22 years ago today, the former Iraqi regime ordered its air force to bombard the Kurdish town of Halabja with chemical weapons, instantly poisoning to death 5000 men, women and children. I went to Halabja for the first time in the spring of 2006 to pay my respects to the dead. I walked in the alleys of the martyred town where time seemed to have stopped on that bloody Wednesday. As I walked those narrow alleys, I remember thinking of the photo of Omar Khawer, the Kurdish man holding his infant son in his arms as they both lay lifeless at the doorsteps of one of those houses in one of those alleys.

5000 dead and there were no campaigns to find the missing, no effort to list the dead, no Le Monde article crying, “We Are All Kurds,” no eulogies for the the infant whose last breath was taken in his father’s arms and subsequently photographed so that his brutal ending could have shook the conscience of humanity. It didn’t shake anything. The next day, the news in Iraq were celebrating victories in the northern battlefields while Western newspapers were busy reporting on the indictment of Oliver North for the Iran-Contra affair and a Colombian airplane crash. And there was nothing about the Kurdish town along the Iraq-Iran border which had been turned into a mass grave.

The corpse-littered streets of Halabja were as if they were not part of the map of this earth.

When a Kurdish delegation asked a Kuwaiti official to condemn Saddam’s use of chemical weapons, his disgusting response was, “what did you expect to be sprayed with, rose water?” No, sir, not rose water, but not mustard gas, either! Two years later, Kuwait would be on the receiving end of Saddam’s brutality as he annexed and occupied the sovereign state of Kuwait.

This anniversary is especially memorable because the man who ordered the attacks, Ali Hassan al-Majid was executed this past January for, among other crimes, the genocidal attack on Halabja. But it doesn’t stop there, the garbage can of history still reserves spaces for those who supplied Saddam with the weapons, for those who helped his military industry, for those Western politicians who stood idly by, for those Arab politicians who should have spoken up, for the newspaper editors who ignored Halabja, for the clergymen who did not express disgust.

Because Halabja was a moment in humanity’s history when cruelty triumphed over goodness, when the promise of “never again” was broken and the international community watched, not long thereafter, how Slobodan Milosevic and his gangsters massacred civilians in Srebrenica, how Hutu warlords macheted Rwandans of Tutsi origins and now how the Janjaweed are massacring and displacing the innocents of Darfur.

So on this 22nd year anniversary of Halabja, wherever you are, whatever you are doing, I ask that you please stop to take one moment of silence in honor of victims of genocide everywhere.