BY ROHAN PEARCE
In a set-back for Washington, on November 19 Danish government prosecutors have charged Nizar al Khazraji with war crimes. Khazraji is the highest-ranking general to have defected from Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's regime. The March 11 Boston Globe reported that Khazraji was the CIA's and US state department's favourite to head a post-Saddam regime.
With the help of the CIA, Khazraji defected in 1996. He has been resident in Denmark since 1999. Khazraji was recognised by a Kurdish refugee, who reported him to the Danish authorities. In 2001, after his presence made headlines in Denmark's tabloids (which dubbed him the "Poison General"), the government activated the investigation.
The charges against Khazraji were finally laid just days before he had planned to leave the country for an unspecified Middle Eastern country. He claimed he was going to join other former Iraqi military officers and launch an insurrection timed to coincide with the US invasion of Iraq.
Over the past year, Danish prosecutors have put together a case against Khazraji based on his role as the top army commander during the Iraqi regime's atrocities against Kurds in 1988-89.
Khazraji was chief of staff of Iraq's army from 1987 to 1991, with around 1 million soldiers under his command. His forces participated in the 1988-89 "Anfal" slaughter of the Iraqi Kurds. In an ironic twist, given his relationship with the US, he was in charge of the army during Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. In 1991, he commanded the forces which crushed the Shiite uprising in southern Iraq.
Before he became army chief, Khazraji was a senior army commander in charge of key military operations during the bloody Iran-Iraq war. Chemical weapons were regularly used against Iranian forces.
Danish prosecutors have charged Khazraji with serious breaches of the Geneva Convention, including complicity in the March 16, 1988, massacre in Halabja, northern Iraq. Iraqi helicopters unleashed chemical weapons against the Kurdish village, killing more than 5000 people.
The attack on Halabja was part of a broader military pogrom against Iraqi Kurds, known as the Anfal operation. In just over six months, the Iraqi armed forces killed tens of thousands of people. More than 2000 villages were destroyed. The fate of more than 180,000 Kurds remains unknown.
Human Rights Watch has provided the Danish authorities with several official Iraqi memos and orders that directly tie Khazraji to the Anfal genocide. Danish authorities have also collected more than 100 witness statements that name Khazraji as being responsible for the carnage in northern Iraq.
The Halabja atrocities occurred in 1988, while Iraq was still a US ally. Consequently, a March 1991 Middle East Watch report notes, "Despite the international outcry over this one infamous event, little was heard in the United States about Saddam Hussein's brutal treatment of his own people until his invasion of Kuwait last August 2 [1991]. Even now, virtually no mention is made of the many other times the Iraqi government has gassed its large Kurdish minority."
The construction of the chemical-equipped weapons used in the Halabja attack was more than likely made possible by the US: in 1994, a report to the US Senate revealed that, during the period that Hussein was the Washington's ally, US companies exported a large variety of chemical and biological weapon components.
It is only since Iraq's descent from trusted ally to "rogue state" after its 1990 incursion into Kuwait that successive US administrations have raised the atrocities against Halabja and Hussein's other crimes against the Kurds.
Of course, these crimes are not being used by the US to make the case for Kurdish self-determination, but merely as useful propaganda point-scoring in the "war on terror". The fact that Washington is considering installing an Iraqi general who led the genocide against the Kurds as Hussein's successor highlights this.
Although the US government often raises the issue of rights for Kurds in Iraq, it has remained silent on the crimes against Kurds committed by US ally Turkey. Indeed, during a visit to Turkey in July, US deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz stated "a separate Kurdish state in the north would be destabilising to Turkey and would be unacceptable to the United States". While Washington is happy to use the Kurds as pawns in its "great game", it will not allow the democratic right of national self-determination for Kurds in Iraq or Turkey.
On November 20, the judge presiding over the case ordered Khazraji be put under house arrest, disregarding the prosecution's request that he remain in jail during the trial.
From Green Left Weekly, December 4, 2002.
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