Under a glass case in the Halabja memorial museum is a brown, three-strand hemp rope, the kind a lorry driver might use for tying down loads. A black label bears the date 25 January 2010. I had a pretty good idea of the significance, but I asked the curator anyway: ‘Chemical Ali was executed with it,’ he said with a slight smile.

It may seem a macabre momento, but here in Halabja it has a special significance, representing as it does a return to the rule of law.

Nearly 10 years since regime change, memories of Saddam Hussein and his lieutenants like ‘Chemical’ Ali Hassan al-Majid are still raw in Halabja, a dusty nondescript town close to the Iranian border. This was the place where, on 16 March 1988, Iraqi bombers dropped a mixture of mustard gas, nerve agents and cyanide, killing more than 5,000 Kurdish villagers. It was part of the so-called Anfal campaign against the Kurds, which in 2005 a Dutch criminal court ruled was an act of genocide under the 1948 Geneva convention.

Halabja is now part of the self-governing, oil-rich and safe (extremely safe, by Iraqi standards) region of Kurdistan. A visitor will hear plenty of complaints about the current government, but the question of whether life was better under Saddam simply doesn’t arise.

To see why, pay a visit to the former Red Security Building, now a museum, in the pleasant city of Suleimaniyah. The buildings - some still riddled with bullet holes - are guarded by a line of rusting Soviet-built tanks, artillery pieces and heavy machine guns. Upstairs, there’s a museum of Kurdish history and culture, but the underground cells have been left as in Saddam’s day.

To wander through them alone is a grim experience: solitary confinement cells without enough room to lie down straight; the women and children’s cell where blankets mark the living space of a dozen or more inmates and, finally, the torture cells. The most chilling has a desk and chair at one end and, at the other a pipe, nearly at ceiling height, fitted with butchers’ hooks. It is the only room where the concrete walls are lined with wood. The museum provides a life-sized dummy to recreate what was done here, but it isn’t really necessary.

Halabja is a 90-minute drive away, past the inevitable police and military checkpoints. We couldn’t miss the memorial, a new-looking building in the style of a circular tent, topped with a giant pair of upstretched hands. Inside, the centrepiece is a hall with the name of each victim etched on black marble; around is an exhibition strongly reminiscent of the A-bomb museum in Hiroshima. The same historic pictures of life before the attack, the same waxwork models of its horrors, the same lack of explanatory context, the same appeal for peace.

My driver and I were the only visitors.

For me, a nice touch was the corner dedicated to the international journalists who, travelling with Iranian forces, bore witness to the attack. Alongside the horror and the sorrow is a cold determination to present Halabja as an atrocity that is fully documented, denial-proof.

And, at least partially, avenged. In the documentation centre the curator showed me two more legal exhibits, a pen with which, needless to say, Saddam Hussein’s death warrant was signed, and the green-bordered robes worn in court by lawyers acting on behalf of Halabja’s victims.

I wanted to make one more stop in Halabja. Unlike the prominent memorial, Martyrs’ Cemetery is hidden up a back street. It took several circuits of the town, and numerous contradictory directions, before we found the entrance with its black signpost ‘Baath’s members are not allowed to enter’ written in English and Arabic. (Kurdish would be superfluous.)

Here, the main memorial is an array of 5,000 stones, each bearing the name of a victim, laid out like a French cemetery from the first world war. Indeed this is literally a cenotaph - the tombs are empty. Just down the hill two marble slabs mark where in 1988 the contaminated bodies were hurriedly shovelled; one grave contains 440, the other 1,500. My Kurdish driver and I stood in silence for a few minutes, and, without exchanging a word, walked slowly away. 

In Britain, after the dodgy dossier and other fiascoes, Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction are a subject for bien-pensant political satire. I dare anyone to make those jokes in Halabja.

Michael Cross is Gazette news editor

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