http://squawk.ca/lbo-talk/0204/0359.html http://squawk.ca/lbo-talk/0209/0024.html When US turned a blind eye to poison gas
America knew Baghdad was using chemical weapons against the Kurds in 1988. So why, asks Dilip Hiro , has it taken 14 years to muster its outrage?
Sunday September 1, 2002
The Observer
When it comes to demonising Saddam Hussein, nothing captures the popular
imagination in America better than the statement that 'he gassed his own people'. This is an allusion to the deployment of chemical weapons by Iraq's military in the Iraqi Kurdistan town of Halabja in March 1988 during the Iran-Iraq war, and then in the territory administered by the Tehran-backed Kurdish rebels after the ceasefire five months later.
As Iraq's use of poison gases in war and in peace was public knowledge, the
question arises: what did the United States administration do about it then? Absolutely nothing. Indeed, so powerful was the grip of the pro-Baghdad lobby on the administration of Republican President Ronald Reagan that it got the White House to foil the Senate's attempt to penalise Iraq for its violation of the Geneva Protocol on Chemical Weapons to which it was a signatory. This made Saddam believe that the US was his firm ally - a deduction that paved the way for his brutal invasion and occupation of Kuwait and the 1991 Gulf war, the outcomes of which have not yet fully played themselves out.
Between October 1983 and the autumn of 1988, Baghdad deployed 100,000
munitions, containing mainly mustard gas, which produces blisters on the skin and inside the lungs, and nerve gas, which damages the nervous system, but also cyanide gas, which kills instantly. From initially using these lethal agents in extremis to repulse Iran's offensives, the Iraqis proceeded to use them as a key factor in their assaults in the spring and summer of 1988 to regain their lost territories, including the strategic Fao peninsula.
That the Pentagon had first-hand knowledge of Iraq's use of chemical agents
during these offensives was confirmed by the New York Times two weeks ago. 'After the Iraqi army, with American planning assistance, retook the Fao peninsula, a Defense Intelligence Agency officer, Lt Col Rick Francona, now retired, was sent to tour the battlefield with Iraqi officers,' wrote Patrick Tyler of the Times. 'Francona saw zones marked off for chemical contamination, and containers for the drug atropine scattered around, indicating that Iraqi soldiers had taken injections to protect themselves from the effects of gas that might blow back over their positions.'
In 1986, it was with the aim of recapturing the Fao peninsula, taken by the
Iranians in February, that Saddam's military used chemical agents so extensively that the UN Security Council stopped accepting its routine denials. Following an examination of 700 Iranian casualties, UN experts concluded that Baghdad had deployed mustard and nerve gases many times. Instead of condemning Baghdad for this, the Security Council, dominated by Washington and Moscow, both pro-Iraq, coupled its condemnation of Baghdad with its disapproval of 'the prolongation of the war' by Tehran for refusing a truce until the council had named Iraq the aggressor.
Despite its repeated reiteration of neutrality, the US had all along been
pro-Baghdad. It lost no time in supplying Iraq with intelligence collected by the Saudi-owned but Pentagon-operated Airborne Warning and Control Systems (Awacs) plying in the region. Once Iraq and the US had resumed diplomatic links after the re-election of Reagan as President in November 1984, the military cooperation blossomed.
Starting in July 1986, aided by the Pentagon, which clandestinely seconded
its air force officers to work with their Iraqi counterparts, Saddam's air force greatly improved its targeting accuracy, striking relentlessly the enemy's power plants, factories and bridges, and extending the range of its strikes to Iran's oil terminals in the lower Gulf. Under the rubric of escorting Kuwaiti oil tankers, the US built up an armada in the Gulf, which clashed with the small, under-equipped Iranian navy and sank two Iranian offshore oil platforms in the lower Gulf in retaliation for Iran's missile attack on an American-flagged supertanker docked in Kuwaiti waters.
