Iraq: Amnesty International deciphers the history of the use of chemical weapons
The Halabja chemical weapons massacre in March 1988 claimed thousands of lives.
7,000 of them appealed to a court in Iraqi Kurdistan.
AFP / File
Text by: Lou Roméo Follow
4 min
Amnesty International publishes this March 18 ToxicAffair, a digital platform dedicated to the history of the use of chemical weapons by Iraq of Saddam Hussein, responsible for the deaths of thousands of Kurdish civilians and Iranian soldiers in the 1980s. ToxicAffair
points to the involvement of several foreign companies, particularly Western ones, in their development.
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Virigine Roels is the editor-in-chief of
La Chronique
d'Amnesty International.
The information available on
the ToxicAffair platform, posted
online this Thursday, March 18, 2021, is taken from an investigation that she led, for
La Chronique
d'Amnesty, and unpublished extracts from Jean-Pierre Canet's documentary,
"
Iraq, destruction of a nation
”
.
RFI
:
Why launch this platform now?
Virginie Roels
: It was Jean-Pierre Canet, who was working on a
documentary series
on the destruction of the Iraqi nation after the American invasion of 2003, who convinced me.
Underlying his research was the issue of the use of chemical weapons, and he was frustrated not to delve deeper into the subject.
As editor-in-chief of
The Chronicle
of Amnesty, I told myself that we had to explore the question of the use of chemical weapons in Iraq and that of the potential involvement of Western companies in their manufacture.
It emerged that it was interesting to pick up the thread of this story, to make it accessible to a wider and younger audience.
Hence the platform, which we wanted to be exhaustive and easy to use, to explain how the use of chemical weapons had been made possible, how Saddam Hussein had obtained raw materials, and how States and companies had allowed the use of these weapons.
95% of the raw materials needed to develop chemical weapons in Iraq were supplied by foreign companies. Have any of them been convicted?
None of these companies, German, French, Dutch, Italian, has been condemned, strictly speaking.
Some have been prosecuted on trade law issues and had to pay fines for violating tariffs.
We are far from complicity in a war crime.
The only heavy sentence to have been pronounced is that of the Dutch negotiator
Frans Van Anraat
, who was sentenced in 2005 by the Dutch courts to sixteen and a half years in prison.
What is complex is proving that companies knew what the raw materials they were selling were going to be used for: chemical weapons use the same manufacturing ingredients as pens or nylon, for example.
► To see: The ToxicAffair platform developed by Amnesty International
A trial is underway in Iraqi Kurdistan, initiated by the complaint of
7,000 victims of the massacre with chemical weapons in Halabja, responsible for the death of 3,000 to 5,000 civilians in March 1988. What can we expect
?
Currently, the hearings are suspended because of the coronavirus epidemic and none of the companies involved have come to the site.
This is one of the limits of the procedure;
the other is that there is little chance that a legal decision taken in Iraqi Kurdistan will be applicable in Europe.
But justice is advancing.
It gradually acquires the means to prosecute those responsible.
We are at the beginning of an awareness of co-responsibilities: justice is beginning to say that if companies are not politicians or individuals, they have responsibilities on the issue of human rights and on the use of Chemical Weapons.
The concept of corporate responsibility is very important today in terms of French law.
► To see:
The documentary series “Iraq, destruction of a nation” by Jean-Pierre Canet, available on France 5
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