Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

V
Van Anraat, Frans (b. 1942). A Dutch businessman and engineer who was tried and found
guilty of complicity in war crimes in connection with the campaign by Iraqi dictator Saddam
Hussein (1937–2006) to use chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) and
the 1988 al-Anfal campaign against Iraq’s Kurdish population in northern Iraq.
In the mid-1980s, van Anraat’s chemical company, FCA Contractor, was a major
supplier of the raw materials needed to make mustard gas and nerve gas, both of which
Hussein used as weapons of war and genocide. Arrested at U.S. insistence (and then, for
some unknown reason, released) in Italy in 1989, van Anraat moved to Iraq to live under
Saddam Hussein’s protection. When the Iraqi dictator’s regime fell in 2003, van Anraat
relocated to his native Netherlands, where he was arrested by Dutch police in his
Amsterdam home in December 2004. He appeared for a pretrial hearing in a Dutch court
on March 19, 2005, and on December 23, 2005, was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment
for complicity in war crimes. He was acquitted on a charge of complicity in genocide.
Of particular interest vis-à-vis this case—aside from its intrinsic value—is that van
Anraat was arrested by Dutch police and tried in a Dutch court, The Hague District
Court, which assumed jurisdiction in this instance. Van Anraat’s sentence was the maximum
that the court could impose. The other point of interest in this case is that the court
determined that genocide, measured under the terms of the UN Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide 1948 (UNCG), had taken place
against the Kurds and could be “legally and convincingly proven.” Following the terms of
the UNCG closely, though, the court stated it could not find sufficient evidence of van
Anraat’s knowledge of the genocidal intent of the Iraqi government. In August 2006, the
Netherlands prosecutor’s office began an appeal against the dismissal of van Anraat’s
charge of complicity in genocide. The appeal was running through 2007.
Vance-Owen Peace Plan. A peace initiative negotiated during the Bosnian War
(1992–1995) in January 1993. It refers to the diplomatic efforts by two negotiators—one
from the United States, the other from Britain—to bring the three-way war in Bosnia to
a peaceful end. By the time Cyrus Vance (1917–2002) and Lord David Owen (b. 1938)
arrived on the scene, Bosnia was a battleground of three rival ethnic groups: the Catholic
Croats, the Orthodox Serbs, and the Muslim Bosniaks. On occasion, Serbs and Croats
collaborated to divide Bosnia among themselves by evicting the Bosniaks. Sometimes,
depending on the fortunes of war, Croats fought alongside Bosniaks to prevent the Serbs