On 10 July, a District Court in The Hague extended the custody of Dutch businessman Frans van Anraat for a second three-month period (see IJT-17). The 62-year-old is charged with complicity to commit genocide and war crimes for supplying Saddam Hussein's regime with substances that were allegedly used to produce chemical weapons.
Van Anraat is charged with selling the chemical products to Iraq over a four-year period, from 19 April 1984 to 25 August 1988. The gas attack on residents of the north-eastern town of Halabja, which killed at least 5,000 and injured many more, took place in April 1988. Although Van Anraat is not charged with delivering the chemicals in the full knowledge of what was happening in Halabja, the prosecutor said that the businessman had not seen fit to recall a shipment that was already under way when the massacre was taking place. Three others cited in the indictment but not on trial in The Netherlands include former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, Ali Hassan Al-Majid, or "Chemical Ali", and one-time Oil minister Hussein Kamal Hassan Al- Majid.

Van Anraat is charged with complicity in genocide. "Complicity follows the act not the perpetrator, so we only have to prove that genocide took place," prosecutor Fred Teeven told IJT. "It will not be difficult to establish that genocide took place," he said. However, Dutch criminal law states that an accomplice either has to have been aware of the perpetrators' genocidal intent, or that there was a not to be neglegted chance that they would produce chemical weapons from the material he supplied. In the light of this, its seems unavoidable that the Dutch trial will become partly a phantom trial of the three Iraqi masterminds.

"If I had not delivered the raw material, someone else would have"

Months before his arrest, Van Anraat commented that "if [he] had not delivered the raw material, someone else would have". But that will not get him of the hook, says the prosecutor. His investigators have carried out a worldwide investigation, travelling from Singapore to Switzerland and Japan to Denmark. They interviewed witnesses in Iran from towns like Alut and Sardasht, who were subjected to mustard gas attacks by the Iraqi army between 1986 and 1988, and talked to victims in Khorramshahr where a nerve gas was used. Experts from the United Nations mission in Iraq, UNSCOM, testified about the link between the reported suffering of victims and the use of thiodiglycol (TDG) as supplied by Van Anraat. In the US, witnesses gave details of the front the defendant had constructed to cover his illegal exportation of chemical products to Iraq. In Switzerland, prosecutors found evidence of financial transactions that show the defendant's links with companies who dealt with transporting the chemical substances.

During a pre-trial hearing in March, the defence argued that its client had not been the only supplier of TDG to Iraq. Although the prosecutor acknowledged this fact at another hearing in June, he added that the two other firms, one Dutch and one Belgian, had stopped their export of TDG to Iraq in 1983, while Van Anraat had "happily continued to deliver TDG, in quantities far beyond those needed for normal use and despite the fact that the UN commissions of inquiry had warned year after year about Iraq's use of mustard gas in Iraq and Iran." The prosecutor pointed out also that Van Anraat's name had even appeared in reports Iraq presented to the UN in the 1990s.

Dutch investigators still have to go to Baghdad to search for documentary evidence and talk to witnesses and victims in Iraqi Kurdistan. Tanaka, a man thought to be one of Van Anraat's close associates, is also due to be heard by the investigators. For its part, the defence is trying to re-open the debate on the role of the Dutch intelligence service, which allegedly used the businessman as an informer. After another pre-trial hearing on 2 September, this ground-breaking trial in the history of business-related prosecution should finally get underway.