Remembering Halabja
Black Dawn On Wednesday, we took our interns and the group visiting from Woodway and went to Halabja, site of Saddam Hussein’s chemical gas attack against his own people on 16 March 1988. Within hours the death toll was over 5,000 men, women, boys and girls dead. Over the intervening two decades, the casualties have continued to rise as people gradually succumb to various cancers and respiratory problems brought on by their exposure to lethal gases on that day.
They have just recently opened a museum that gives something of the history of the gassing of Halabja. In addition to the names of all of the victims etched in marble in a massive rotunda, there are also graphic photographs of the results of this chemical attack as well as three-dimensional recreations of some of these scenes: people dead wherever the gas finally overtook them.
One of these essentially life-sized scenes was of a family who died in their pick-up truck. Children silent and still in the bed of the truck, a father slumped over the wheel. Only one member of this family survived: a thirteen-year-old boy who somehow stayed alive in the cab of the truck for two days surrounded by the poisoned corpses of his family before he finally braved the open air and a trek up the mountains to escape into Iran and seek medical treatment there. (And the two days actually helped save his life. Those who immediately tried to escape through the mountains were met by an armada of Saddam’s helicopter gunships waiting for them.)
The reason we heard so much about this particular family is because that surviving son now works at this memorial museum. Maybe it is simply because it is nearly impossible to emotionally come to grips with the depravity and tragedy that made the name of a small Kurdish town like Halabja known to the world, but I think the most overwhelming thing to me on Wednesday was witnessing this man whose job everyday is to narrate the murder of his family, compelled to make sure that no one forgets.
For the sake of his own healing, I hope that he soon learns that there is One who has heard all of his cries and who will never forget his pain because he himself has borne it.
