by Indra Sinha
‘Bodies lie in the dirt streets or sprawled in rooms and courtyards of the deserted villas, preserved at the moment of death in a modern version of the disaster that struck Pompeii. A father died in the dust trying to protect his child from the white clouds of cyanide vapour. A mother lies cradling her baby alongside a minibus that lies sideways across the road, hit while trying to flee. Yards away, a mother, father and daughter lie side by side. In a cellar a family crouches together. Shoes and clothes are scattered outside the houses.’
Witnesses saw Iraqi jets make more than twenty raids on the town, dropping clusters of bombs. After the flash and flame of the explosions, a cloud of white almond essence descended upon Halabja. Five thousand people breathed it and died.
James led me through the huge open-plan cave of the Sunday Times to an office clogged with papers. They lay on every surface, on the desk, heaped on chairs, stacked on the filing cabinets that lined the walls. He had just returned from Saudi Arabia, where the Allied troop build-up was in full swing. When I asked him about Iraq’s chemical weapons, he went straight to a filing cabinet and fetched out a single old-fashioned cyclostyled page.
‘You should see this, Bear,’ he said. ‘I got it in Saudi Arabia – they were handing them out to Americans. I took two, so you can have this one.’
The sheet read:
‘PREVENTATIVE MEASURES: CHEMICAL WARFARE
A.___YOU ARE OUTSIDE.
YOU WILL DIE. DO NOTHING.
B.___YOU ARE INSIDE
1) SEAL ALL AIR LEAKS, DRYER VENT, BATHROOM CEILING VENT, PET DOOR.
2) TURN OFF A/C. IT WILL ATOMIZE/CIRCULATE ANY GAS WHICH ENTERS.
3) LOOK OUT YOUR WINDOWS:
-BIRDS DROPPING FROM TREES
-CATS/DOGS/PEOPLE DROPPING, CHOKING, ETC.
-CARS CRASHING
-GENERAL CHAOS
-VISIBLE FOG/MIST IN AIR
Now I’m on the phone to Anita Roddick, telling her how I wrote the ad in the white heat of anger after visiting Kurdish refugees in London and hearing their stories. I describe the gloomy room in Brixton that was home to a couple with four small children, the floor space entirely taken up by beds with no room to squeeze between. I tell Anita about Diane, smoking furiously, still in her fur coat because it was so cold, listening to the father, Azad, who had a deep, hollow cave above his left cheekbone, describe what his right eye had seen in Kurdistan.
Azad told us that he had been a peshmerga, a fighter. In the spring of 1988, one morning soon after dawn, his platoon came to a village which had just been bombed. People were stumbling away from it. Some were badly burned, others were wounded and crying. They said, ‘Don’t go in, you’ll die.’ But Azad went. In a sunlit spring meadow – he particularly remembered the light on the flowers – he found two small children, a boy and a girl, walking with their arms around one anothers’ shoulders. The children said in the darkness and confusion they had got separated from their parents, but that they would surely find them again, as soon as it got light. They did not know, said Azad, that their parents were dead. And that they were blind.
All of this I tell Anita – how Diane later, when we were on our own, turned on me liquid eyes (teary from fury or frustration) and said, ‘Bear, why are people surprised by these things? Why are they so amazed that Saddam has grabbed hostages? We warned them. A year after Halabja, we published a report describing how a baby was held as a hostage and deprived of milk to force its parents to divulge information. We published how five-year-olds were tortured in front of their families. We revealed that at least thirty forms of torture are in use in Iraq – beating, burning and electric shocks – torturers are gouging out people’s eyes, cutting off noses, ears, breasts, penises – they insert things into the vaginas of women – some of these things they do to children. Listen Bear, Amnesty published this report last year and presented it to the UN Human Rights Commission. You know what happened? A few days later they voted not to investigate human rights violations in Iraq. I ask you, why should anyone be surprised that for the first time since World War One, British and American boys are facing a gas attack? Our leaders allowed Saddam to test those weapons on civilians who had no gas masks or weapons to fight back. We clearly told the politicians what was happening in Iraq. We told them in ’80, ’81, ’82, ’83, ’84, ’85, ’86, ’87, ’88 and ’89. They did nothing. The UN did nothing. So Bear, I’ll give you the stories and you will write things they cannot ignore. You will bomb these smug bastards into reality.’
