THIS WEEK, a Baghdad court convicted Ali Hassan Majid of genocide against the Kurdish people and sentenced him to hang. The verdict was supported by overwhelming evidence, much of which he never bothered to deny.
I first encountered the handiwork of "Chemical Ali," as he was known, in September 1987 in Kurdistan's empty countryside. Traveling north from Baghdad, we entered Iraq's Kurdish region, and suddenly there were no more villages. In one town, bulldozers were parked near abandoned houses on one side of the road while only rubble remained on the other. Further north, only grave markers, utility poles and abandoned orchards indicated the location of once thriving communities.
Saddam Hussein had put Majid in charge of the Baath Party's Northern Bureau earlier that year, and conferred on him absolute authority to deal with an intractable Kurdish rebellion that had arisen in the midst of Iraq's war with Iran. Majid, who was Hussein's cousin, began by ordering the destruction of villages, ultimately leveling 4,500 of Kurdistan's 5,000 villages by 1990. Also in 1987, Iraq began to use "special ammunition" -- chemical weapons -- against villages in Kurdistan's remote Balisan Valley. These attacks earned Majid his nickname.
The chemical weapons attacks continued into 1988. On March 16 of that year, Iraqi warplanes dropped a cocktail of chemical weapons on the eastern Kurdish city of Halabja, killing more than 5,000 men, women and children. When I visited the city not long after Kurdish guerrillas recaptured it, residents showed me the basement where 42 people took shelter from the gas -- and died as it seeped to the lowest point. Even though several years had passed, the stench was overpowering. At the cemetery, a Kurdish guerrilla stuck his hand in a pile of dirt and pulled out two skulls for me to photograph. They were small, the bones of young children.
Concerned that Iraq might lose the Iran-Iraq war, the Reagan administration deliberately obscured responsibility for Halabja by suggesting that both Iran and Iraq may have had a role in the gassing. But the Iran-Iraq war ended on Aug. 20, 1988, and five days later Hussein and Majid launched chemical weapons attacks on 48 villages in Dahuk province, more than 100 miles from Iran.
There was now no doubt as to who was responsible. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee asked me to lead a delegation to document the attacks. We interviewed hundreds of survivors camped out along the Iraq-Turkey border. All were eyewitnesses, and most had lost family members, often seeing them drop dead before their eyes.
