Dear Demonstrators: How About Protesting Real Genocide?
Don't expect any acknowledgment of the 20th anniversary of Saddam Hussein's massacre of 5,000 Kurds in Halabja during this weekend's demonstrations against the Iraq war, says Bridget Johnson.
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When thousands of anti-war demonstrators take to the streets today to protest the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, you can expect there to be countless signs decrying Bush as Satan, claiming that the U.S. has committed war crimes, protesting that Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror was unjustly brought to an end.
But you’ll likely be hard-pressed to find any demonstrator at these events solemnly marking the 20th anniversary of a genocidal event that defined the Baathist regime’s countless atrocities. I dare one protester who claims to be marching in the name of peace and humanity to carry a large sign reading “Remember Halabja.”
Being no stranger to crashing war protests, I can bet that if you held a poster bearing one of the infamous images of a man who fell and died at the base of a home’s steps clutching an infant whose mouth was frozen in a vain gasp for air, or the pile of bodies in traditional colorful clothing strewn across an otherwise verdant hill, most demonstrators would assume the grisly images are products of the American war machine. They wouldn’t like to hear that these murders were committed by the dictator we deposed.
On March 16, 1988, Iraqi warplanes bombed the Kurdish town of Halabja with chemical weapons including sarin and mustard gas, targeting civilians as part of the Anfal campaign to rid Iraq of its Kurds. Five thousand — three-quarters of them women and children — died from the chemical cocktail. Children trying to rush home fell in the street, while the insidious gasses claimed those who cowered in basements from what they thought was a traditional bombardment. Thousands were left with chemical burns, blindness, cancers, birth defects, etc.
The Halabja attack was, in Josef Mengele fashion, an experiment to determine which of the various chemical agents worked best on the population, where were the best strategic places to drop the poisonous canisters, where victims would fall and how many. “These were field tests, an experiment on a town,” Iraqi defector Khidhir Hamza, the former director of Saddam’s nuclear-weapons program, told then-New Yorker reporter Jeffrey Goldberg in 2002. “The doctors were given sheets with grids on them, and they had to answer questions such as ‘How far are the dead from the canisters?’”
Ali Hassan al-Majid, aka Saddam’s cousin and the infamous “Chemical Ali,” could hang any day for orchestrating the Anfal campaign, in which 4,000 villages in Iraqi Kurdistan were destroyed, 250 towns were attacked with chemical weapons, and tens of thousands of Kurds were summarily executed or disappeared for an estimated, overall death toll of more than 180,000. When he goes to the gallows, we’ll likely hear the same shtick over whether he received a fair trial, or whether the Sunni’s execution — approved by a council of Kurdish President Jalal Talabani and the Sunni and Shiite vice presidents — will stoke sectarian tensions.
But to say the man speaks for himself is an understatement. Recordings from 1988, in which Ali is speaking to other Baath officials, show maniacal ethnic cleansing. “…We continued the deportations,” Ali said. “I told the mustashars that they might say that they like their villages and that they won’t leave. I said I cannot let your village stay because I will attack it with chemical weapons. Then you and your family will die. You must leave right now. Because I cannot tell you the same day that I am going to attack with chemical weapons. I will kill them all with chemical weapons! Who is going to say anything? The international community? F**k them! The international community and those who listen to them.”
The government of Iraq just approved $6 million to help rebuild Halabja, but 20 years later the damage is still felt. A survey last year found that widows from the entire Anfal campaign make up 15 percent of the Iraqi Kurdistan population. Iraq also announced plans to sue unspecified international firms for supplying chemical-weapons materials to Saddam’s regime; a Dutch businessman is already behind bars in the Netherlands for supplying some of the Halabja gas ingredients.
“We have known for a long time that the Iraqi ruler is a mass murderer,” Elie Wiesel wrote in the Los Angeles Times five years ago. “In the late 1980s, he ordered tens of thousands of his own citizens gassed to death. In 1990, he invaded Kuwait. After his defeat, he set its oil fields on fire, thus causing the worst ecological disaster in history. He also launched Scud missiles on Israel, which was not a participant in that war. He should have been indicted then for crimes against humanity. Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic was arrested and brought to trial for less.”
But as the war protesters take to the streets today, they won’t be terribly concerned with the genocide that should have made the international community bring Saddam to his knees. While busy painting the U.S. as the cruelest of warmongers, they won’t remember Halabja. To do so would give others the impression that taking out Saddam was, indeed, completely justified.
Bridget Johnson (www.bridgetjohnson.org) is a columnist at the Los Angeles Daily News.
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9 Comments
gule:After twenty years, it is finally coming time for the kind of journalism like yours to reflect on how genocide happens and continues to be in the world.You exposed the source of a huge denial that we in the west have fostered against the Kurds. Many Turks Arabs and Persians here should read your article. It is the responsibility of us to seek justice and truly ask our creator to forgive and remember.
Mar 15, 2008 - 3:07 am Tel:And we all remember who got Saddam all tooled up in the first place, hmmm?
