Iran's Chemical Wounds Remain Open and Painful
    By Delphine Minoui
    Le Figaro

    Friday 25 August 2006

The tragedy of Sardacht, the Iranian city bombarded with chemical weapons by Iraq in 1987, contributes to explaining Tehran's desire to acquire nuclear technology.

0aIran seems determined to confront the prospect of Security Council sanctions, after having rejected the Great Powers' demands that it suspend its uranium enrichment activities. Yesterday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel made known her dissatisfaction with the Iranian answer, transmitted to the UN on Tuesday. The Six (Germany, China, the United States, France, Great Britain, and Russia) are preparing to reject Tehran's proposal to resume negotiations without preconditions.

    When he concerns himself with the international news, Mustafah Assaghzadeh sees only injustice and incomprehension there. His country, Iran, is accused of manufacturing the atomic bomb, while his city, Sardacht - the first city gassed by Iraqi planes with chemical weapons in 1987 - doesn't even figure among the distinct charges of which Saddam Hussein is accused in the trial now underway in Baghdad. "The world has ignored us for twenty years. Only international recognition of the crimes to which we have been subjected could heal our pain," he blurts.

    In its own way, this big brown-mustachioed Iranian Kurd's resentment embodies the Islamic Republic's distrust with respect to the great global powers. It allows a better understanding - even if it's difficult to prove it - of the Iranian paranoia that could prompt the country to launch itself into construction of a nuclear weapon.

    "If the international community's suspicions are correct, Iran's nuclear program finally is only a legacy of the repeated use of chemical gas by Iraq during its war with Iran and of the international community's failure to put a stop to it," comments researcher Joost Hiltermann, author of a book on recourse to chemical weapons use during the Iran-Iraq war that will shortly be published by Cambridge University Press.

    When Iraqi military planes dumped four mustard gas bombs right in the center of Sardacht, a peaceful little city in northwestern Iran, a dozen kilometers from the Iranian border, at 4:30 p.m. on June 28, 1987, Mustafah Assaghzadeh, then eighteen years old, was in Tehran. A long and painful race against death began for him then, through the region's hospitals where the victims had been scattered, to finally discover, one after another, the wrecked bodies of his nine closest family members: father, mother, grandmother, brothers and sisters.

    Back in Sardacht, he learned that one of the bombs had been dropped three meters away from his family home. "My brain was empty. I was on my own, with no help, no psychological support. Evenings, I wandered, I talked to the dead. I will never forget what we were made to undergo," he confides.

    5,000 Poisoned Inhabitants

    A quarter of some 20,000 inhabitants of Sardacht, at the foot of the Zagros Mountains, were poisoned. A hundred died. International silence only encouraged Saddam Hussein to let loose on Halabja, a town in Iraqi Kurdistan where 5,000 inhabitants died several months later, and to continue his chemical attacks against Iran. In total, 360 chemical bombs targeted Iranian civilian and military targets, especially during the last years of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988). "These crimes are unforgivable. In its recent history, Iran has never attacked any country. But it has found itself the target of multiple attacks," fumes Dr. Shariar Khat ri, who manages the Iranian Association for the Defense of Victims of Chemical Weapons.

    Seen from the West, the Islamic Republic of Iran generally appears as a threatening power, ready to export the Islamic Revolution, to strike Israel with its missiles and to build the bomb. But if one takes Tehran's side, another vision emerges. For the Iranians, their recent history is a series of conspiracy, often led by the West. "Psychologically, that's what pushes the Islamic Republic to claim its rights today, to stand up to the West about the nuclear issue," analyzes Iranian political scientist, Morteza Firouzi.

    When the Iraqi enemy, supported by Western countries, violated the (1925) Geneva protocol that proscribed that type of weapon, Iran cried 0aout against the scandal. Its indignation did not reach the United Nations. The result was a feeling of abandonment, which the forgotten victims of Sardacht echo today. "The UN abandoned us," despairs Hossein Mohammadian, englobed in his "charwar," the traditional Kurdish bouffant trousers. This Sardacht farmer has just launched a little NGO to assist survivors of the catastrophe, who, like himself, he says, still suffer secondary effects of the chemical attack: asthma, skin irritations, depression.

    Two UN Communiqu s

    Seven United Nations missions during the Iran-Iraq war investigated the use of gas during the conflict. But, deplores Dr. Khat ri, "the Security Council settled for issuing two communiqu s void of any substance." The first, on May 9, 1988, launched a vague appeal at Iran and Iraq not to use chemical weapons. The second, in August 1988, specified that "chemical gas had been used against Iran," without citing its origin: Iraq. As for the American administration at the time, informed of the facts: it played deaf.

    When the conflict was over, the Islamic republic revised its strategy and drew two lessons from it: "To avoid at all costs any vulnerable position and never to trust international conventions and treaties when faced with the global superpower," notes Joost Hiltermann.

    According to the experts, the end of the Iran-Iraq war coincided with the accelerated development of a clandestine Iranian nuclear program. With respect to biological weapons, Ali Akbar Hach mi Rafsandjani, then President of the Parliament, declared two months after the cease-fire that "we should, at least think about them for our defense." Before adding: "Even if usage of such weapons is inhuman, the war taught us that international laws are nothing but ink on paper."

    Officially, Tehran continues to maintain that its atomic program is exclusively civilian. "As the sole victims of the use of weapons of mass destruction in recent history, Iranians reject the development and the use of these inhuman weapons," declared Ambassador Javad Zarif on July 31 in New York, immediately following the vote on the UN resolution threatening Iran with sanctions if it did not renounce uranium enrichment.

    As for the residents of Sardacht, they continue to struggle with the demons of the past. About 3,000 of its inhabitants wounded by chemical weapons (of 45,000 across Iran) continue to receive specific care. The same question incessantly returns to people's lips: why? The gas, in fact, deliberately targeted the heart of Sardacht. Did the Iraqi head of state want to frighten the Iranians in order to put an end to the war? Or was he trying to interrupt a meeting between Iranian officials and Iraqi Kurdish opposition leaders that, according to rumor, was being held in the city? Including Sardacht among the specific charges brought against Saddam Hussein during his trial would perhaps allow clarification of an affair that everyone seems to have wanted to bury.