In 2001, Jalal Talabani, historical leader of Iraqi Kurdistan and current president of Iraq, decided to build a monument in memory of the 5,000 Kurds who were gassed at Halabja on March 16, 1988 on the orders of Saddam Hussein's cousin, Ali Hassan Al-Majid. Halabja was the first act of the Anfal campaign, which killed between 120,000 and 200,000 Kurds in 1988. Al-Majid, known as "Chemical Ali", was sentenced to death for genocide in June 2007 by the Iraqi High Tribunal [IJT-71]. His execution, approved by the Iraqi Presidential Council on February 29, is imminent. From the outset, the Halabja memorial was a political act. The memorial's director, Sarkhel Ghafar Hama-Khan, describes it as a "gift to the people" even though the local population was not meaningfully consulted about its creation. The monument was also part of Talabani's strategy to build up his power base following the fratricidal war with the other major Kurdish leader, Massoud Barzani. That conflict ended in 2001 with the Kurdish zone, now autonomous, being split: the east to Talabani, the west to Barzani.

Designed by Jamal Baker Qassab, the architect of the large Kurdish city of Souleimaniah, the memorial is a circular building topped with a Kurdish flag and a golden arrow which pierces the palm of a stylized hand that has 16 fingers, in reference to March 16. The style is deliberately monumental. The arrow in particular evokes the architecture of the grand age of authoritarian regimes in the region (such as the FLN martyrs monument in Algiers, the giant clock built in Baghdad, and the Azadi tower in Tehran). Inside, black granite plaques bear the names of 5,000 victims. A large area is set aside for photos of the tragedy and reconstructions of the horrifying scenes (mannequins of men, women and children lying in front of houses). There are also paintings by Kurdish artists and the repainted remains of rockets.

Inauguration in presence of American representatives

The monument was inaugurated in September 2003, six months after the American invasion. The inauguration took place in the presence of the two, reconciled Kurdish patriarchs Talabani and Barzani, representatives of their parties, then US Secretary of State Colin Powell and then head of the Coalition Provisional Authority Paul Bremer, as well as a "crowd of thousands", according to the monument's former director, Ibrahim Hawramani. With the same pride, his successor, Ghafar Hama-Khan, listed off the international visitors that had been there: "American, Spanish and French journalists, ambassadors, etc." If one insists, he adds that "of course, all of the victim's families were there" as well.

According to a March 2006 New York Times article, Halabja residents felt the Kurdish leadership was using them to "draw the attention of foreign visitors" and "obtain international aid". Yet this aid would supposedly not be used to reconstruct the city. "Millions of dollars have been spent, but nothing has reached us," one resident told the New York Times. Another complained that "All the foreigners are brought to the monument instead of coming to see the city." With the monument located at the entrance to Halabja, it is easy for foreign visitors to miss seeing the extent of the city's devastation. Halabja, located in southern Iraqi Kurdistan, near the Iranian border, did not benefit from the same rapid economic development as the regions bordering Turkey.

Pillaged and burned

Resentment exploded on March 16, 2006, the eighteenth anniversary of the chemical attack. According to Mariwan Hama-Saeed, a young Kurdish journalist who was there that day, around 150 were gathered to protest in front of the official delegations. They had already made their dissatisfaction known elsewhere in Kurdistan and had even alerted the authorities of their intention to protest. According to Reuters, hostile slogans were shouted when a regional government representative arrived. The police reacted and tensions rose. A shot fired by policemen seriously wounded a 17-year-old young man who died shortly thereafter. Angry residents came from the city to join the crowd (estimates range from 1,500 to 5,000). At the end of the day, the memorial was pillaged and burned.

During an improvised press conference, a representative of Talabani's party suggested that "external elements" had manipulated the protesters. Clearly, he was accusing the Islamist opposition. According to its director Ghafar, the memorial offended fundamentalist sensibilities, which consider tombs to be idolatry. Hosham Dawod, an Iraqi researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, says that this area is known to be a zone where the Sunni islamist group Ansar Al-Islam is established. According to him, their influence is such that the two secular Kurdish parties have trouble maintaining their influence. The Islamists started moving to the area even before 2003, taking advantage of the border with Iran, which was trying to maintain its capacity for regional troublemaking a rest.

Yet, in the photographs of the protest, there are no bearded faces or other tell-tale signs of Salafism. What is visible are young men in their 20s. Ghafar admits that they are "students, originally from Halabja, who had come back for the commemorations". The fact that they had traveled on that day suggests that the memorial had earned a degree of notoriety, but supposedly more as a political symbol than a place of collective remembrance. Taha Sleman, who is part of an association that organizes commemoration activities in the region, said there had been several signs of discontent throughout the region, and particularly after 2005 in Halabja, even though they were smaller in scale and not around the memorial itself. For Louis Bickford of the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), "because of the city's development, it had become something of a substitute town square".

"Symbolic cemetery"

When he visited the memorial, Bickford was struck by the reconstructions of the massacre scenes, which reminded him of the Hiroshima museum. These scenes, like the photos, were crudely realistic and extremely violent. One has to wonder what effect these images had on survivors and whether they were not intended more to convince a foreign public of the scope of the tragedy than to help those who had suffered. Joost Hiltermann, author of a book on the Anfal operation and vice-president of the International Crisis Group's Middle East program, noted that, starting in 2005, large crowds gathered the day of the commemorations at another location—where the mass graves were dug in 1988. Halabja mayor Khidr Kareem Muhamad explained that this place, more modest and better woven into the urban fabric, was developed in 1992, also at the request of Talabani.

For Loqman Abdelkader Mohamed of the Chemical Attack Victims Association, this site is not "a place of power", but a "symbolic cemetery". In fact, people organize reburials of the bones of victims there, in individual tombs. The setting is modest: tombs and a marble statue. With the "big memorial" destroyed, the commemoration ceremonies took place here in 2007 and 2008. Ghafar insists on the fact that the mayor consulted "all the associations" of the city in preparing for the program. As for the memorial, it is being reconstructed, exactly as it was. The work will be finished this summer. According to the mayor of Halabja, Talabani financed the construction, "appealing to local companies". In other words, it will remain a "gift from the president" to the people.