Words are crawling across my screen and I realise that I am still logged into Shades. Morgan sits where I abandoned him, under the city arch. Nearby, two mortals – a soothsayer and an enchanter – are engaged in a desperate fight, tumbling over one another like cats in the rubble, kicking up a cloud of dust in which a sword flashes as it is stolen back and forth from hand to hand. The dust quietens, a figure lies face down in the rubble and words begin a new march across my screen announcing the death of the enchanter. Morgan stirs from the depths of his misery, lifts his head and cackles. And now a fantasy starts running in my mind. I pull Morgan to his feet, telling him, ‘Come with me, there’s something you have to see.’ Drag him through the city of Shades past the muttering, violent beggar and blasted buildings with jackdaws in the shattered rafters; past the rubble which hides the Morloch tunnels and into the Vood Street Metamagic Alternative-Reality Generator. Here a tall crystal cross leans against the wall. On a table here is a draw-string bag of white muslin, stained with patches of rust.
I say, ‘We are characters in a dream called Shades. I am inside your dream and you’re inside mine. Isn’t that right?’
‘Yes Bear,’ he says.
‘Morgan,’ I tell him. ‘See the bag on the table? Pick it up.’
He obeys and Shades confirms, ‘You have taken Diane’s Collection of Stories.’
‘Now,’ I say, ‘put in your hand and choose one.’
I am watching his face as his hand goes into the grab bag of nightmares, and feels the pulsing of the crawling horrors within.
Almond blossom in Kurdistan
The Kurdish Cultural Centre above the Brixton Road is full of heavy-eyed men – eyes like Omar Sharif’s, moustaches like Stalin’s – waiting to tell their stories. A boy whose leg was blown off by a mine sits with his prosthesis stretched out, staring at the wall. I am here at the invitation of Sarbast, the KCC’s Co-ordinator and Handren, its Secretary. When I phoned for the background on Halabja, they seemed amazed that anyone should be interested. Cyanide and nerve gas attacks on Kurdish villages had begun as early as 1985. The Kurds had been screaming for help, but the world’s governments and media had chosen to ignore them. The press knew nothing about the Kurds, and didn’t want to know. It was preoccupied with the coming war in the Gulf, and whether Saddam would use chemical weapons on British troops.
Sarbast welcomes me and leads the way to his office, where half a dozen serious men are sitting in a tobacco fug. The room is a paper-filled box, dominated by a map that fills one whole wall. The map shows Kurdistan, a lime green splodge the size of France that overlies most of eastern Turkey, the top of Iraq, a slice of western Iran, a wedge of Syria with outlying blobs in Armenia and Azerbaijan. The central regions around Lake Van had been occupied by the Kurds for centuries before the time of Christ. (Xenophon, in his Anabasis, described his army’s struggle in 400BC against the wild mountain Kurds, who carried great curved bows, and drew them by planting one end on the ground and bracing a foot against it. The tribesmen called themselves kurdi, the word pronounced not as in ‘curds’, but quurd with rolled ‘r’ and soft ‘d’, ‘’ it would be in Hindi. To Xenophon’s Greeks they were Karduchoi: “οı δε Καρδοχοı οὔτε καλούντον ὐπήκουν οὔτε ἂλλο φıλıκὸν οὺδὲν ὲποίουν.” ‘The Karduchians would neither listen when they called to them nor give any other sign of friendliness.’) The map represents promises, remembered and treasured in this office, dishonoured and forgotten in the capi
tals of the west. It is a sacred mandala, before which the cigarette smoke rises like incense. The men in the room are recalling that at the end of the First World War, when the Ottoman empire was to be dismantled, Stanley Baldwin had promised their grandfathers an independent Kurdistan. Instead, the territories of the Kurds were divided up between Turkey, Persia, Syria and Britain’s new creation, the kingdom of Iraq – which took in what had once been Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers, the barren desert to the west and a swathe of mountain territory to the north. The mountains happened to be the southern marches of Kurdistan, or, as the map on the wall before me now proclaims, ‘Kurdistan – Iraq Sector’. When the Kurds, sick at the betrayal, protested, they became the first population in history to be bombed with poison gas, in this case mustard gas dropped from RAF biplanes. Seventy years later, they also became the second.