Mar 16, 2008 - 2:25 am Mikhail Evzlin:The anti-war protesters forget or don’t want to remember that the War in Iraq was against the absolutely criminal regime that killed political adversaries and ethnic and religious groups (at least 1.000.000 killed by the political police of Saadam Hussein according the most moderated estimation). I’ll never forget the photographs of the trucks full of bodies of Kurds killed with poisonous gas (The Gulf War, 1991). For all these liberal, that criticize Bush’s policies, these dead have no importance, like the infinite victims of communist terror. Why this indifference for the innocent people and why this anxiety for the criminals instead? In Stalinist Russia common criminals were called by the authorities “social allies”. So also for the liberals the criminals, dictators, terrorists are “social allies”.
Mar 16, 2008 - 3:14 am Rich:The presence of the American troops in Iraq has broken a system of not only Islamist, but international terrorism, because Iraq under Saadam Hyssein was the Promised Land of all the terrorist groups, western and eastern, communist and Islamist. That’s why pacifists, that always defended the most criminal dictatorships, communist, fascist (do not forget that fascism is direct derivation from the socialist parties) and now Islamist, that infernal synthesis of both, hate so ardently President Bush who destroyed the Taliban’s and Saadam Hussein’s absolutely monstrous regimes. It is stupid to say that Saadam Hussein did not have connexions with Al Qaeda. He had connexions with all the terrorist organizations, not only with Al Qaeda. His “State” was transformed in a terrorist organization, like Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, North Korea, Castrist Cuba or Islamic Iran. The stupid French foreign minister has said “We have to talk with our enemies”. How is it possible to talk with terrorists who have as one and only goal to kill you?
I know well from my own experience the horror of totalitarian communist regime and can imagine what Islamofascist dictatorships means, so I feel an admiration for this truly great man as George W. Bush. The History will not change her course for whims of “liberal” politicians who desperately fight for their political survival, using the lowest procedures that in the end will harm them. Mankind’s survival is at stake, under the constant menace of some evil forces of destruction loomed up from the underground of the World. And it is the historical task of the United States to fight them: they cannot fail, if we still want to live in a human world and not in an Islamic or communist sewer.
U.S. friend and host of U.S. Military bases TURKEY has its own population of Kurds that it has been killing for years and now has had its own invasion of Iraq to kill more Kurds. The U.S. let Turkey come right on in to Iraq and kill Kurds. I guess these Kurds were not in the right place at the right time to get U.S. sympathies.
The weapons that Saddam Hussein used to kill Kurds were supplied to him by the U.S. These same weapons and support were used to fight Iran in the Iraq-Iran war. The U.S. was friends with Saddam Hussein until he didn’t want to do business our way.
Mar 16, 2008 - 10:43 am Bridget:Rich, Turkey isn’t exactly a comparable example. For decades, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a Marxist-Leninist rebel group intent on taking part of Turkey for its own, has waged a violent campaign including thousands of assassinations, bombings, and, as Amnesty reported in 1997, killing 124 schoolteachers in Turkish villages. Fittingly, the PKK is regarded as a terrorist group by the U.S. and EU. The PKK is also not representative of the vast majority of Iraq’s Kurds, who a) prefer democracy to the hammer and sickle, and b) disapprove of the PKK’s violent tactics.
Mar 16, 2008 - 3:21 pm its_all_bad:I don’t know any anti-war protesters who approved of Saddam Hussein’s brutal tactics to remain in power. Donald Rumsfeld and other pro-war leaders did until Hussein stood up to them on some issues.
Something like 2 million have died, directly and indirectly, in the >17 year effort to depose Hussein and install a government acceptable to the US war establishment. Hussein was bad for Iraq, but at least he did some good things for his country. In contrast, the US has been worse for Iraq than Hussein, and what few good things the US has done are vastly outweighed by the harmful ones.
Mar 16, 2008 - 7:04 pm Sean:its_all_bad : “Hussein was bad for Iraq, but at least he did some good things for his country.”
Ah, the dreaded “He may have gassed his citizens, but at least he provided Health Care” argument. The impenetrable end-all of leftist Mongoloid reasoning.
Mar 17, 2008 - 8:42 am Dissenter:This guy, “Its-all-bad”, like all anti-war protesters and pacifists, justifies Saadam’s criminal regime (”Hussein … did some good things for his country”) and blames as usual the US: “Something like 2 million have died, directly and indirectly, in the 17 year effort to depose Hussein and install a government acceptable to the US war establishment”. In this way Saadam killing 2 million people has only defended himself. Conclusion: the most criminal and bloody dictatorship is better than any democracy, most of all the American Democracy; and dictators, like Saadam Hussein, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao etc. are benefactors of the mankind, while democratic presidents, like George Bush, are its enemies. Well. It’s enough to see the intellectual and moral perversion of this Mr “Its-all-bad”.
Mar 17, 2008 - 10:36 am Josh:But Bridget,
since when is being against the war in Iraq being for Saddam gassing people? Please get yourself educated.
Your reporting is fanatically absurd.
Going into Iraq and destabilizing an entire country and paying hundreds of billions for it made matters worse, for Iraqis and now for us Americans.
How many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died because of the Neo-Cons lies?
Was Saddam evil? Sure. But the ends don’t justify the means.
Mar 17, 2008 - 3:50 pm