Halabja and the Face of Justice

Abstract

This is an edited text of the comments that Professor Newton was asked to deliver at the 25th Anniversary commemoration of the genocidal acts that took place in Halabja on March 16, 1988. The speech is entitled "Halabja and the Face of Justice". The text touches on the attributes of the Kurdish people and describes the effects of the chemical weapons attacks on Halabja that day as well as the larger context of the Anfal genocidal campaign. Saddam Hussein's regime destroyed some 2000, Kurdish villages and used chemical weapons against the civilian population more than 50 separate times. The speech concludes by placing the crimes in Halabja and the larger Anfal into the perspective of current events in Syria.

Keywords: genocide, Anfal, Halabja, Kurdish, dolus specialis