Halabja is a small market town in the mountains near the border with Iran. It has a climate like the Alpes Maritîmes, deep crisp snows in winter and hot summers tempered by altitude. In the spring its orchards are full of blossom: plum, cherry, peach, apricot, walnut, almond. In March 1988, the Iran-Iraq War – the costliest ever war in terms of human life, featuring gas attacks on a scale which had not been seen since Flanders – was drawing to an end. The Iranian army was advancing towards Halabja. It was some twenty miles away when its forward observers saw silver needles glint above the town and white mushrooms of smoke fly up. Again and again Iraqi jets dived on Halabja and explosions, foreshortened and flattened in the watchers’ field glasses, kicked up pale clouds of cyanide that drifted among the houses and through the almond blossom. Breath was death. The bodies lying in houses and streets were filmed and photographed by a French crew.
‘After Halabja,’ says Sarbast – he has close cropped hair, glasses like Raskolnikov in Dr Zhivago and a sad smile – ‘we hoped and expected that the world would at last intervene . . .’
‘Well?’
‘You see, Bear,’ says Handren, the flamboyantly moustachioed Secretary, ‘we were very disappointed, because less than a month after Halabja, a Conservative minister told a group of businessmen that he had high hopes for them to sell more goods in Iraq.’
‘The British government turned a blind eye to the murder of five thousand people?’ This strikes me as preposterous, impossible.
They just smile sadly at me.
On 16th September 1988, after chemical and nerve gas attacks had actually intensified, Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani wrote to the Foreign Secretary. He said that numerous Kurdish appeals to the UN had gone unanswered and that Iraq was exploiting what seemed to be the world’s indifference to genocide in Kurdistan. Talabani wrote, ‘One of our few remaining hopes is that democrats and those who cherish values of justice, peace and freedom would voice their concern for the plight of the Kurds. That is why I am making this direct appeal to you . . .’
The Thatcher Government’s response? On 5th October 1988 the Independent reported ‘The United Kingdom has a credit line to Iraq worth approximately $300 million, expected to double . . .’ In November, Minister Tony Newton flew to Baghdad at the head of a twenty-strong delegation carrying in his pocket credit lines for Anglo-Iraq trade worth £340 million.
‘We can’t let these stories go untold,’ I say.
‘Bear,’ says Handren, ‘would you like to meet someone who was there? Who saw what happened with his own eyes?’
‘I think you mean with his own eye,’ says Sarbast. ‘He is like the politicians. He has only one eye.’
Eye witness
Greennet, started in Britain in 1987, and part of the internet, is a forum for radical discussion and action. It connects thousands of organisations working in human rights, environment, development and health. Within months these groups, many of whom had been unaware of one another’s existence, are planning joint actions and learning the value of co-operation. In late 1990, Greennet is seething with activists protesting against the inevitability of war in the Gulf. But knowing what Saddam has done to the Kurds, I long for his removal. I want a war that will sweep him from power.
Sarbast, Handren and I decide to start our own newsgroup on Greennet. We will portray the Kurds as survivors who can tell the world what it’s like to be bombed with cyanide and nerve gas. Surely someone will notice. But even on Greennet demands for Kurdish autonomy are met with resistance. The moderator of the mideast newsgroups says there is no need for a mideast.kurds, that Kurdish affairs are already covered by mideast.news, mideast.forum and mideast.gulf. We plead, he refuses to listen. We argue that the Kurds have been denied their own country, must they be denied a voice in cyberspace? We bombard his newsgroups with protests (early examples of spamming). Finally, he relents and mideast.kurds is born. To attract our first visitors, I post a string of phoney message headers in mideast.forum.
Our aim is to make mideast.kurds a reference point for the history, culture and politics of the Kurdish clans. The interviews I am doing with the eyewitnesses will be posted there. I will always remember Sarbast’s room, where we did the interviews, as reeking of coarse mountain tobacco but, strange tricks the mind plays, the smokers were actually puffing Marlboros and Rothmans. To this day, when I check these stories in mideast.kurds, I imagine that the net itself smells of black home-cured leaf.
