Dutch prosecutors needed eleven hours on 7 December for their closing arguments against Frans van Anraat, the Dutch citizen accused of complicity in genocide on trial before a federal court in The Hague for his sales of chemicals to the Saddam Hussein regime in the 1980's. After a three-week trial, the prosecution requested the maximum prison sentence of 15 years. The prosecutor argued that the 63- year old Dutchman had known that the thousands of tons of thiodiglycol (TDG) he supplied were converted to chemical weapons, which Iraq used to attack Iran and its own Kurdish population.
On 5 December, fifteen victims of mustard gas attacks in Iraq and Iran appeared in the Hague-based court to claim damages. The maximum amount victims can claim is 680.67 euros, which is largely symbolic. The court allowed them ample time to describe their ordeal, between bouts of coughing or sobbing: the white mist low over the ground, the smell of rotten garlic, the suffocating effect, the deep burns and the damage done to their lungs and skin and eyes. A man from Sardasht in Iran viewed the trial as "mental medicine" and another asked the judges to prevent "people from bringing about such misery again for the sole purpose of making money."

The attacks against Iran are qualified as war crimes and the attacks against the Kurds as genocide. Saddam Hussein, his cousin Ali Hassan Al-Mahid - aka Chemical Ali - and Hussein's brother Hussein Kamal al-Mahid are named in the Dutch indictments as the main suspects in the Kurdish genocide. The prosecutor interviewed witnesses in the areas were they are living today and several victims came to testify in The Hague. The prosecution showed that from May 1987, van Anraat was the sole supplier in Iraq of thiodiglycol, an ingredient needed to make mustard gas. A former UN-inspector in Iraq, Cees Wolterbeek, testified that it was difficult to determine which suppliers provided the chemical products used prior to 1987, but that by 1987 the other suppliers had exhausted their stocks and so these chemical could have come only from van Anraat.

The Dutchman has always insisted that he had thought that his chemicals were being used in the textile industry. However, the prosecutor presented evidence that as early as 1984, Japanese producers of thiodiglycol had warned van Anraat about the dangerous use that could be made of the materials. Telexes showed that the Dutchman and his Iraqi customers had agreed to use the textile industry as a cover. Telex exchanges between van Anraat and a Japanese businessman named Tanaka, a major producer of chemicals and close associate of the accused, mention the use of poison gas. Tanaka told investigators that van Anraat had known how the TDG could be used and that he had asked Tanaka to keep its final destination secret. In court, the 77-year old Japanese man seemed confused about facts and dates, but he swore that his previous statements were true.

An Iraqi citizen for four years

The defense does not deny that van Anraat delivered a huge amount of TDG to Iraq between 1984 and 1988. They do, however, stress that there is no certainty that van Anraat's TDC actually did end up in the mustard gas attacks. Van Anraat claims that he stopped his deliveries the moment he learned of the massacres of Kurds in Halabja. The prosecutor refutes that claim saying, "He might have stopped for one day, but then his containers of chemicals continued their journey to their deadly destination." Van Anraat visited Iraq on several occasions after the attack on the Kurds and ultimately, when the US had him listed as one of the top five most wanted war criminals in the world, he was given Iraqi nationality under the name of Faris Mansour Rasheed Al Bazzaz, which allowed him to live in safety in Iraq from 1989 to 2003.

To support his arguments concerning complicity in genocide, the Dutch prosecutor cited two rulings from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (Akayesu and Musema), which state that "knowing or having reason to know" that a genocide is in progress is enough to make one an accomplice. The court is expected to issue a ruling on December 23.