The Municipal Council of Vienna, Austria’s capital, have officially defined the Halabja massacre, in which Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces killed thousands of Kurdish civilians in a chemical attack in the northeastern Iraqi town of Halabja in 1988, as ‘genocide’, said Berîvan Aslan, the Kurdish MP of the Green Alternative party of Vienna.
The Municipal Council and Landtag of Vienna unanimously accepted the three-party proposal for the recognition of the Halabja genocide on 23 March, brought forward by the Greens, Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) and the New Austria and the Liberal Forum (NEOS), the last two being the partners of Austria’s ruling coalition.
Aslan, who initiated the proposal, stated on her Twitter page that this recognition of a crime against the Kurdish people as genocide is a first in Austrian political history.
The Austrian Parliament, again with Aslan’s motion in 2017, recognised the Islamic State’s (ISIS) 2014 massacre in Sinjar (Shengal) region of Iraqi Kurdistan as the “Yazidi genocide”.
The Halabja massacre, which occurred on 16 March 1988 and killed between 3,200 and 5,000 people, injured more than 7,000 and caused long-term health consequences across the region, is considered the third deadliest chemical warfare attack in the twentieth century after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Iraqi High Tribunal recognised the attack in 2010 as an act of genocide, in which the lethal cocktail of chemical gases used by the Iraqi forces through the end of the Iraq-Iran War targeted civilians in the Kurdish town of Halabja, most of them women and children.
