Day of Remembrance for all Victims of Chemical Warfare (April 29)

On the occasion of the Day of Remembrance for all Victims of Chemical Warfare (April 29), the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) recalls the largest poison gas massacre of civilians since the Second World War – in Halabja, a Kurdish town in northern Iraq – on March 16, 1988. The human rights organization appealed to the German government to help the survivors, who are suffering from the poison gas attack until today. “Back when the Iraqi Air Force dropped poison gas on Halabja, about 5,000 children, women, and men lost their lives in only one day,” explained Kamal Sido, the STP’s Middle East consultant, in Göttingen on Thursday. “The Hessian companies Karl Kolb GmbH and Pilot Plant had contributed to the construction of the poison gas factories in Samara, ordered by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein – and Germany must take over responsibility: There must be more support for survivors who are still dependent on qualified medical treatment that can not be performed in the region.”

The use of poisonous gas against Halabja was part of an extermination campaign of the Baath regime (initiated in 1987) against the Kurdish people in Northern Iraq as well as the ethnic groups of the Assyro-Chaldean-Aramaic, the Turkmen, and the Yazidis. Back then, the STP had repeatedly informed the German-speaking media about poison gas attacks on a total number of 87 villages in the Kurdish mountain region, committed by the Iraqi Air Force.

Despite international agreements and bans, chemical weapons are still being used. Only a few weeks ago, poison gas attacks on civilians in Syria had made it to the headlines again. Both the Assad regime, supported by Iran, and the radical Islamists, supported by Turkey, are being blamed for the attacks. April 29 has been a day of remembrance for the victims of chemical weapons since 1997, as this was the day when the Chemical Weapons Convention came into force 20 years ago.

Header Photo: Adam Jones, Ph.D. via Wikimedia Commons