LITERARY | Iraq: Halabja’s Public Health Nightmare
Iraq | Daniel J. Gerstle | November 2009
Republished November 2024
Welcome back! This story was published in our original first issue of Humanitarian Bazaar Magazine (originally called HELO Magazine) in November 2009. The story was originally published under a pseudonym.
Mr. Araz Abed Akram walks into his office with a small green plastic bag full of soil and sits below a portrait of his family. He says the soil, which he scooped up outside in old town Halabja, northern Iraq, was just turned up by a construction crew resurfacing the road. And he wants to have it tested for weapons of mass destruction.
On March 16, 1988, during the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime ordered pilots to drop canisters of serin, cyanide, and mustard gas over Halabja and several other hamlets on the northeast border to clear a zone between Iraqi and Kurdish-backed Iranian forces in the area. Canisters of toxins rained into the bustling markets spewing clouds of death. About 5,000 Kurdish and other civilians perished in their tracks. Others fled and survived but blame later cancers and children’s birth defects on the gas they inhaled that day.
For a moment I reconsider the family portrait behind Mr. Araz. It is an aged photograph of a pile of bodies in a grassy field. Mr. Araz hangs that picture by his desk so that he and his guests will never forget the last time he saw his family.
Many believe that today’s dramatic increase in construction activities in Iraqi Kurdistan are stirring up poisons which have lain dormant in the top-soil for years. Although farmers have tilled the land despite such risks, new improvements are now stirring up clouds of dust in Halabja and other urban centers. Some fear an upsurge in lung problems and birth defects.
The United States, United Kingdom, and Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq have each invoked the nightmare of the Baathist’s poisoning of Halabja to stir political will for the “No Fly Zone” of the 1990’s and the Iraq invasion of 2003. Yet none have followed through on any substantial epidemiological impact study, follow-up intervention, or local after-effects monitoring system to increase global knowledge about such kinds of attacks. Small studies have traced psycho-social effects. But efforts to reduce mortality and morbidity due to the poisons are unknown by residents.
“People still experience serious lung problems, skin cancer, eye problems, and birth defects we know are due to the gas,” Mr. Akram explains. “Sometimes people are treated for eye problems in Iran because they can’t find doctors who understand the specific damage caused by these toxins here. But treatment for the last people we sent cost too much for us to afford. They came back and the problem persisted because the treatment wasn’t accurate.”
When asked whether the cancers and birth defects could be related to other causes or conditions, Mr. Akram holds steady that he is focusing his advocacy efforts on health conditions specific to the gas.
“For adults, we know for a fact our symptoms began the day of the attack. Today the problems also persist with our children. One small boy was playing football, injured his leg, and then they had to amputate because of a certain kind of unusual cancer they found.”
Halabja’s survivors do not see themselves as lone victims. Mr. Akram and other leaders here argue they are part of a vast network of people who would benefit from a serious public health intervention stretching from Halabja throughout Iraqi Kurdistan, Iran, and even Russia’s Chechen Republic where fighting in the early 2000’s destroyed chemical plants near residential areas. Mr. Akram assesses that at least 500 people continue to suffer in Halabja alone from injuries or birth defects believed to be directly linked to the poison gas attacks.
Leaders interviewed in the community assert that the townsfolk still feel exploited and ignored. Some remain furious at the Kurdish leadership because of the perception that oil profits are increasing. In 2006, a group of residents destroyed the Halabja memorial erected by that government and visited by diplomats from the US, UK, Japan, and beyond, specifically because they believed the money should have gone to victims instead.
At the UN, they still have not recognized Halabja as an international tragedy,” Mr. Akram explains. “This kind of tragedy should be acknowledged and followed up at the highest levels, not simply among rights advocates. They can’t hear our voice; that is the problem.”
In Mr. Abed Akram’s vision Western institutions would not only intervene to ensure Halabja’s survivors and their children do not continue to die young, but also collect lessons-learned to distribute to global communities who may one day face the same fate.
Halabja today is a safe and welcoming community despite the residents’ concerns about ongoing unaddressed public health concerns. The mountain-shaded old town is built around a market maze and central mosque, lined with tea houses, kebab stalls, and stores which sell everything from foreign video-camcorders to local olive oil soap. Since the trauma of the 1980s and 2003, residents have revived their town.
Visual evidence of the massacre has been reduced to a collection of sad but inspirational statues marking sites and a central graveyard with a sign on the gate which reads: “It’s not allowed for Baaths [Members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party] to enter.”
“People come,” Mr. Akram continues, “and we talk, but no medical assistance turns up for long term effects and birth defects related to the tragedy. Unfortunately, I made more than 400 interviews with the media as well as with Colin Powell, Francois Miterrand of France.
“In 2006, the Japanese Prime Minister’s deputy came to learn what they might do, but until now we don’t have any response from any of these people. The Kurdish Regional Government made a committee to help these kinds of patients. But over six months they’ve only made a list of names. Some of the victims are really suffering. Some dying. They can’t wait until next year.”
Many of those who spoke with Abed Akram were perhaps at first, drawn to his raw masculine power, his bitter passion, and his eloquence, only to conclude that he was so tortured by his loss he simply could not let go. Others may have instead seen a man who was continually planting seeds in the desert. For twenty years, he had planted where there would be no rain; the epidemiological study and intervention he sought simply cost more than anyone would be able or willing to pay.
As for me, I saw in Araz Abed Akram the figure of Job, an incredible force of man who had lost his farm, his entire family, and had even suffered the boils of mustard gas himself, clinging to the only implement he had left: his quest to save the remaining survivors.