Khalid is a heavy-set man, like many others, an ex-peshmerga. He is one of those who fled to the mountains in the exodus of autumn 1988. In a matter-of-fact voice he describes what he saw in the Kurdish valleys during the year before Halabja.
‘I was stationed in the valley not far from Sheikh Wasanen. I saw the jets diving again and again to bomb the village. After the bombs fell, the people ran outside as though they thought they had escaped injury. But they ran into the chemical and died.’
‘Were you certain it was a chemical attack?’ asks Sarbast.
‘Of course,’ says Khalid. ‘We were there.’
On April 15th and 16th 1987, thirty-four Soviet-made Iraqi Sukhoi jets had bombed the Kurdish villages of Haledin and Balisan with poison gas. Khalid described what they found.
‘We entered Balisan not long after the bombs had fallen. Bodies were lying in the street. The bodies had gone blue, but there was no other sign of injury. My friend Abdullah Habib went to where a woman lay, her arms round her small children. As Abdullah bent down, he collapsed and died. A friend who rushed to help him also died. Where I was standing, ten feet away, the air was breathable.’
A second man enters. He is perhaps forty, but with hair gone grey. He sits and accepts a coffee.
Sarbast says, ‘He does not speak English. I will tell you his story. He was a peshmerga. They had to get out of an area where the Iraqi army was attacking. He had his nine year old son with him. Their path led down to a river which was very fierce, white with melted snow. They began to ford, the father holding onto his boy’s wrist. The water rushed around his chest and it knocked him off his feet. He says he heard the boy call “father” as he was swept away. He found his son’s body two miles downstream, on a rock in the sun.’
During the translation, the man sips coffee and stares ahead of him, seeing I dare not guess what, as if his tears had long since been exhausted, their few thimblesful released to that river in spate.
Mahmud, a tall gentle looking man, stoops in and takes a seat. Handren speaks to him in Kurdish.
‘He also speaks no English,’ says Sarbast. ‘I will translate.’
‘Mahmud says, “I was running, filled with the giant strength of panic, with a child tucked under each arm. Behind us, our village was filling with white clouds of gas. It had a smell like rotten onions. We only just got out. The gas was coming fast behind us and it was threatening to catch us. I turned round and I could see my wife running a little way behind me. She also had two children to carry. My wife’s face was twisted in an expression which I do not like to remember. You see, we had five children, not four, but we could only carry two each. I shall never forget that small figure of my son, running alo
ng following me, reaching out his arms, begging me not to leave him. As God is my witness, I never loved him more than at that moment.” ’
Sipple of Arabia
Now begins a new period in my life. We have a cause to fight. For the first time in my advertising career something I am doing is important. I compose Amnesty’s ad about the cyanide attack on Halabja in a white flame of anger: ‘You Margaret Thatcher, you George Bush and you reading this – yes, you – you did nothing to help.’ I write this in the study one dark evening and read it to Eve. She says, ‘You can’t say that. It sounds hysterical.’ But it has to be said. The ad runs and there’s a big response (including the call from Anita Roddick). But even working with Amnesty does not feel so urgent as the struggle to help the Kurds. We run a tiny ad in the Daily Telegraph and raise £26,000.
Inspired by the exciting things happening on Greennet, I decide to volunteer my services to the Green Party. I log into the gn.party newsgroup and leave an email detailing my experience. A week later the phone rings and I am invited to their HQ in Balham. There I meet a nice lady called something like Mouche who tells me she runs the ComCon (or some such) team, and a sleek, white-haired PR man who reminds me of Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s cat. The office is too small to accommodate three of us, so we go round the corner to a pub. Mouche asks if I will help them create a slogan for the next party conference. It won’t be easy, she warns. She has sounded out colleagues and the consensus is that the slogan must be uplifting, positive, ecologically inspiring, sensitive, ground breaking, modern yet protective of tradition, embracing the needs and hopes not just of greens but the wider community, speaking to the (wo)man in the street in a language (s)he understands, neither patronising, sexist nor exploitative, warm, friendly yet authoritative, casual yet with the smack of firm government, short, snappy, memorable, singable – and it’s needed by next week.