March 17, 2008
Twenty years on, few Kurds forget that the United States and other Western countries stood idle while a chemical attack killed 5,000
MARK MACKINNON
HALABJA, IRAQ — Rafiq Laiq learned two difficult lessons as he and his family fled the chemical-gas attack Saddam Hussein's army launched on this town 20 years ago.
The first was that tabun gas smells like apples, and can kill almost instantly. The second was that big, powerful friends like the United States have a tendency to help you only when it suits their interests.
A memorial service held here yesterday in this traumatized town focused on the horrors witnessed over a three-day period between March 15 and 17, 1988, when the Iraqi army used tabun and other chemical gases to kill more than 5,000 people, punishing the town's Kurdish population for siding with the enemy in the final stages of Iraq's eight-year war with Iran.
Thousands of villagers and visiting dignitaries, many of them dressed in black, filled the town's muddy streets yesterday for the unveiling of a monument depicting a father trying to shield his infant daughter from the effects of the gas with his own body.
Most of the anger that poured out at the anniversary ceremony was understandably directed at Mr. Hussein and his henchmen. Many here are anxiously awaiting the execution of the chief perpetrator, Ali Hassan al-Majid, dubbed Chemical Ali for his role in the massacre here. Convicted of genocide, he has been sentenced to hang some time this month, although the date has not yet been set.
But few Kurds have forgotten that the United States and other Western countries stood idly by at the time, unwilling to criticize Mr. Hussein, whom they were supporting against Iran.
Twenty years later, many here in semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan see disturbing parallels in how the U.S. army - which, unlike in 1988, now has 157,000 soldiers in Iraq - allowed the Turkish army to enter northern Iraq last month in pursuit of Kurdish rebels.
The Turkish government portrayed the eight-day incursion by 10,000 troops as an "anti-terrorism" operation targeting fighters from the banned Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, which allegedly uses Iraqi soil to launch cross-border attacks into Turkey.
But many of Iraq's Kurds interpret things very differently: They believe Turkey, like Saddam Hussein's Iraq, launched the assault because it is opposed to the birth of a Kurdish state in the region. And the United States - forced again to choose between its support for the Kurds and its alliance with another country - left the Kurds to fend for themselves.
"We are afraid the Americans will collaborate with our enemies against us, just like in the past. Every Kurd thinks about this," said Mr. Laiq, now the dean of the Halabja Fine Arts Institute. Twenty-six years old when he fled with his family from the chemical attack on Halabja, his eyes are still blood red from the gas and he lives with memories of stepping over the dead and dying as he fled the town.
What happened at Halabja, and the international community's muted response to it, has become a rallying cry for those seeking an independent Kurdish state based in northern Iraq - an argument for a Kurdish state just as the Jewish Holocaust was part of the rationale for creating the state of Israel.
"The Halabja massacre is what made our cause known worldwide ... but in 1988, the issue was closed and no one talked about it," said Barzan Hawrani, who represents Halabja in the Iraqi Kurdistan's regional parliament. "If this tragedy had happened to another people besides the Kurds, they would benefit from it by being allowed to establish their own country, like the Jews."
But while full independence still remains a way off for Iraq's five million Kurds, they've arguably moved closer than ever to that goal in the five years that have passed since the U.S. army - at the encouragement of Kurdish leaders, and with the support of Kurdish peshmerga fighters - invaded Iraq to oust Mr. Hussein. In that sense, the Kurds are perhaps the war's only winners thus far.
While using their clout in Baghdad - President Jalal Talabani is a Kurd, as are Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh and Foreign Minister Hoshar Zebari - to redesign Iraq as a loose federation in which the various regions are given increasingly broad autonomy, the feeling you get on the ground in Kurdistan is that this is a place that wants little to do with the rest of Iraq.
Despite a car bomb that killed two people in the provincial capital of Sulaymaniyah last week, Kurdistan has remained an oasis of calm compared with the violence that has consumed the rest of the country since the 2003 invasion. The region is effectively sealed off from the south by a thick network of peshmerga checkpoints that examine every vehicle that wants to cross into what is clearly now a separate entity.
On a slick website, the Kurdistan Regional Government markets its turf as "the other Iraq." The green-white-and-red Kurdish banner is ubiquitous while the newly redesigned flag of the Republic of Iraq is rarely seen.
The region's economy is also rapidly growing, although most of the new development is concentrated in the main cities of Sulaymaniyah and Erbil, with little of the new wealth trickling down to villages such as Halabja. Corruption in the bureaucracy, and in the two main political parties, is seen as rife.
But most Kurds are nonetheless pleased with their growing independence. However, their neighbours - Turkey, Iran and Syria, all of which have substantial and restive Kurdish populations of their own - are clearly not.
Many Turkish commentators urged the army to target the Iraqi Kurdish government during the recent military incursion, accusing it of not only providing aid to the PKK, but of inspiring rising unrest among Turkey's own Kurds through its sheer existence.
Meanwhile, Iran last week shelled three villages along its border with Iraqi Kurdistan, reportedly targeting bases of the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan, an Iranian Kurdish group with links to the PKK that has also been using northern Iraq as a base.
"We have so many neighbours and enemies who don't want to see the Kurdish nation rise," said Rebwar Abdullah, a 40-year-old Halabja survivor who lost his father and six siblings in the 1988 attack. Back then, Iraq's Kurds saw Iran as an ally and mistrusted the United States for backing Mr. Hussein.
Now, most Kurds see the United States as the only guarantor of their fledgling mini-state. Many say that their biggest fear is that, with American public opinion now firmly against the war, the United States will soon withdraw from Iraq and leave the Kurds once more at the mercy of the Arabs, Persians and Turks who have repressed them for decades.
"The U.S. has no stable policy toward the Kurdish people. We hope that this time there will be no bargaining at the expense of us. We don't want to again be the victims of petrol policy," said Mr. Hawrani, the Halabja legislator.
But history, he said, has taught the Kurds to be wary. He has a saying every Kurd knows by heart: "We have no friends but the mountains."