"Admission of Iraqi refugees is the beginning of reconciliation”

For the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) the admission of 2500 refugees from Iraq is "the beginning of reconciliation with respect to the support given by German firms to the poison gas industry and the re-armament of the Iraqi army under Saddam Hussein”. German firms helped in the setting up of installations for the manufacture of poison gas and in the construction of Scud rockets, which were aimed at Israel in 1991, said the GfbV German Chairperson, Tilman Zülch, on Thursday. Military helicopters were also delivered from Germany to the Iraqi air force. The first refugees from Iraq are expected today at the Friedland reception camp near Göttingen.

Conservative estimates indicate that tens of thousands of Kurds and Assyrian Chaldaic Christians died in 1987/88 in the bombardment with poison gas of their villages and towns in northern Iraq. In Halabja alone some 5000 people died on 16th March 1988 through the use of chemical weapons. Inhabitants of Halabja are dying to the present day as a result of the bombardment with poison gas. The GfbV accused the two companies from Hessen, Karl Kolb and Pilot Plant, with complicity in the painful death of the members of the minority and was engaged in a legal battle with them.

The GfbV has for years been calling for up to 50,000 members of particularly persecuted minorities and religious communities from Iraq to be admitted to Germany. "As in the case of the Hugenots, who in their thousands found a new homeland in Germany, the Christian Assyrian Chaldaeans, Mandaeans and Yezidi from Iraq will also be quickly integrated”, said Zülch.