Against this background, Iraq started hitting Tehran with its upgraded Scud
ground-to-ground missiles in late February 1988. To retake Halabja from Iran and its Kurdish allies, who had captured it in March, Iraq's air force attacked it with poison gas bombs. The objective was to take out the occupying Iranian troops (who had by then left the town); instead, the assault killed 3,200 to 5,000 civilians. The images of men, woman and children, frozen in instant death, relayed by the Iranian media, shocked the world. Yet no condemnation came from Washington. It was only when, following the ceasefire with Iran in August, Saddam made widespread use of chemical agents to recapture 4,000 square miles controlled by the Kurdish insurgents that the Security Council decided to dispatch a team to find out if Baghdad had resorted to chemical arms. Saddam refused to cooperate.
But instead of pressuring him to reverse his stand, or face a ban on the
sale of American military equipment and advanced technology to Iraq by the revival of the Senate's bill, US Secretary of State George Shultz chose to say only that interviews with the Kurdish refugees in Turkey and 'other sources' (which remained obscure) pointed towards Iraqi use of chemical agents. These two elements did not constitute 'conclusive' evidence. This was the verdict of Shultz's British counterpart, Sir Geoffrey Howe: 'If conclusive evidence is obtained, then punitive measures against Iraq have not been ruled out.' As neither he nor Shultz is known to have made a further move to get at the truth, Iraq went unpunished.
That was the end of the story - until the hawks in the Bush administration
recently began bandying about the revolting phrase of 'gassing his own people' for their partisan ends.
· Dilip Hiro is the author of 'Neighbours, Not Friends: Iraq and Iran After
the Gulf Wars' (Routledge). His latest book is 'War Without End: Rise of Islamist Terrorism and Global Response' (Routledge, £12.99).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,784314,00.html
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http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/0109/0181.html
http://www.dawn.com/weekly/mazdak/20010616.htm
>...However, lest we feel we are alone in this socially accepted and
sanctioned brutality, let me introduce those readers unfamiliar with his
unbiased and honest reporting to Robert Fisk. Writing for The Independent,
Fisk recently filed this despairing article:
"Why, I ask myself, am I spending more time than ever in 25 years covering
the Middle East, cataloguing the barbarity, torture, hangings, head-chopping and human rights abuses of the region? No, I'm not talking about Israel's death squads, its vile torture apparatus at the Russian compound in Jerusalem and its shoot-to-kill army, some units of which are turning into an indisciplined rabble. I'm talking about the blind, cruel, vindictive Muslim regimes of the Middle East. Because I'm beginning to ask myself if there isn't something uniquely terrible about the way they treat their people, the way they kill their people, the way they abuse them and flog them and string them up..."
It is perhaps revealing that Saddam Hussein, despite the hundreds of
thousands of deaths he is responsible for, continues to be a hero to millions of Muslims across the Islamic world. I know the following passage will not make any converts, but let me quote from the preface to Samir Al-Khalil's book (published in 1989) "Republic of Fear":"Since I finished writing Republic of Fear, the chamber of horrors that is Saddam Hussein's Iraq has mushroomed into something not even the most morbid imagination could have foreseen. The war with Iran ended in the summer of 1988 on favourable terms for Iraq. But did the violence stop, or even abate? On the contrary, it turned in on itself...
"The day after the ceasefire came into effect, Iraqi warplanes went into
action with chemical weapons against Kurdish villages. Between August 25 and 27, several thousand helpless civilians died. The attacks continued on a systematic basis through September. It had of course been done before, in the town of Halabja in March 1988 where around 6,000 perished... How many died in these attacks? We may never know. Tens of thousands of army deserters had collected since 1980 in the marshes region of southern Iraq. They were given an ultimatum. What happened to those who handed themselves in? We know only what happened to those who didn't; they were gassed."
Al-Khalil goes on to lament the silence that greets such viciousness outside
Iraq: "Western governments looking toward lucrative markets... are not doing enough. They turn a blind eye to the worst excesses when these do not involve them directly. More ominous is the active support Saddam Hussein's regime receives from the Arab world - from regimes in particular but also from public opinion... Not a word of condemnation of the indiscriminate use of poison gas to eliminate a civilian population has appeared in the Arab press..." Nor in the press here, one might add.
