TEHRAN, 21 July 2004 — Angered at being left off the charge sheet in the case against ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Iran yesterday wheeled out its veterans still suffering the consequences of chemical attacks during the 1980-88 war.
In a media event featuring a photo exhibition and patients still coughing and spluttering from gruesome wounds inflicted nearly two decades ago, victims pressed Iran’s indignation over not meriting a place alongside Iraqi’s Kurds and Shiite Muslims or Kuwait.
“I want our case to be presented to the court in Baghdad as soon as possible, just as Kuwait’s case was presented,” complained Ameneh Ebrahimian, a 66-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman and survivor of one of Iraq’s largest chemical attacks.
“I want the world to know what happened to our beautiful town of Sardasht, of the day we were bombed and me and five of my children were gassed.”
On June 28, 1987, Saddam’s forces launched their first large-scale chemical weapons attack against civilians. An estimated 4,500 people were exposed to mustard gas in the target, the northwestern Iranian town of Sardasht. Just a year later, Saddam used a cocktail of chemical and nerve agents against Iraq’s own Kurdish minority in the town of Halabja.
With Halabja featuring on the charge sheet against Saddam when he appeared in court on July 1 for an initial hearing on seven charges of crimes against humanity, Iran was overlooked.
Iran responded by accusing archenemy the United States of dictating the terms of the charges, but nevertheless asserting it would prepare a dossier and welcome the head of the Iraqi Special Tribunal trying the ousted president, Salem Chalabi.
Saddam sparked an eight-year war with Iran when he attempted to profit from Iran’s revolutionary turmoil by making a land grab into the oil-rich Iranian southwest in 1980. The ensuing conflict cost the lives of up to a million people, most of them Iranians.
Still not lost on Iran is that key United Nations member states, fearing the spread of the Iranian revolution, turned a blind eye to Iraq’s use of chemical weapons.
According to Iran’s Society for Chemical Weapons Victims Support (SCWVS), the organizers of yesterday’s hospital event, the 45,000 registered war veterans with chemical injuries cost the regime around $20 million a year to support. Ebrahimian’s son, Hashem Karmian, described them as “Saddam’s forgotten victims”.
“Even though this tribunal has been set by the occupiers, we still have to present our case,” asserted Ismail Bani-Hossieni, a 43-year-old cleric. He was speaking with a hoarse voice, having suffered from an infected larynx provoked by a gas attack 18 years ago in southern Iraq’s Faw Peninsula.
Meanwhile, Iran yesterday dismissed as “fabrication and fantasy” US suggestions that it may have been involved in the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. US President George W. Bush said on Monday Washington was “digging into the facts” to determine whether Iran played a role in the Al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington.
A US commission investigating the attacks will detail links between Iran and Al-Qaeda in its final report this week. The report is expected to say that several of the 19 hijackers passed through Iran on their way to the United States.
Tehran acknowledges that some of the Sept. 11 plotters may have been in Iran before the attacks but says they did so after entering the country undetected along its lengthy and porous borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“Any claim about Iran’s direct or indirect links to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks is fabrication and fantasy,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told the official IRNA news agency. “It is not strange that some people manage to slip through a country’s borders illegally... What is funny is the fact that the country which has given them visas, residency permits, pilot training and sabotage training is making such claims,” he said.
Meanwhile, Iran’s hard-line judiciary sentenced dissident academic Hashem Aghajari to five years in prison yesterday for saying Muslims should not blindly follow their clerical leaders like “monkeys”, his lawyer said. The sentence marked a major climb-down by the judiciary which originally condemned Aghajari to death for blasphemy after making the speech in 2002.
The death sentence, issued by a provincial court in western Iran, sparked some of the largest student protests for years and fuelled international concern about restrictions on free speech in the Islamic state. The blasphemy verdict was finally overturned by the Supreme Court in June after many senior clerics said it was too harsh. A retrial was held in Tehran earlier this month.
“The Tehran court sentenced him to five years in prison for insulting Islamic values,” Aghajari’s lawyer Saleh Nikbakht told Reuters. He said the court had agreed to free Aghajari, a history lecturer and pro-reform activist, on bail of 1 billion rials ($117,000) while a further appeal is lodged.
Aghajari’s wife said her husband should have been acquitted. “Why should a professor be given a prison sentence for making a speech?” Zahra Behnoudi told Reuters. “If he had been acquitted we would have felt that wisdom had prevailed in the judiciary.”
