We arrived early this morning after hours of flying and a ten-hour layover in Amman. We were met at the airport and driven into Sulaymaniyah. After a couple hours rest we went to a building that used to be one of Saddam's prisons but has now been converted into a museum. The large building was stormed in the 1991 Kurdish uprising and the exterior is pock-marked with bullet holes. The museum itself serves as a memorial to the thousands of Kurds who were imprisoned, tortured, and ethnically cleansed under Saddam's regime. In a dark basement, photos from the worst of the gas attacks adornd the concrete walls. A long passageway has been tiled with a kind of patternless mosaic of broken mirror shards that reaches from floor to cieling. Every shard of glass represents one of the 182,000 Kurds that was systematically murdered under the old regime. The cieling is lit with 5,000 small lights, one for each of the villages destroyed. The passageway itself goes on for a very long time, giving a clear visual represntation of the sheer number people killed.

After the museum, we were taken to Halabjah, one of the towns that was attacked with poison gas. There is a large memorial there with with the names of all 5,000 of the dead carved into a wall. There are also over a hundred photos of the aftermath of the attack. Much of what is there defies description but one of the things that I was very moved by was the extremely high porportion of women and young children killed in the attack. It was clearly an act of terror carried out bythe state and perpetrated against its own citizens. The decision by an Iraqi court to label Saddam's campaign against the Kurds a genocide is well-founded.