The first European Union citizen to face charges of complicity in genocide and international war crimes went on trial in The Netherlands on Monday accused of aiding Saddam Hussein to gas the Kurds of Halabja almost 20 years ago.
Frans van Anraat, a 63-year-old Dutch businessman who fled to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and lived there from 1989 to 2003, faces charges of supplying the Saddam regime with the ingredients for the chemical weapons used in the gassing in Halabja in the 1980s.
At the start of the long-awaited trial on Monday at the district court in The Hague, the defence failed to have the case dismissed on the grounds that the alleged crimes were not committed on Dutch territory and because another jurisdiction, the post-war Iraq, is trying Saddam and some of his henchmen on similar charges.
Van Anraat was arrested almost a year ago in Amsterdam just as he was preparing to leave the country, with his suitcases packed and a new passport in his pocket. He is alleged to have supplied the Saddam regime with more than a thousand tonnes of chemicals used to manufacture nerve gas and mustard gas between 1986 and 1988.
While admitting that he supplied the chemical weapons precursor, thiodiglycol, obtained from a now defunct United States chemicals company in Baltimore, Van Anraat insists he had no idea how the chemical would be used.
Charges of genocide or complicity in genocide, the gravest crime possible, carry a heavy burden of proof and intent.
The Dutch prosecution and Fred Teeven, a dogged special prosecutor specialising in international war crimes, have been helped in bringing the case by the Americans, by veterans of the UN weapons inspection effort in Iraq in the 1990s, and reportedly by testimony from Saddam regime insiders since 2003.
Leading the prosecution, Teeven told the court that Van Anraat was involved ”in the crime of all crimes” in Iraq. He supplied the ”chemical components to Saddam Hussein’s regime that led to the deaths of thousands in Iran and Iraq”. Witnesses will include relatives of Kurds murdered in the Anfal offensive of February-September 1988 that left tens of thousands dead or maimed and including the gas attack on Halabja in March that year that killed 5 000.
In previous interviews with the Dutch media, Van Anraat has said that he was horrified when he learned of the ghastly scenes at Halabja and that he had no idea his supplies would be used to prepare the poison gas. He could face life in prison if convicted. The prosecution and lawyers following the case concede that it is highly complex and difficult to prosecute successfully, given the difficulty of proving genocide and the fact that the alleged crimes took place so long ago in a faraway country.
Van Anraat was on the FBI’s most wanted list for years. The Americans tried and failed to have him extradited from Italy in 1989. He fled to Baghdad, assumed an Arab identity, and stayed for 14 years until fleeing Iraq when the Americans invaded in 2003. – Guardian Unlimited Â