It is not the widespread use of systematic violence in our part of the world
that is as disturbing as its easy acceptance at every level of society. Defenders of the system point to the blood on the hands of other civilizations at different points in history. But actions are judged in the context of their times: just because other societies destroyed statues in earlier times is no justification for the Taliban to blast the magnificent giant Buddha carvings in Bamiyan. Similarly, Halaku Khan's trail of terror does not give his successors the licence to kill.
Nevertheless, the blood-letting does not stop: in Algeria, tens of thousands
of innocents have been slaughtered, many by having their throats slit, in an unending civil war. Thousands of Kurds have been killed in Iraq, Turkey and Iran over the years. We Pakistanis have the blood of an unknown number of Bengalis on our hands. Iranians and Iraqis bled each other white for a decade. And everywhere in the Muslim world, torturers and hangmen go about their grisly task every day.
Back to Fisk: "Down in Saudi Arabia, where public execution is a fine art,
they're well on their way to meeting last year's rich crop of 113 beheadings... Our friends the Saudis are second only to the merciless Saddam when it comes to butchering their people in public... Then there's the other refinement of Saudi sadism: "cross amputation" (the chopping off of right hand and left foot for supposed crimes)..."
Apologists for these regimes seek refuge behind concepts like "Muslim
traditions" and "deterrent punishment" as if the world had not moved forward from the days when cruelty was built into statecraft. But now fundamental human rights are at the heart of constitutions around the world. For a modern state to indulge in such barbarism on a daily basis is to deny the progress humanity has made over the centuries.
For believers, here are some words from Fisk's article to ponder over: "What
does it represent, this behaviour by the states of the Middle East? Yes, I know the Americans are poisoning, frying or shooting their condemned at a ferocious rate. And of course I know about 'sharia' law. I've heard more than I want to about its severity. But what about the mercy and compassion that are among the first words of the Quran? In Arab and Iranian homes, Muslim families exhibit infinitely more compassion and love than westerners. They don't send their elderly and incurably sick to die in nursing institutions. The old and the fatally ill spend their last days in their family homes, cared for to the end by relatives. Shame on us. But how come the same men and women can stand on a rooftop to scream at a woman strangling on a rope?"
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/5735.html
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~irdp/ The Iraq Research and Documentation Project (IRDP) website is a collection of resources documenting the government, politics, and society of modern Iraq. IRDP is engaged in the gathering of information of diverse content and format (official government documents, maps, citizen testimonies, reference sources, chronologies, bibliographies, notable articles, human rights reports, photographic and other images, audio and video materials). This online collection is made available to the public to provide a window into the inner workings of the repressive state system evolved under the aegis of the Iraqi Ba'th Socialist Party in Iraq since 1968. http://216.167.199.58/index.htm The North Iraq Dataset is a collection of documents generated by various Iraqi security and political agencies in localities in northern Iraq, mostly from the 1980's.
Anfal: The Kurdish Genocide in Iraq
http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/kurdish/htdocs/his/Khaledtext.html
>...It is important to note that in reality Anfal corresponded to something
more than military offensives against the Kurdish villages and Kurdish
resistance. Anfal meant co-ordination of many measures starting with
destruction of thousands of villages; gathering rural population after
multiple chemical attacks; transporting them to the camps; processing the
captives through isolating them and determine who should be sent to death;
transporting different groups to different destinies - women and children to
particular camps, elderly people to southern Iraq and the men aged between
15 and 50 to gravesites- under extreme secrecy; using fire squads to kill
large groups of men near pre-dugged mass graves and then covering the mass
graves as well as denying to know anything about their fates.
Iraqi authorities did nothing to hide the Anfal campaign from public view.
'On the contrary, as each phase of the operation triumphed, its successes were trumpeted with the same propaganda fanfare that attended the victorious battles in the Iran-Iraq War.'
