Thirty-seventh years ago, on the afternoon of June 28th, 1987, a number of Iraqi Ba’athist aircrafts appeared over the skies of Sardasht and surrounding villages. In a criminal act, they dropped their chemical bombs on the innocent and defenseless people, created a great catastrophe, leaving the heart and emotions of Kurdish, Iranian and people of the world in a tragic sense.
Chemical bombs were dropped on four crowded parts of the city. The attack killed 110 civilians and poisoned 8,000 others. The victims of this tragedy still, after all these years, have to endure the painful effects of it forever and pass the suffer of its consequences to the next generations.
Sardasht is considered to be the first victim of chemical weapons in the world after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. The chemical bombing of Sardasht was a turning point in the reactionary war of Iran-Iraq in terms of the use of weapons of mass destruction against ordinary people. Earlier that time, the Ba’athist regime had used chemical weapons against the Peshmerga and in battlefield against the front of soldiers of opposite side. However, it was their first time using chemical weapon against civilian and innocent people and it was a sign that crime was at its height in this reactionary war. This was the first time since World War I that chemical weapons had been widely used by hostile governments. A few months after the chemical bombing of Sardasht, the Ba’athist regime of Iraq created the Halabja disaster in which nearly 5,000 people died and more than 7,000 were injured and poisoned.
The imperialist governments and those who provided chemical weapons to these war criminals consciously remained silent about these tragedies for their own economic and political interests, thus helping the Ba’athist regime to repeat this tragedy on a much more horrific scale in Halabja. Although these governments themselves drafted and signed the Protocol on the Prohibition of the Production and Use of Chemical Weapons, adopted in 1925 in Geneva, they did not hesitate to produce or sell these weapons during the war.
Passing more than three decades of chemical bombing of Sardasht, the Islamic Republic of Iran has done nothing for the chemically injured and disabled victims of this attack but hypocritically playing innocent and sanctifying of the 8-year war and acquitting itself of the crimes committed during the time of war. Survivors of the tragedy still suffer from what happened to them. Every year, the regime uses propaganda for this tragedy in its ceremonial and theatrical events, and the only thing that is not taken into account is the life and fate of the surviving victims.
Although the perpetrators of this catastrophe, who were directly involved in its creation, have not remained in power and have been thrown into the trash of history, there are still other criminals who rule Iran and are no less than Saddam and his accomplices. Those who kill, imprison and torture the hardworking Border porters known as Kolbar and make their families and relatives suffer in the same region of Sardasht should be pulled down of power and be taken on a fair trial.
The people of Kurdistan and the world, as well as history, have registered the chemical bombing of Sardasht in the list of criminals as to be Saddam and his accomplices, as well as “Khomeini and Khamenei”. Those who supported the war and chanted “war war to victory” and wanted to conquer Jerusalem through Karbala and spread their similar reactionary regimes throughout the region. Undoubtedly, the day after the overthrow of this regime, a page from the thousands of pages that list the crimes of the Islamic regime will be dedicated to the same mass and oppressed massacre of hundreds of people who died or were injured in the Sardasht chemical bombing. People will not forget that with the beginning of the war, Khomeini called it a divine and a heavenly blessing, and he actively used this war in the service of establishing the Islamic government in Iran.
The Islamic Republic welcomed the war to break the Iranian revolution, to recapture all the democratic gains made during that period, to massacre the communists and all its opponents, and to crush all the demands and expectations of the 1979 revolution. With the continuation of the war the Islamic regime was able to drown those who did not want such a revolution to be confiscated by Khomeini and the Islamic idealism in their own blood.
On the anniversary of Sardasht`s humanitarian catastrophe of the chemical bombing, we express our disgust and hatred for the perpetrators and accomplices of this great crime, and send greetings to the memory of those innocent people who lost their loved ones during this tragic incident.
