The Evil Men Do
Yes, some people truly do tread fearlessly well beyond the pale of humanly-acceptable norms in protecting their interests as demagogic tyrants without conscience. But no one single individual can possibly enact scenes of finely orchestrated violence on his own. It takes the compliant obedience of many others complicit and at one with themselves over the actions they take which result in the horrendous deaths of hundreds, thousands and the disablement of more human beings.And justified in some inscrutable way, as being necessary to ensure restoration of a peaceful atmosphere. So fearsomely and broadly victimizing a population that any further thought of protest against their condition of living under the burden of a brutal dictatorship is completely expunged. The process of sacrificing thousands of lives for the purpose of subduing rebellion somehow never seems excessive when they're conducted by self-regulating fascists.
Five thousand Kurds murdered heartlessly and with deliberate precision, at the orders of Saddam Hussein, and his henchmen eager to do his bidding. Iraqi military planes determinedly dropping a succession of bombs over the space of a day, 20 years ago, horrendously killing five thousand Kurds, leaving many thousands of others with tormenting life-long agonies of injuries and sickness of mind and body.
The hospital in Kurdish Halabja had taken in wounded Kurdish soldiers who had skirmished with the Iraqi military in March of 1988. A day later just after ten o'clock on the morning of March 16, bombs fell on the city in a carefully orchestrated barrage repeated and repeated unceasingly. Prior to the bombs being dropped the planes dropped paper to interpret wind direction and speed. No efforts wasted to ensure maximum hits, maximum damage, maximum deaths.
Then came cluster bombs, shrapnel, shelling. Then came napalm bombs, frightening the residents to hide as best they could in underground shelters built during the Iran-Iraq war. The bombing continued, intensified, with mustard gas, nerve agents, Sarin, tabun and cyanide. The gasses seeping everywhere, asphyxiating those who hadn't been killed by earlier onslaughts with shrapnel and direct hits.
Charred bodies littered the streets, houses, buildings. The dead fell with their arms wrapped around themselves, their children. A survivor who had suffered grave injuries, but who had been able to make his way with the help of others out of the city for medical assistance, returned a few days later to find silence - and blistered, black corpses swelling in putrefaction everywhere he turned.
Then Kurdish forces began loading the decomposing bodies onto trucks for mass burials. Twenty years later thousands of Kurds in the as-yet unreconstructed city - once the cultural and artistic capital of Iraqi Kurdistan - are still suffering from the effects of the bombing. The hospital hasn't the means to treat them all, although it serves close to 100,000 patients a year.
Chemical Ali, (Ali Hassan al-Majeed) the mastermind of the Halabja attack still lives under sentence of death. Is there a sentence too harsh for such a monstrous mass murder? His own death will accomplish not much of anything. The event can't be undone. People will continue to suffer - with their memories, their sickness. Little wonder the Kurds yearn for a homeland of their own.
Justice? What's that? Where found?
Labels: Justice, Realities, Terrorism
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, October 28, 2007
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