Remembering Halabja at the Speaker’s Dining Hall

Astonishingly, it has been 20 years since the attacks on Halabja, carried by the former dictator, Saddam Hussein.
The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and the Leadership Council of Human Rights jointly organized a commemorational ceremony for the 20th anniversary of the atrocities carried out by the former Iraqi dictatorship at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s dining hall.

The hall was filled with the soft sound of sez (traditional Middle Eastern musical instrument) echoing in the background, pictures of mothers holding their dying kids, bruised babies dead by the river; father’s crying on the side of their dying kids’ beds and the list goes on.
Kathryn Cameron Porter, founder and president of Leadership Council of Human Rights, and Qubad Talibani, son of the Iraqi President and representative of the KRG in the United States, both talked about the importance of remembering such a horrific day. Talibani mentioned that March is a bitter sweet month for the Kurds. It was in the same month that the world experienced the fall of the Hussein regime, that regime that killed thousands of innocent people.

Some 5000 Kurds were massacred at a small town, called Halabja, at the northern region of Iraq. The former dictator attacked the town with gas bombs, planning on eliminating the Kurds from “his” own territory. The country was in war against Iran then and the idea of killing innocent people would have been considered justifiable; yet another “we were in war” excuse. Most of the survivors fled to Iran and found shelter there.

Mohammed Aziz, a 43-year-old survivor explained the horrific activities of that cold Thursday in March. He was with his family eating lunch when six planes started bombarding Halabja. Their first reaction was to run to the basement, as did all the other families. This lasted couple of minutes; however they remained sheltered at the basement for another few hours. Thinking that the planes had gone, everyone started fleeing from their basements and running towards the borders, that is when the deadliest attacks happened. The planes were back, but this time filled with poisonous chemicals. People were losing their eye sights, were having chest pains and were acting hysterically. This was the start of the range of “slow deaths.”

Halabja is only one of the numerous massacres of the twentieth century. The Armenians, Ukrainians, the Holocaust, Kurds, Rwandans and now the people of Darfur have all experienced the non-humane acts of their fellow neighbors. When will the cycle of genocide end? History repeats itself no matter what the circumstances are; Darfur is a great proof of the latter.