Hinweis zum Sprachgebrauch in älteren Beiträgen
Der folgende ältere Beitrag kann Sprache und Formulierungen enthalten, die heute nicht mehr den Ansprüchen einer diskriminierungsfreien und sensiblen Ausdrucksweise entsprechen. Er wurde im historischen Kontext verfasst und bewusst unverändert gelassen, um unsere jahrzehntelange Menschenrechtsarbeit zu dokumentieren.
Following the announcement of a second trial for the overthrown Iraqi head of state Saddam Hussein for genocide and crimes against humanity the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) called today for the those firms to be brought to justice in Germany which were involved in the preparation of these crimes. Saddam Hussein is accused of having initiated the so-called Anfal Offensive on Kurdish and Assyro-Chaldean villages in North Iraq, which was flanked by poison gas attacks. In the course of this according to different estimates between 100,000 and 182,000 people were killed after 1987. Under the leadership of the two Hessian firms Karl Kolb GmbH and Pilot Plant a number of German firms pushed the construction of the poison gas plants in the Iraqi Samarra. In the spring of 1987 the GfbV were the first to report on the poison gas attacks on villages of the Kurdish and Assyro-Chaldean population. In March 1988 5,000 inhabitants of the Kurdish town Halabja died in a poison gas attack of the Iraqi air force. The GfbV accused these firms in April 1987 of having the responsibility for the deaths of thousands of civilians in the Kurdish regions of Iraq. The district court of Bonn forbade our human rights organisation twice under penalty of 500,000 DM fine the repetition of these accusations. The higher court of Cologne then reversed this sentence on 11th January 1988 after the GfbV quoted Israeli sources. According to documents which have been made available Saddam Hussein gave his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid the order for the Anfal Offensive. The poisnon gas attacks of 1986-1988 were so terrible, said a report of the United Nations, „and of such an extent that there have only been very few similar examples since the Second World War”. Surviving victims in the attacked settlements were liquidated by the Iraqi army. Hundreds of thousands of Kurdish and Assyrian civilians were driven into central Iraq and tens of thousands were shot in mass executions. Following the crushing of the Kurdish revolt after the first Gulf war Ali Hassan al-Majid admitted to the Kurdish negotiator that in this Offensive „only” 100,000 Kurds were killed. It was no more than that.
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