Letter from Kurdistan
Over twenty one years ago, the Saddam regime attacked the town of Halabja with chemical weapons, instantly poisoning to death 5000 men, women and children, mostly civilian. Some survivors were taken to Iranian hospitals just on the other side of the border, one such survivor, only four months old at the time was adopted by an Iranian family and recently returned to the place of his birth to reunite with his biological mother. The young man in question is Zimnako but there was no way for his adoptive family to know that so they called him “Ali,” 21 years later, Zimnako returned to Halabja looking for his family, his roots, for pieces of a biological family.
Upon hearing of his return, six families from Halabja with missing children from that day in 1988 went foreword to claim him as theirs, a judge, based on the results of DNA testing, decided that the child who was born Zimnako and renamed Ali was indeed the son of a survivor who still lives in Halabja, Fatima Mohammad Salih, a woman who had lost six children and her husband to the chemical attack of March 16, 1988.
So there they were, a mother who had lost everything but the memory of things and people that once were and a young man who, at birth was taken off the track of anything that can even resemble a normal childhood, a normal life. Twenty one years after losing all of her family, Fatima was presented with a Farsi-speaking son named Ali who has to now learn Kurdish in order to communicate with his biological mother, who has to now learn to be Zimanko again, as he was called for the first four months of his life.
How does one begin to move on from the shadow of Saddam, from the bloody legacy of Saddam, from the lives that were shattered by Saddam? What sin had Zimnako’s mother committed to be treated like this, to experience such pain and loss? Alas we leave the story where we read it, the headlines switch back to the election law and to who gets what. We forget about Zimnako and what Zimanko’s story represents, the need for an adequate system of transitional justice which includes a decisive de-Ba’thification policy. Only then can the phrase which we once so proudly wrote and spoke about, “the new Iraq” can once again be written with a capital N.
Below is an AP photo of the young man and his mother:
Vahal Abdulrahman
Salahadin, Erbil
December 6, 2K9
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To become a “born again”, in a metaphorical sense. To unlearn and re-learn.
Very touching.
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Perpetual lies…the old Nazi trick …The CIA analyst for Iraq , later a professor at the US Army War College, stated in the NY Times that there is NO evidence proving that Iraq bombed Halabja, but that it was more likely that Iran did. But the Kurdish-Zionist interests lie in the propaganda ploy, that the Arabs committed genocide. The (Kurd would rather that the West think Arabs did it, instead of their Persian kinfolk). The Kurds are planning another Palestine; they hope to steal a large section of northern Iraq to create a state on Arab land, just as their Zionist allies did!
If yoy have any doubts about the Zionist-Kurdish alliance, google “Israel agents in Iraq” and Israel arms Kurds”. Or, check the NY Times article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/31/opinion/31PELL.html
And don’t be fooled by their lies. They only hope to divide the Arabs for the mutual benefit of the Zionists anfd themselves!