June 25, 2007 | Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman

The guilty verdict against Ali Hassan al-Majid or Chemical Ali is a milestone for the people of Kurdistan in Iraq.

Yesterday Majid and four other leaders in Saddam Hussein's regime were found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Majid was also found guilty of genocide for crimes committed in the 1980s.

As Saddam Hussein's first cousin and a top commander of the Ba'ath regime, Majid led the Anfal campaign of genocide in Kurdistan in which 50,000 to 182,000 people were killed, thousands of villages destroyed and tens of thousands were forced to leave their homes, many of them to face torture and death. Dozens of mass graves have been found in Kurdistan and southern Iraq and more are being found even now.

We have waited two decades for justice on behalf of the men and boys as young as 12 who were forced to go to their deaths in concentration camps and open deserts in a systematic campaign to eradicate the people of Kurdistan. We have waited long to see those who used chemical weapons against women and children be brought to justice.

We have waited for justice but not revenge. Our aim has always been to see an open trial in which justice is seen to be done, in stark contrast to the way thousands of Kurdish lives were extinguished without a hope of self-defence or a voice to speak out for them.

This trial has lasted more than six months, heard eyewitness accounts and seen written evidence of Majid's and the other four defendants' guilt. Charges against a sixth defendant were dropped due to insufficient evidence. All this stands in contrast against the summary executions under Saddam Hussein's dictatorship.

The people of Kurdistan are resilient, yet the scars of Anfal are deep and we are not equipped to heal them alone. Many survivors of the chemical attacks suffer serious illnesses to this day, cancer rates in some areas are unusually high as are birth defects, as well as the psychological traumas associated with loss, torture and bearing witness to mass murder.

In the whole of Iraq, there are only a handful of people trained to exhume mass graves to international standards. There are no DNA laboratories in Kurdistan to help people identify the remains of their loved ones. We need the assistance of the international community in these areas and most urgently to bring proper medical care to those who still suffer the consequences of the crimes committed by Majid and his accomplices.

With the intense debate in Britain and elsewhere about the Iraq war, people are sometimes surprised when they hear the Kurds say they are grateful to the coalition for liberating us and the other peoples of Iraq.

The people of the Kurdistan region, backed by the Peshmerga, are proud to have fought side by side with the coalition forces to bring to an end to Saddam's genocidal regime. We are proud to work alongside the multinational forces today as we strive to spread the security and stability that we have established in Kurdistan to the rest of Iraq.

Others are surprised or suspicious of our motives for not flying the current Iraqi flag in our region. It was under this Ba'athist flag and in the name of Ba'athism that these crimes of genocide were perpetrated.

Our regional parliament proudly flies the Iraqi flag pre-dating the Ba'athist one and we are ready to fly a new Iraqi flag when it comes into existence. Until then, the flag under which Chemical Ali committed his crimes will not be raised in Kurdistan.

Source: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/bayan_sami_abdul_rahman/2007/06/a_milestone_for_kurdistan.html