemical
weapons against civilian as well as military targets. Ever since the
Iraqi military had started using chemical weapons in 1982 and Iran had
started complaining about it to the United Nations Security Council, the
United States had blocked any Security Council action on the matter.
As we recount in Going to Tehran, UN Secretary General Javier
Perez de Cuellar, acting on his own (because the Security Council
wouldn’t support him), sent six fact-finding teams to investigate Iraq’s
use of chemical weapons between 1984 and 1988. Their reports
consistently confirmed Iran’s charges—and just as consistently, the
United States refused to let the Council act. As then Secretary of
State George Shultz later explained, Washington blocked international
pressure on Iraq to stop using chemical weapons because “you don’t want
Iran to win the war.”
It was only after the Iraqi military was
caught red-handed in a chemical weapons attack on Halabja—again, not
located in Iran, but in Iraqi Kurdistan—that even the United States felt
compelled to let the Council take formal notice. But when it finally
adopted Resolution 612 in May 1988, the Council (at U.S. insistence)
merely condemned “the continued use of chemical weapons in the conflict
between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Iraq,” without specifying who
had been using them, and exhorted “both sides to refrain from the future
use of chemical weapons,” though no credible charges that Iran used
chemical weapons have ever been advanced.”
American complicity in Saddam’s use of
chemical weapons against Iran went beyond protecting Iraq from
international sanction for its violations of international law. As we lay out in Going to Tehran, the
United States took Iraq off the state sponsors of terrorism list so it
could support Saddam’s war of aggression, working with allies to make
sure Iraq had steady supplies of weapons and military
technology—including technology used to produce the chemical munitions
that Iraqi forces used against Iranian targets, and at Halabja.
So read Zander’s post. And if you’re
American, as we are, think about what your country was promoting in its
support for Saddam’s use of chemical weapons—against Iran as well as
against Iraqi Kurds.
–Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett
Thinking of Halabja—25 Years Later Today
Jean-Pascal Zanders
16 March marks the 25th anniversary of
the chemical warfare attacks against the Kurdish town of Halabja. Since
the First World War it was one of the few cases wherein chemical
weapons (CW) were deliberately used against a civilian target. Human
Rights Watch documented over 3,200 deaths and many times that number of
other casualties. Since then, thousands more of people have succumbed
to their injuries or preventable infections affecting organs damaged by
exposure to gas. Many women also suffered extensive genetic damage,
thus passing the consequences of the gas attacks down the generations.
The town of Halabja in northeast Iraq has
become a modern-age symbol condemning chemical warfare. Together with
Ieper, a medieval town in the Belgian province of West Flanders. On 22
April 1915, the day on which scientific research, industrial production
and military art finally found each other, German Imperial troops
released a chlorine cloud from thousands of canisters buried in the
trenches on the northern flank of the Ieper salient. Two years later,
in the night of 12–13 July 1917, the town became associated with the
first use of a new chemical warfare agent—mustard gas (which the French
subsequently called ‘Yperite’). Mustard was also one of Iraq’s agents
of choice against both the Iranians and the Iraqi Kurds.
The Iran–Iraq war lasted twice as long as
the First World War: from 1980 until 1988. Iraqi use of toxic
chemicals against Iranian soldiers was first reported in 1982, but by
the end of 1983 press outlets told of widespread usage of mustard gas
and tabun, a nerve agent. In April of the next year, a UN team of
experts confirmed chemical warfare. From then onwards, Iraqi chemical
attacks escalated, reaching a first peak in 1986 in the southern
marshes. Two years later Iraqi forces had also assimilated CW for
offensive operations and employed them with increasing effectiveness
until Iran’s capitulation on 8 August 1988.
Possibly earlier, but definitively from
1987, Saddam Hussein opened a second chemical front against the Iraqi
Kurds in the north. Names of towns such as Erbil (Hewlêr in Kurdish) in
the north of the country or Penjwin, east of Sulaymaniyah, recurred
frequently in interviews I had with Kurdish Peshmergas coming for a
break to Belgium. They recounted chemical strikes against agrarian
communities in north and east Iraqi Kurdistan. They described how
eating the vegetables from their fields poisoned women and children many
weeks after a CW attack. Unwittingly, they ingested the mustard agent
that had settled on the bottom side of the leaves. The Peshmergas also
depicted bombing raids high in the mountains, after which the mustard
gas rolled down the mountain sides, penetrating deep into any cave
sheltering Kurdish fighters.
About two years later, when listening
again to my recordings from 1987, I recognised another town being
referred to—Helebce, since then better known in the West as Halabja.
The local population had risen up against Saddam Hussein, who brutally
crushed the revolt. Half of the city fled to Iran, about 15 kilometres
to the east, according to the interview. When Kurdish guerillas
fighting alongside Iranian troops ‘liberated’ Halabja on 15 March 1988,
supreme vengeance against an insurrectionary town came the next morning
in the form of a gas cloud. Attacks were to continue until the 18th.
Privately I have always been convinced that the 1987 uprising together
with the ‘betrayal’ of the Iraqi Kurds seeking to break Baathist control
over northeast Iraq with Iranian help in 1988 provoked the
extraordinary escalation of chemical warfare against Kurdish guerillas
and civilians alike. From that perspective, Saddam Hussein’s campaigns
against the Kurds through August and September 1988 merely systematised
the Halabja method on an even grander scale.
