[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 29 (Tuesday, March 17, 1998)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E383-E384]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]





                         THE TRAGEDY OF HALABJA

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. NEWT GINGRICH

                               of georgia

                    in the house of representatives

                        Tuesday, March 17, 1998

  Mr. GINGRICH. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to submit into the 
Congressional Record this editorial by Dr. Christine Gosden from the 
Washington Post of March 11, 1998. I believe that this editorial helps 
put the terrible effects of chemical and biological weapons into 
perspective and clearly illustrates why Saddam Hussein is a mortal 
danger to this planet. We must never allow ourselves to forget the 
ghastly horrors of Halabja and Saddam Hussein's willingness to inflict 
the horrors of chemical and biological weapons not only on the 
Iranians, but on his own people.
  The editorial follows:

               [From the Washington Post, Mar. 11, 1998]

                         Why I Went, What I Saw

                         (By Christine Gosden)

       We have all talked so long and so reflexively about 
     ``weapons of mass destruction'' that the phrase has lost much 
     of its immediacy and meaning. It has become, like ``nuclear 
     devastation'' and ``chemical and biological warfare,'' an 
     abstract term of governmental memos, punditry and political 
     debate. For many it calls forth neither visual imagery nor 
     visceral revulsion.
       Two Sundays ago, the TV program ``60 Minutes'' got a good 
     start on changing that when it broadcast the story of the 
     Iraqi city of Halabja 10 years after its civilian population 
     had been the target of a chemical attack by Saddam Hussein. 
     That population is mainly Kurdish and had sympathized with 
     Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. The gassing of its people was 
     in retaliation for that sympathizing.
       ``60 Minutes'' has given us permission to make still 
     pictures from the film, which was originally shot, both in 
     1988 and 1998, by the British film maker, Gwynne Roberts. The 
     ``60 Minutes'' staff also helped us to get in touch with the 
     remarkable Dr. Christine Gosden, a British medical 
     specialist, whose efforts to help the people of Halabja it 
     documented. Dr. Gosden, who went out to Halabja 10 years 
     after the bombing, agreed to write a piece for us, expanding 
     on what she saw in Iraq. People around the world have seen 
     the evidence of deformity and mutation following from the 
     nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It shaped their 
     attitude toward the use of atomic weapons. Maybe if more 
     evidence of the unimaginable, real-life effects of chemical 
     warfare becomes available, a comparable attitude toward those 
     weapons will develop.
       On the 16th of March 1988, an Iraqi military strike 
     subjected Halabja, a Kurdish town of 45,000 in northern Iraq, 
     to bombardment with the greatest attack of chemical weapons 
     ever used against a civilian population. The chemical agent 
     used were a ``cocktail'' of mustard gas (which affects skin, 
     eyes and the membranes of the nose, throat and lungs), and 
     the nerve agents sarin, tabun and VX. The chemicals to which 
     the people were exposed drenched their skin and clothes, 
     affected their respiratory tracts and eyes and contaminated 
     their water and food.
       Many people simply fell dead where they were, immediate 
     casualties of the attack; estimates put these deaths at about 
     5,000. A few were given brief and immediate treatment, which 
     involved taking them to the United States, Europe and Iran. 
     The majority of them returned to Halabja. Since then, no 
     medical team, either from Iraq, Europe or America or from any 
     international agency has monitored either the short- or long-
     term consequences of this chemical attack. Gwynne Roberts, 
     a film director, made the award-winning film ``The Winds 
     of Death'' about the attack in 1988. I saw this film, and 
     it had a tremendous effect on me. Gwynne revisited Halabja 
     in 1997 and was concerned that many of the survivors 
     seemed very ill. He could not understand why no one had 
     tried to find out what was happening to them. He convinced 
     me that this was something I had to do.
       Why would a female professor of medical genetics want to 
     make a trip like this? I went to learn and to help. This was 
     the first time that a terrible mixture of chemical weapons 
     had been used against a large civilian population. I wanted 
     to see the nature and scale of the problems these people 
     faced, and was concerned that in the 10 years since the 
     attack no one, including the major aid agencies, had visited 
     Halabja to determine exactly what the effects of these 
     weapons had been.
       My medical specialty was particularly apt. My principal 
     field of research is directed toward trying to understand the 
     major causes of human congenital malformations, infertility 
     and cancers including breast, ovarian, prostate and colon 
     cancers. I am carrying out studies on a group of about 15 
     genes called tumor suppressor genes, which include breast/
     ovarian cancer genes BRCA1 and BRCA2, colon cancer genes and 
     the Retinoblastoma and Wilm's tumor genes associated with 
     childhood cancers. When these genes are disrupted or mutate, 
     they have a number of effects. Alterations lead to congenital 
     abnormalities or pregnancy loss. Their role after birth is to 
     try to prevent cancers from forming. Later in life, loss or 
     mutation may lead to infertility and cancers.
       I was particularly concerned about the effects on the women 
     and children. Most of the previous reported exposures to 
     chemical weapons and mustard gas had involved men involved in 
     military service; chemical weapons had never been used on 
     this scale on a civilian population before. I was worried 
     about possible effects on congenital malformations, fertility 
     and cancers, not just in women and children but in the whole 
     population. I also feared that there might be other major 
     long-term effects, such as blindness and neurological damage, 
     for which there is no known treatment.
       What I found was far worse than anything I had suspected, 
     devastating problems occurring 10 years after the attack. 
     These chemicals seriously affected people's eyes and 
     respiratory and neurological systems. Many became blind. Skin 
     disorders which involve severe scarring are frequent, and 
     many progress to skin cancer. Working in conjunction with the 
     doctors in the area, I compared the frequency of these 
     conditions such as infertility, congenital malformations and 
     cancers (including skin, head, neck, respiratory system, 
     gastrointestinal tract, breast and childhood cancers) in 
     those who were in Halabja at the time with an unexposed 
     population from a city in the same region. We found the 
     frequencies in Halabja are at least three to four times 
     greater, even 10 years after the attack. An increasing number 
     of children are dying each year of leukemias and lymphomas. 
     The cancers tend to occur in much younger people in Halabja 
     than elsewhere, and many people have aggressive tumors, so 
     that mortality rates are high. No chemotherapy or 
     radiotherapy is available in this region.
       I found that there was also a total lack of access to 
     pediatric surgery to repair the major heart defects, hare lip 
     and cleft palate or other major malformations in the 
     children. This meant that children in Halabja are dying of 
     heart failure when children with the same heart defects could 
     have had surgery and would probably have survived in Britain 
     or the United States. It was agonizing for me to see 
     beautiful children whose faces were disfigured by hare lip 
     and cleft palate when I know that skilled and gifted surgeons 
     correct these defects every day in North America and Europe.
       The neuropsychiatric consequences are seen as human tragedy 
     on every street, in almost every house and every ward of the 
     hospital. People weep and are in great distress because of 
     their severe depression, and suicidal tendencies are 
     alarmingly evident. The surgeons often have to remove bullets 
     from people who have failed in their suicide attempts. In 
     collecting data from the Martyrs Hospital in Halabja, the 
     doctors said that they are not able to see patients with 
     psychiatric and neurological conditions because there is a 
     lack of resources and there is no effective treatment. 
     Many people have neurological impairment or long-term 
     neuromuscular effects. Most people cannot afford even the 
     cheapest treatment or drugs and so are reluctant to come 
     to the hospital. At present, even for those with life-
     threatening conditions, there is no effective therapy for 
     any of these conditions in Halabja.
       On the first day of my visit to the labor and gynecological 
     ward in the hospital, there were no women in normal labor and 
     no one had recently delivered a normal baby. Three women had 
     just miscarried. The staff in the labor ward told of the very 
     large proportion of pregnancies in which there were major 
     malformations. In addition to fetal losses and perinatal 
     deaths, there is also a very large number of infant deaths. 
     The frequencies of these in the Halabjan women is more than 
     four times greater than that in the neighboring city of 
     Soulemaneya. The findings of serious congenial malformations 
     with genetic causes occurring in children born years after 
     the chemical attack suggest that the effects from these 
     chemical warfare agents are transmitted to succeeding 
     generations.
       Miscarriage, infant deaths and infertility mean that life 
     isn't being replenished in this community, as one would 
     expect if these weapons had no long-term effects. The people 
     hoped that after the attack they could rebuild the families 
     and communities that had been destroyed. The inability to do 
     so has led to increasing despair. Their lives and hopes have 
     been shattered. One survivor described being in a cellar with 
     about a hundred other people, all of whom died during the 
     attack. Not only do those who survived have to cope

