Dutch Chemicals Trader On Trial For Helping Saddam Wipe Out Halabja
Angelique van Engelen - 11/27/2005
Amsterdam. The trial has started in the Netherlands of a businessman who supplied Saddam Hussein in the 1980s with the ingredients to create the chemical weapons that were used to commit genocide on the inhabitants of the Northern Iraq town of Halabja. The chemicals trader in the 1990s was listed on the FBI’s most wanted list. His trial in Dutch courts is highly controversial because the Netherlands’ secret service had used the man as an informant and provided housing for him only to arrest him when he was making moves to leave the country late last year.
http://www.globalpolitician.com/articledes.asp?ID=1416&cid=3&sid=120The chemicals trader, Frank Cornelis Adrianus van Anraat, denies he had any knowledge to which end the chemicals would be used by the Iraqi regime when his Swiss headquartered company FCA Contractor sold and delivered the ingredients for mustard and nerve gas. Van Anraat delivered 538 tonnes of thiodiglycol, a substance that in combination with soutsuuuuuur yields some 700 tons of mustard gas. The US company that sourced some of the thiodiglycol, Alcolac Inc. from Baltimore, is not under investigation.
The chemical attack on the town of Halabja took place in March 1988. It killed 5,000 Kurds and wounded tens of thousands of others. Van Anraat lived for 14 years in Iraq, having been entered on the US list of most wanted people in the year following the attack, says he did not feel that he is an accomplice in the genocide because he simply delivered the chemicals as a businessman fulfilling his contractual obligations. The Dutch authorities say that these deals ought to have been officially reported.
The court case is however more controversial because Van Anraat appears to have become an informant of the Dutch secret service in the new Millennium and moved to a safe house owned by the government. He was no longer a wanted man when he, after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, fled to the Netherlands via Syria. He was reportedly arrested in December last year because the Dutch authorities feared he was going to escape the country, having been provided with a passport.
This transpired from taped telephone conversations. There is no clarity about the Dutch government's exact plans for Van Anraat, but the court case is highly controversial. The US authorities had earlier received the documents regarding Van Anraat from Swiss authorities. These included a statement by the former deputy head of the Iraqi department for chemical weapons in 2004 to a Dutch judge-commissioner which incriminated Van Anraat.
Critics say that the case is slightly embarrassing to the Dutch authorities because it is more than clear that they only started legal procedings after it appeared Van Anraat was likely to flee the country. The Public Prosecutor contends that Van Anraat did know what the chemicals were used for. Van Anraat says that until the attack on Halabja he had been convinced his produce was only used for the textile industry but that after the attack his 'eyes were opened'.
Of critical importance is Van Anraat's Japanese business partner who has stated on the record that he was fully aware of what the implications were and that the ingredients could be easily converted to poisonous gases.
Angelique van Engelen is a freelance journalist who is involved in
www.reporTwitters.com, a journalistic project that combines reporting with Twitter. She crowdsourced opinions on this issue on this site.
Topic: Dutch Chemicals Trader On Trial For Helping Saddam Wipe Out Halabja (Read 2263 times)