Halabja: People who are stronger than chemical weapons

I visited Halabja during my journey to North Iraq. My feelings are quite confused so I can not write much about it before reading background information. Just look at the pictures which I took.

I went there expecting to see a living misery - 1988 there were about 70 000 people in Halabja and five thousand of them died in Saddam's attack by chemical weapons. How a town can come back to normal life ever after such a thing?

But what I saw was an active town just preparing the anniversary of one of its massacres. Because 16.3.1988 is just one example in the long line of massacres.

Many people left Halabja after the gas attack so the population is now under 70 000. But those who remained say they will never leave their home town because of respect to their ancestors who have been murdered.

It was my first visit to Halabja but very soon I felt like I had been there earlier. Or in a place which is similar to Halabja. Where? In Dersim, October 2005. When seeing the statue of Zilan opposite to the statue of Kemal Ataturk in Tunceli city centre one understands that the Dersim people have not given up.

And neither have the Halabja people done. They say that they are stronger than chemical bombs.

It is also amazing how quiet the liberators of Iraq, also Americans and Britons, have been about the Halabja massacre. It is the clearest evidence of Saddam’s atrocities towards Iraqi citizens - why the liberators do not make surveys about it and use this information for verifying the right of their crusade? Because the first question in any research would be that who gave Saddam the chemical weapons.

I visited both the mass graves of the 16.3.1988 victims and the Memorial Statue of the massacre.

There are three mass graves where the bodies have been counted but not identified.

This is a symbolic grave yard. The victims of Saddam’s atrocities are not buried here, but they lie in mass graves and in anonymous graves in villages around Halabja. Each stone represents one family, not one person.

For my big surprise I heard that the monument was burnt last year, but it did not became clear by whom it was done. But it seems that also other people than the Islamists are disappointed on the way how KRG has dealt the Halabja tragedy.

As you can see from the picture the monument the reparation goes on now.
The picture is bad because it was difficult to take pictures by a digital camera in the heat and heavy sunshine.

Here is re-cycling by the Halabja way: authentic chemical weapons á la Saddam styled in an artistic way:

Vice-mayor of Halabja, Mrs. Kwestan Akram. Also Tunceli’s mayor is a woman, her name is Songül Erol Abdil. So even in this aspect these two towns are similar.

After visiting Halabja I visited Medico Legal Institute Kurdistan which is part of Hawler Medical University.

Here is some statistics of their work:

Pathologist working in the institute: 10
Autopsy per day: 2 -3
Deceased waiting for identification in their morgue: 700
Deceased waiting for identification in mass graves around Iraq:

182 000

Due to poor security situation in the Iraq area controlled by Arabs the digging of the mass graves has been postponed.

Pictures by Kristiina Koivunen, Halabja, the 10th May 2008