From: The Guardian, 26 November 2008,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/26/iran-iraq-war
The legacy of chemical warfare
Twenty years on, the survivors of the Iran-Iraq war provide grim human
reminders of the horrors of chemical warfare, Ian Black reports from Tehran
Ian Black, Middle East editor guardian.co.uk, Wednesday November 26 2008
02.14 GMT
Mohammad Shagef-Nakhaei holds up a photograph showing the injuries he
suffered during the war with Iraq. Photograph: Ian Black
Tehran might not be the most obvious place for a peace museum, but Iran's
eight-year war with Iraq was one of the longest and bloodiest conflicts of
the post-1945 era — so anything that deals honestly with its legacy has to
be a positive thing.
Set in a carefully tended park in the centre of the capital, the new museum
— inspired by existing ones in Hiroshima and Ypres — will also serve as a
centre for surviving victims of the war, especially for the thousands of
Iranians who were injured in chemical warfare attacks unleashed by Saddam
Hussein's forces.
Mohammad Shagef-Nakhaei is one of them – a middle-aged man with a
persistent hacking cough that is an awful legacy of the injuries he
suffered during an Iranian offensive against the southern Iraqi port of Fao
in 1985, when he was 22.
"Four days after we captured Fao we were back on the Iranian side of the
Shatt al-Arab," he told me. "We had eaten breakfast and said our prayers
when five or six Iraqi fighters hit our position with chemical bombs. I
felt cold like when someone splashes water on you. Later I started vomiting
and something green came out of my mouth. My throat was very dry and I
couldn't breathe. I was blistered from head to toe."
Shagef-Nakhaei was evacuated from the front line and underwent emergency
treatment in a private London hospital – he still has a yellowing newspaper
clipping reporting his arrival — but has been suffering ever since and
still spends long periods in hospital every year.
Hassan Hassani Saadi, also injured by Iraqi mustard gas, tells a similar
story of vomiting, dizziness, days in a coma and being burned all over. Two
decades on he has been left blind in one eye and has just 20% vision in the
other. His lungs are permanently scarred and his cough is especially bad at
night. He is 43 but looks 10 years older.
In a country whose religious culture and official propaganda glorify
sacrifice and martyrdom, these men's stories convey the banal pity of war.
The effect is more Wilfred Owen than rose-scented Shia Muslim paradise.
Their experiences were shared by 60,000 Iranians injured in chemical
warfare attacks in what the Islamic Republic still calls the "imposed war"
or the "sacred defence". It was the first time since the first world war
that mustard gas was used and the first time ever that nerve agents such as
Sarin and Tabun were employed. Iran complained bitterly that the raw
materials were supplied to Iraq by western companies while the US and other
governments "tilted" towards Saddam and looked the other way.
It wasn't the first time I had seen the terrible effects of these banned
weapons. I visited Iran several times during the war; in February 1986 in a
Tehran hospital, courtesy of the Ministry of Islamic Guidance, I met Hamid
Kurd Alipoor, then a 19-year-old conscript with the Revolutionary Guards. A
few days earlier he had been sheltering in a sandbagged bunker when an
Iraqi shell detonated nearby.
Hamid was swathed from neck to waist in yellow, disinfectant-soaked
bandages. His eyelids, I reported, were "scorched and puffy, his swollen
face grotesquely patterned with slices of bright new pink flesh striped
over cheeks and forehead the colour of overdone toast." Like so many others
he was diagnosed as likely to suffer permanent lung damage long after he
had passed the immediate risk of infection and blood poisoning and his
burns had healed.
By 1986 Iraq was using chemical weapons as an integral part of its
battlefield strategy. Over time, Iranian forces were issued with gas masks
and chemical warfare suits that were also distributed to visiting
journalists, who were instructed how to inject themselves with an antidote
in the event of a nerve gas attack. It was a sinister and frightening
experience - even for those who knew they would be back in the safety and
comfort of a Tehran hotel within a day or two.
So it is gratifying that the Tehran museum — dedicated last summer but yet
to formally open — plans to focus on the enduring human consequences of
that grim period. "The government calls the war the 'sacred defence'. We
don't like that. We hate war and that's why we have established this
museum," said Dr Shahriar Khateri, of the Society for Chemical Weapons
Victims Support. "We have witnessed its devastation and we are still
dealing with the consequences of something that ended 20 years ago. We need
to teach the younger generation that war is not a computer game."
Khateri, from Khorramshahr, was just 15 when he volunteered to fight.
"Later I saw pictures of the first world war and it was very similar to our
experience: trenches, dead bodies and heavy artillery firing for hours," he
recalled.
Earlier awareness, Khateri argues, could have saved lives. The most
notorious use of chemicals was against the Iraqi Kurdish village of Halabja
in 1988, though an Iranian Kurdish town, Sardasht in West Azerbaijan
province, was attacked by the Iraqis the year before. If there had been a
stronger reaction then, he says, Halabja might have been spared its
terrible fate. (Khateri, incidentally, is firmly opposed to Iran developing
nuclear weapons. The government, defying UN demands that it cease enriching
uranium, insists it wishes only to generate power for civilian purposes.)
Mohammad Reza Taghipur Mughaddam, the director of the museum, was injured
by a conventional high-explosive shell which hit the ambulance he was in,
causing the loss of both his legs above the knees. "People help me all the
time because I am in a wheelchair," he said. "The problem is that if you've
been injured in a chemical attack your injuries are not visible. People
don't always ask me if I was wounded in the war but when they do they
always thank me for helping defend their homes and families."
Koroush, my guide and interpreter in Tehran, who had dismissed my idea of
an interview with disabled Iranian war veterans as an old story, did just
that, visibly moved as he embraced and thanked these former soldiers as our
meeting ended.
"We want to show the whole world that chemical weapons have done this to
us," said Saadi. "We want to show how painful the consequences are. We
don't want revenge. We just want to show what happens so it won't happen
again."
The legacy of chemical warfare
This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Wednesday November 26
2008. It was last updated at 02.14 on November 26 2008. Most viewed on
guardian.co.uk
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Never again should this happen