Indelible impressions
A few weeks after the attacks against
Halabja, members of the Kurdish community in the Leuven area (where many
Iraqi Kurds stayed with relatives and local acquaintances for a
breather from combat) took me to the Erasmus hospital in Anderlecht,
just outside Brussels. It had accepted four or five victims of chemical
warfare for treatment. One was an Iranian soldier badly affected by
mustard gas; one was a boy aged around five recovering from the chemical
attacks on Halabja; the remainder were farmers from a wide area
surrounding the town…
[M]y Kurdish hosts tore me away from the
Iranian soldier. He was by far the worst victim of gas exposure in the
hospital (he was to die not too long after my visit). His skin looked
blackened where white ointment did not fully hide it. Lesions from the
vesicles covered parts of his body and his difficult, assisted breathing
betrayed internal injuries. A faint, but unforgettable smell of decayed
flesh penetrated the dominant odour of disinfectants. He had fallen
victim to mustard gas outside of Halabja, possibly being one of the
soldiers along whose side the Peshmergas were fighting against Saddam
Hussein. The Kurds, however, did not spare a thought for him…
The other face of Halabja
This incident was my first concrete
exposure to the deep ethnic, cultural and religious cleavages in the
Middle East, difficult to bridge and a perennial source of
misunderstanding and hostility. It also shows why Halabja can never be a
symbol for Iran’s suffering from CW in the way Ieper does for all
chemical warfare during the First World War…
Iran’s own Halabja is called Sardasht (Lihat website: articles.latimes),
a municipality without much military significance across the border
north of Sulaymaniyah. Saddam’s air force hit the town on 28 June 1987,
almost nine months before Halabja. Although initial reports of CW
victims were low, it soon emerged that almost three quarters of a
population of 12,000 had been exposed to the toxicants. Some 130 people
died, most of them civilians. The international press barely noticed
this strike on a target with hardly any military significance.
Sardasht emblemised Iran’s predicament.
The Islamic revolution of 1979 bought the country few friends. With the
hostage taking in the US embassy, pent up anger over Washington’s
unwavering support for the Shah’s repressive regime exploded into the
open. The new leadership also refused rapprochement to the Soviet
Union. Meanwhile it called for Islamic uprisings against the corrupt,
autocratic leaders in the Gulf and beyond. When Iraq invaded its
neighbour, Saddam Hussein presented himself as the bulwark against
Persian territorial designs and Islamic revolutionary fervour. Although
the United States and the USSR found themselves on the same side of the
war; having lost a major regional ally, Washington nevertheless sought
to pry Iraq away from the Soviet sphere of influence. The tide soon
turned against Iraq, but the international community could not afford to
let it lose the war. Such geostrategic calculations were to clash with
international law.
When Saddam Hussein ordered the first
chemical attacks, he breached the 1925 Geneva Protocol. Both Iran and
Iraq had been party to the agreement for many decades. To Iraq, CW were
a force multiplier that arrested the incessant Iranian human wave
attacks when it was about to lose the war. National governments
expressed their outrage, but the UN Security Council, while condemning
the chemical attacks, never specified Iraq as the perpetrator for the
duration of the war with Iran.
Countries adopted national sanctions and
restricted access to certain chemical warfare agents and their
precursors, but, absent a specific designation of responsibility under
international law, applied them to both belligerents. The Geneva
Protocol did not deny Iran the right to retaliate in kind, but
international ‘evenhandedness’ certainly precluded it from achieving a
CW capacity before the war’s end. The international stance had its
moral merit. This, however, did not apply to the refusal to assist Iran
with defensive countermeasures, including gasmasks, decontamination
equipment, other types of individual and collective protection or
prophylaxis. In 1985–86 an Iranian delegate to the Conference on
Disarmament in Geneva even had to travel to several European countries
(including Spain) to procure active charcoal in order to develop
chemical warfare defences in Iran…
Just like Trotsky concluded after
Russia’s capitulation to Germany in 1917, those experiences convinced
Iran of the need to overcome technological backwardness in order to
survive. They also taught the country that international law does not
guarantee international justice, and it harbours deep misgivings about
international promises for assistance. Adding insult to injury, US
officials from 1989 onwards several times indicated that Iran rather
than Iraq had gassed Halabja, a claim so preposterous (lihat website: cns.miis) that its motive remains a mystery until today.
Self-sufficiency, self-reliance, autarky
in all security-related matters drives today’s political leadership.
Most Iranian politicians of all persuasions, as well as much of the
population, belong to the generation that grew up on the battlefields of
the Iran-Iraq war. War is therefore not necessarily a state of affairs
they will seek to avoid in the pursuit of national interests. Nor do
international confrontation or the threat of war particularly frighten
them. Layer upon layer of fresh economic and political sanctions only
confirm convictions that had eight long years to take root in the
blood-soaked trenches along the Iran-Iraq border.
Halabja therefore also symbolises the
long-term fallacy of short-term interests. It is the one lesson the
world does not seem to have learned.
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