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Halabja Watches Hussein's Trial and Waits for Its Day in Court
This Halabja neighborhood was one of the hardest hit during the attack. Witnesses described seeing bodies strewn all along this dirt road.
(By Jackie Spinner -- The Washington Post)
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"People were screaming and shouting," Hassam recounted. "We were in the basement of our house. A lot of families were in their basements because of the rumors of the attacks on Iran. We gradually felt our lungs getting tighter. We couldn't breathe easily."
Hassam said his family stayed until dark, then fled Halabja on borrowed mules and donkeys. "The road, it was filled with corpses, hundreds and hundreds of corpses and animals."
"How can Saddam Hussein not be put on trial for this?" Hassam said. "Is there any crime in this world sicker than this? Bring the trial here. They killed children here that were still in the womb."
In a nearby market, balancing a stack of hot bread on her head, Taleea Salih, 55, refused to talk about the day of the attack. As she scurried off to a waiting truck full of family members calling for her, Salih offered only this, "I want Saddam to be executed."
The Halabja Human Rights Ministry keeps a file on families who lost relatives in the chemical bombings 17 years ago. Nearly 900 still receive some assistance from the government -- pensions, medical treatment or housing.
"If we calculate the disaster as a genocide, as killing mass numbers of people at the same time, if we try to describe that disaster, it was pure hell," said Sasan Anwar, director of the ministry. "Visualize it in your mind, stepping on hundreds of your friends and neighbors without having the ability to help them. If we allow ourselves to remember, we can't stop ourselves from crying."
Anwar, 33, who was a teenager then, said the best punishment for Hussein would be a fair trial. "This would be very different from his own trials," Anwar said. "He was trying people without any rights. If Saddam Hussein is not psychologically ill, then each day passing between the trials is death for him."
At the Halabja hospital, not far from a sprawling, symbolic graveyard with a stone memorial for each family that lost someone to the attacks, doctors still treat patients with medical conditions brought on by the gassings.
Rebeen Haidar, 25, a physician, has been compiling cases for a study that would gauge the extent of the health damage, including thousands of cases of respiratory problems and infertility. "There's not a research center in Halabja that does this, and as time passes by, these people are going to die and take their cases with them," he said. "For the future, we need this data."
Haidar, who decided to become a doctor after watching a neighbor treat his father's bleeding throat on the day of the bombing, said the people of Halabja could not look to a courtroom for justice.
"In my opinion, as a doctor, Saddam Hussein is gone, but he left a bad legacy in Halabja, a legacy of destruction, pollution, killing and societal problems," he said. "He left those legacies on the shoulders of the people. If we could eliminate those legacies in Halabja, then we will have executed Saddam in Halabja."
Special correspondent Sarok Abdulla Ahmed contributed to this report.
