Focus on Halabja

Hussain Hassan Mohammed receives visitors in his Halabja home with customary Kurdish kindness. Over sweet tea he once again tells his story of the horrors of 16 March 1988 when his town in northern Iraq was attacked with poisonous gas. As part of Saddam Hussein’s repression of the Kurds, chemical weapons were unleashed, killing 5,000 residents in just five minutes. Hussain tried to guide a group of 22 residents towards the Iranian border but by the time they got there nine had died. He was blinded, spent 40 days in a Tehran hospital, lost his three-year-old daughter and a nephew and has had serious health problems ever since. His youngest son, who was only 10 months at the time had his lungs badly damaged and has to visit hospital regularly. In the 15 years since the atrocity many people have come to speak to him about the attack and its impact. “So many doctors come to our house but nothing has happened. Everyone that comes gets his salary from what he is doing and coming to my house but I don’t receive anything. We are telling our story to all the world but nobody is listening,” he told IRIN in Halabja. “It’s true that 5,000 people were killed but I can tell you that just as many are still suffering and living between death and life.” While Halabja is often cited as a symbol of Saddam’s cruelty, the town and its residents are still struggling after 15 years. While impressive shrines and monument to the dead have been built, much of the town still lies in ruins. Secondary school teacher Erfan Karim told IRIN he saw the effects of the gas attacks every day written on the faces and personalities of his students who had lost parents and houses. “Every year on March 16 we say we will do all these good things for Halabja and on the 17th we forget it.” A poem he wrote recently sums up the feelings of many in Halabja. “We remember the deaths and neglect those that are living.” He said while other Kurdish cities marked five minutes of silence every 16 March to remember Halabja, what was needed was for everyone to devote five hours or five days to help the city rebuild. Ali Abdul Aziz, the spiritual advisor to the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan, one of the most powerful parties in the north of Iraq, told IRIN in Halabja that the town had been a very advanced centre of religious and scientific learning before the attack. The bombing had reduced most of it to rubble and even the mosque was not rebuilt until last year with donations from Gulf states. But while the architect of Halabja’s atrocities is gone, Ali Abdul said life was arguably worse because of the US presence in Iraq. In August, he was arrested with 10 of his fellow party members and imprisoned for two weeks. Eventually they were released with apologies about a mix up in intelligence but events like this have soured the so-called liberation. “It’s not just me that wants them to leave, it’s all the people. I ask you - is there any country in the world that likes to be occupied? Of course not.” He said even on the most basic level of life, things were worse now than before this year’s war. “We used to be able to call Baghdad. Now we can’t even call our neighbour. We have no power and because of this we have a problem with clean drinking water. There are so many power cuts all the time - it’s like a traffic light," he lamented. “My great hope is for a new sense of open and clear thought to be established to deal with Halabja people and to follow up all the things that they have suffered from and for people to be compensated for houses, land and money they lost and supported for the future,” he added. One project on the drawing board is for an intensive care unit to be built by the US Army’s Civil Military Operations Centre attached to the existing Halabja Hospital. The hope is that it will also include a section to look at the post-chemical attack effects on the population and such things as the high rate of birth defects. But for some in Halabja there doesn’t seem to be any end to the killing. At the town’s cemetery Hadja Mahmood Ahmed tends the grave of her son, Hamid. He was killed a year ago by Ansar al-Islam militants, leaving two children, one just a month old. Soon after, the same group killed Hadja’s son-in-law. Then her nephew was killed by a suicide bomber when acting as a guard. Every Friday the 60-year-old comes to their graves and tends the plants, lights sweet smelling incense and plays tapes of the Koran if she can afford batteries. “I hope the killing is over and no more of our relatives will die. I hope that the Coalition is the thing sent by god to bring us peace, and especially now that ‘dog’ is in jail we won’t see any more death,” she told IRIN. “This wasn’t life that we had in the past. It was death but we were just breathing. These are all the sacrifices to bring the new life,” she told IRIN while sweeping her hand over the surrounding graves. Nearby, Aisha Ali Saeed squats by the fresh earth of her husband’s grave. He survived the gas attacks unlike many of their relatives. Before he died recently he asked to be buried along with those who perished in the chemical attacks to be near them. So his grave is now on top of a mass burial of more than 1,000 people who were piled into a crater in the aftermath of the bombing. At Halabja’s mosque, winter sun slants in through stained glass windows as men line up for Friday prayers. With fresh snow on the surrounding mountains the water they wash themselves with is icy, but the rich red carpets they stand on are warm. There is a muffled thunder as they sink to their knees in prayer - praying no doubt for peace and the ability to proceed with life in Halabja.