Madam Speaker, I rise today to solemnly remember the 20th anniversary of a terrible crime committed against the Kurdish people, the gassing of the inhabitants of the city of Halabja on March 16, 1988. This attack on men, women, and children was a crime against humanity. On that day, Iraqi planes dropped chemical munitions, including mustard gas and nerve gas; the planes concentrated their attack on the city as well as the roads leading out of the town. More than 5,000 people were killed and another 10,000 were injured. Twenty years later, the survivors of this attack are still suffering from the effects of that horrendous onslaught.
As a staffer with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time, I had the opportunity to travel to the region after this attack, in September 1988, and observed firsthand the effects of that terrible campaign against the Kurds. With my colleague, Peter Galbraith, I interviewed Kurdish survivors of other chemical attacks that followed. We had the sad but important task of documenting chemical attacks on 49 Kurdish villages. These attacks were part of a year-long brutal campaign that resulted in the deaths and disappearances of approximately 180,000 Iraqi Kurds.
Because of these brutal attacks against the Kurds, the Senate passed stiff economic sanctions against the Saddam Hussein regime at the time, but the Reagan Administration defeated this effort and failed to penalize this regime with any meaningful measures. That failure sent a terrible signal to Saddam Hussein, and he may have concluded that he could subsequently attack Kuwait with impunity. After the Persian Gulf War of 1991, the United States imposed a no-fly zone over the Kurdish region of Iraq, which helped the inhabitants of that area to begin to restore their shattered lives.
Today, the Iraqi Kurdistan region is one of the most stable and peaceful regions of Iraq, and its brave people are trying to concentrate on political and economic development. As we try to assist these people we should also be mindful of what they have lived through and the loved ones whom they have lost. We must never forget the crime against the inhabitants of Halabja and other Kurdish towns and villages.