THE HAGUE: A Dutch businessman who sold Iraq’s former regime chemicals that were used in deadly gas attacks against Kurds in Iraq and in Iran was ordered yesterday to pay ¤400,000 in compensation to some of the victims.
The court ruled that Frans van Anraat must pay ¤25,000 plus interest to each of the 16 plaintiffs in the case. A seventeenth suit was rejected because of a statute of limitations.
Van Anraat is currently serving a 17-year prison sentence on charges of complicity to war crimes in relation to the chemicals he sold to Saddam Hussein’s regime between 1985 and
1989.
A Dutch court previously ruled that Van Anraat supplied the ingredients that enabled Ali-Hassan Al Majid, also known as “Chemical Ali”, a senior member of the regime, to launch deadly mustard gas attacks during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.
Later they were also used on Iraq’s own Kurdish population, most infamously in the massacre of 5,000 Kurds in 1988 at Halabja, northwest Iraq.
The plaintiffs in the civil case sought compensation “for the damage they suffered as a consequence of the bombings with mustard gas on cities in Iraq and Iran in the 1980s, executed by the Saddam Hussein regime,” court documents said.
“At the time of the bombings, the plaintiffs, all civilians, were living in one of the bombed cities. As a result of the bombings, they came into contact with mustard gas and therefore, were (seriously) injured.”
“Van Anraat supplied the raw materials for a chemical weapon to the Saddam Hussein regime, knowing that this weapon will be produced and implemented,” the court said. His “acts do not pale into significance beside the actual use of the weapon, but they form an essential link in the causal chain,” it added.
Van Anraat’s lawyer said however that his client was “unable to pay.”
“He has no money,” Hans Vermeer told AFP, adding he did not know whether Van Anraat would appeal. AFP