As such, Anfal was a logical extension of nearly two decades of government
Arabization of the Kurdish areas. For all its horror, Anfal was not entirely unprecedented, because terrible atrocities had been visited on the Kurds by the Ba'th Party on many occasions particuraly since 1968. In the wake of an official autonomy granted to the Kurds in the firs half of the 70's, the Ba'th Party embarked on the Arabization of the oil-producing areas in Kurdistan, evicting Kurdish farmers and replacing them with poor Arab tribesmen from the south, guarded by government troops. After the the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) fled into Iran after the collapse of the Kurdish revolt in March 1975, tens of thousands of villagers from the Barzani tribes forcibly removed from their homes and relocated to barren sites in the desert south of Iraq, where they had to rebuild their lives by themselves, without any form of assistance.
>..."Some groups of prisoners were lined up, shot from the front and dragged
into pre-dug mass graves; others were shoved roughly into trenches and machine gunned where they stood; others were made to lie down in pairs, sardine-style, next to mouths of fresh corpses, before being killed; others were tied together, made to stand on the lip of the pit, and shot in the back so that they would fall forward into it - a method that was presumably more efficient from the point of view of the killers. Bulldozers then pushed earth or sand loosely over the heaps of corpses. Some of the gravesites contained dozens of separate pits, and obviously contained the bodies of thousands of victims. Circumstantial evidence suggests that the executioners were uniformed members of the Ba'th Party, or perhaps of Iraq's General Security Directorate (Amn)."
20 How much Washington may have known about the Kurdish genocide as it was happening? Documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by MEW and the National Security Archive throw scanty light on this contentious issue. One Defence Department cable, dated April 19, 1988, notes that 'an estimated 1.5 million Kurdish nationals have been resettled in camps'; that 'approximately 700-1000 villages and small residential areas were targeted for resettlement;' that 'an unknown but reportedly large number of Kurds have been placed in "cowncentration"(sic) camps located near the Jordanian and Saudi Arabian borders'; and that 'movement by the local population throughout the north has been severely restricted. The long section that follows is heavily deleted. [Genocide in Iraq, p. 204, note 19] How much did the Saudi, the Kuwaiti and the Jordanian authorities know about the mass graves near their borders? In a document titled 'Guidelines for U. S.-Iraq Policy,' prepared by the Bush transition team in January 1989, the new administration outlined its intention to develop relations with Saddam's Iraq. 'It is up to the new Administration to decide whether to treat Iraq as distasteful dictatorship to be shunned where possible, or to recognize Iraq's present and potential power in the region and accord it relatively high priority. We strongly urge the later view.' Even though they described Iraq's human rights records as 'abysmal', Bush's foreign analysts concluded that 'in no way should we associate ourselves with the 60 year Kurdish rebellion in Iraq or oppose Iraq's legitimate attempts to suppress it.' As quoted in James A Bill and Robert Sprinborg, Politics in the Middle East. New York: Harper Colllins College Publishers, 4th Edition, p. 387-388. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Extensive footage from Iranian TV and interviews from Halabja were presented on this
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/shows/saddam/photo.html show a few months ago. Footage of the Iraqi bombers dropping the gas. The shells are collected in Halabja. That the producers blew it by interviewing Richard, "Prince of Darkness, " Perle after the British documentary was, to say the least, stupid agit-prop.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/shows/saddam/photo2.html
>For Iranian photographers who crossed the border to document the attack, the streets of Halabja were a diorama
of sudden death.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/shows/saddam/photo3.html
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/shows/saddam/photo4.html
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/shows/saddam/photo5.html
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/shows/saddam/photo5.html
In 1998, Liverpool University geneticist Christine Gosden began documenting what seemed like abnormal patterns
of chronic illness throughout northern Iraq. This man, for example -- a child in 1988 -- developed a severe
curvature of the spine.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/shows/saddam/photo7.html
Mustard gas burns often require months to heal. And according to geneticist Christine Gosden, they can result
in genetic mutations and abnormal tissue growth. Skin lesions, such as this man's, are common throughout the
region.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/shows/saddam/photo8.html
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/shows/saddam/photo9.html
But according to geneticist Christine Gosden, the damage is not limited to those who lived through the attack.
High rates of congenital deformity, such as cleft palate, are another indication of permanent genetic damage
among the Kurdish people.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/shows/saddam/photo10.html
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/shows/saddam/imap.html