[[Page E384]]

     with memories of their relatives suddenly dying in their 
     arms, they have to try to come to terms with their own 
     painful diseases and those of their surviving friends and 
     relatives.
       For instance, many people have more than one major 
     condition, including respiratory problems, eye conditions, 
     neurological disorders, skin problems, cancers and children 
     with congenital malformations and childhood handicaps such as 
     mental handicap, cerebral palsy and Down's syndrome. The 
     occurrences of genetic mutations and carcinogenesis in this 
     population appear comparable with those who were one to two 
     kilometers from the hypocenter of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki 
     atomic bombs and show that the chemicals used in this attack, 
     particularly mustard gas, have a general effect on the body 
     similar to that of ionizing radiation.
       Ten years after the attack, people are suffering a wide 
     spectrum of effects, all of which are attributable to long-
     term damage to DNA. A radio broadcast was made the day before 
     our arrival to ask people who were ill to come to the 
     hospital to record their problems. On the first day, 700 
     people came; 495 of them had two or more major problems. The 
     cases we encountered were extremely sad.
       The people of Halabja need immediate help. There is a need 
     for specialists (such as pediatric surgeons), equipment and 
     drugs. Even more basic than this, though, is the need for 
     heat, clean water and careful efforts to safeguard them 
     against further attacks. We have to realize that there is 
     very little medical or scientific knowledge about how to 
     treat the victims of a chemical weapons attack like this 
     effectively. We need to listen, think and evaluate with 
     skill, since many of these people have had exposures to 
     strange combinations of toxic gases. They have conditions 
     that have not been seen or reported before. We may severely 
     disadvantage a large group of vulnerable people and deny them 
     effective diagnosis and treatment if we are intellectually 
     arrogant and fail to admit that we have virtually no 
     knowledge about how to treat the problems resulting from 
     these terrible weapons, which have been used to more powerful 
     and inhumane effect than ever before.
       The pictures beamed around the world after the attack in 
     1988 in newspapers and on TV were horrifying. One picture was 
     of a father who died trying to shield his twin sons from the 
     attack. The statue in the road at the entrance to Halabja is 
     based on that picture. This is not a traditional statue of 
     someone standing proud and erect, captured in stone or bronze 
     to represent man triumphant and successful, but of a man 
     prostrate and agonized dying in the act of trying to protect 
     his children. A deep and lasting chill went through me when I 
     entered the town and saw the statue, and it settled like a 
     toxic psychological cloud over me. This proved hard to 
     dispel; it intensified as I met the people, heard their 
     stories and saw the extent of the long-term illnesses caused 
     by the attack. The terrible images of the people of Halabja 
     and their situation persist and recur in my nightmares and 
     disturb my waking thoughts. Perhaps these thoughts persist so 
     vividly as a reminder to me that the major task is now to try 
     and get help for these people.

     

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