Bulletin de liaison et d'information - Institut kurde de Paris

Revue de Presse-Press Review-Berhevoka Çapê-Rivista Stampa-Dentro de la Prensa-Baszn Ozeti
After the Iraqi bombardment subsided, the Iranians managed to retake Halabja, and they evacuated many of the sick, including
Nasreen and the others in her family, to hospitals in Tehran.
Nasreen was blind for twenty days. "I was thinking the whole time, Where is my family? But I was blind. I couldn't do anything. I
asked my husband about my mother, but he said he didn't know anything. He was looking in hospitals, he said. He was avoiding the
question."
The Iranian Red Crescent Society, the equivalent of the Red Cross, began compiling books of photographs, pictures of the dead in
Halabja. "The Red Crescent has an album of the people who were buried in Iran," Nasreen said. "And we found my mother in one of
the albums." Her father, she discovered, was alive but permanently blinded. Five of her siblings, including Rangeen, had died.
Nasreen would live, the doctors said, but she kept a secret from Bakhtiar: "When I was in the hospital, I started menstruating. It
wouldn't stop. I kept bleeding. We don't talk about this in our society, but eventually a lot of women in the hospital confessed they
were also menstruating and couldn't stop." Doctors gave her drugs that stopped the bleeding, but they told her that she would be
unable to bear children.
Nasreen stayed in Iran for several months, but eventually she and Bakhtiar returned to Kurdistan. She didn't believe the doctors
who told her that she would be infertile, and in 1991 she gave birth to a boy. "We named him Arazoo," she.said. Arazoo means hope
in Kurdish. "He was healthy at first, but he had a hole in his heart. He died at the age of three months."
I met Nasreen last month in Erbil, the largest city in Iraqi Kurdistan. She is thirty now, a pretty woman with brown eyes and high
cheekbones, but her face is expressionless. She doesn't seek pity; she would, however, like a doctor to help her with a cough that
she's had ever since the attack, fourteen years ago. Like many of Saddam Hussein's victims, she tells her story without emotion.
During my visit to Kurdistan, I talked with more than a hundred victims of Saddam's campaign against the Kurds. Saddam has been
persecuting the Kurds ever since he took power, more than twenty years ago. Several old women whose husbands were killed by
Saddam's security services expressed a kind of animal hatred toward him, but most people, like Nasreen, tolchtories of horrific
cruelty with a dispassion and a precision that underscored their credibility. Credibility is important to the Kurds; after all this time,
they still feel that the world does not believe their story.
A week' after I met Nasreen, I visited a small village called Goktapa, situated in a green valley that is ringed by snow-covered
mountains. Goktapa came under poison-gas attack six weeks after Halabja. The village consists of low mud-brick houses along dirt
paths. In Goktapa, an old man named Ahmed Raza Sharif told me that on the day of the attack on Goktapa, May 3, 1988, he was in
the fields outside the village. He saw the shells explode and smelled the sweet-apple odor as poison filled the air. His son, Osman
Ahmed, who was sixteen at the time, was near the village mosque when he was felled by the gas. He crawled down a hill and died
among the reeds on the banks of the Lesser Zab, the river that flows by the village. His father knew that he was dead, but he
couldn't reach the body. As many as a hundred and fifty people died in the attack; the survivors fled before the advancing Iraqi
Army, which levelled the village. Ahmed Raza Sharif did not return for three years. When he did, he said, he immediately began
searching for his son's body. He found it stilllying in the reeds. "I recognized his body right away," he said.
The summer sun in Iraq is blisteringly hot, and a corpse would be unidentifiable three years after death. I tried to find a gentle way
to express my doubts, but my translator made it clear to Sharif that I didn't believe him.
We were standing in the mud yard of another old man, Ibrahim Abdul Rahman. Twenty or thirty people, a dozen boys among them,
had gathered. Some of them seemed upset that I appeared to doubt the story, but Ahmed hushed them. "It's true, he lost all the flesh
on his body," he said. "He was just a skeleton. But the clothes were his, and they were still on the skeleton, a belt and a shirt. In the
pocket of his shirt I found the key to our tractor. That's where he always kept the key."
Some of the men still seemed concerned that I would leave Goktapa doubting their truthfulness. Ibrahim, the man in whose y,.,J we
were standing, called out a series of orders to the boys gathered around us. They dispersed, to houses and storerooms, returning
moments later holding jagged pieces of metal, the remnants of the bombs that poisoned Goktapa. Ceremoniously, the boys dropped
the pieces of metal at my feet. "Here are the mercies of Uncle Saddam," Ibrahim said.
2. THE AFTERMATH
The story of Halabja did not end the night the Iraqi Air Force planes returned to their bases. The Iranians invited the foreign press to
record the devastation. Photographs of the victims, supine, bleached of color, littering the gutters and alleys of the town, horrified
the world. Saddam Hussein's attacks on his own citizens mark the only time since the Holocaust that poison gas has been used to
exterminate women and children.
Saddam's cousin Ali Hassan aI-Majid, who led the campaigns against the Kurds in the late eighties, was heard on a tape captured by
rebels, and later obtained by Human Rights Watch, addressing members of Iraq's ruling Baath Party on the subject of the Kurds. "I
will kill them.all with chemical weapons!" he said. "Who is going to say anything? The international community? Fuck them! The
international community and those who listen to them." .
Attempts by Congress in 1988 to impose sanctions on Iraq were stifled by the Reagan and Bush Administrations, and the story of
Saddam's surviving victims might have vanished completely had it not been for the reporting of people like Randal and the work of a
British documentary filmmaker named Gwynne Roberts, who, after hearing stories about a sudden spike in the incidence of birth
defects and cancers, not only in Halabja but also in other parts of Kurdistan, had made some disturbing films on the subject.
However, no Western government or United Nations agency took up the cause.
In 1998, Roberts brought an Englishwoman named Christine Gosden to Kurdistan. Gosden is a medical geneticist and a professor at
the medical school of the University of Liverpool. She spent three weeks in the hospitals in Kurdistan, and came away determined to
help the Kurds. To the best of my knowledge, Gosden is the only Western scientist who has even begun making a systematic study
of what took place in northern Iraq.
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