Dutchman Frans Van Anraat recently declared in a television interview that his deliveries of chemical substances to Iraq was just something he had done on the side. He had received a request from Iraq and had successfully delivered. Had he not done it, somebody else would have, he said. At the time, the Dutch public prosecutor had contemplated charging him with export violations, but since the crimes took place in the late 1980s, it was too late. The crimes would be considered prescriptible. On 6 December, 2004, the businessman was arrested and charged with complicity in genocide and war crimes.
Although there is no indictment yet and a trial date has not been set, the public prosecutor announced that Van Anraat is being held on suspicion of involvement in 36 deliveries to Iraq between 1984 and 1988 of a substance called thiodiglycol, used for the production of mustard gas and employed in the Iraq-Iran war during the late 1980s. Van Anraat\'s deliveries have been linked to the gassing of Kurds in the north-eastern town of Halabja in 1988, resulting in 5000 deaths and numerous casualties. The thiodiglycol is thought to have travelled all the way from the United States or Japan through the Belgium harbour of Antwerp and Aqaba in Jordan to Iraq, where it was processed and used. Van Anraat is believed to have managed his business from Lugano in Switzerland.

Two decades of international investigations

Evidence in this case appears to have been accruing for almost two decades. Van Anraat has been a target of international investigations for many years. In 1989 he was arrested in Milan, Italy, at the request of the United States. After the Italian court rejected the extradition request and his detention was suspended he fled to Iraq, where he lived the high life of the members of Saddam Hussein\'s entourage. When the US army invaded Baghdad in 2003, he returned home to The Netherlands.

On the FBI\'s wanted list

At the end of the 1980s, the US customs discovered that Alcolac International, based in Maryland, had sold several tons of thiodyglycol to a company called Nu Kraft Mercantile Corporation and that Van Anraat was involved in the deliveries. The US indicted Alcolac for illegal exports to Iraq and Iran. Alcolac pleaded guilty on one count - export to Iran - and paid a fine. Van Anraat was put on the FBI\'s wanted list. During the Clinton regime, the American government actively supported the London-based group INDICT, which repeatedly stressed the importance of prosecuting Saddam Hussein and his lieutenants. The name of Van Anraat appeared on many lists, not just of human rights organisations but also of UNSCOM, as an important tradesman of chemical materials. But after 2000 the US seemed to have lost all interest in the Dutchman. And in 2003 they had no objections when the Dutch told them that they were planning to prosecute Van Anraat. The fact is that exports from the US went on even after Halabja. In 1994, a Senate Committee produced a number of documents implicating both the US authorities and private companies in the export of forbidden chemicals to Saddam Hussein. The trial of Frans Van Anraat could well put this embarrassing past back into the limelight.
The businessman is being prosecuted on the basis of a Dutch law that has integrated the definitions established by the Genocide Convention. The prosecutors will have to navigate through a maze of legal notions, most of them rooted in Anglo-American law, and the growing case law of the UN tribunals for Rwanda and former Yugoslavia, in an attempt to apply notions of \'aiding and abetting\' and the \'specific intent\' required for genocide. This will not be an easy task.