This is an article from guardian from Tehran where the peace musuem is built to remind everyone the horrible legacy of the chemical warfare ... The whole idea behind this can be described in this pragraph : "We want to show the whole world that chemical weapons have done this to us, we want to show how painful the consequences are. We don't want revenge. We just want to show what happens so it won't happen again."
The original article :
Tehran might not be the most obvious place for a peace museum, but Iran's eight-year war with Iraq was one of the longest and bloodiest conflicts of the post-1945 era — so anything that deals honestly with its legacy has to be a positive thing.
Set in a carefully tended park in the centre of the capital, the new museum — inspired by existing ones in Hiroshima and Ypres — will also serve as a centre for surviving victims of the war, especially for the thousands of Iranians who were injured in chemical warfare attacks unleashed by Saddam Hussein's forces.
Mohammad Shagef-Nakhaei is one of them – a middle-aged man with a persistent hacking cough that is an awful legacy of the injuries he suffered during an Iranian offensive against the southern Iraqi port of Fao in 1985, when he was 22.
"Four days after we captured Fao we were back on the Iranian side of the Shatt al-Arab," he told me. "We had eaten breakfast and said our prayers when five or six Iraqi fighters hit our position with chemical bombs. I felt cold like when someone splashes water on you. Later I started vomiting and something green came out of my mouth. My throat was very dry and I couldn't breathe. I was blistered from head to toe."
Shagef-Nakhaei was evacuated from the front line and underwent emergency treatment in a private London hospital – he still has a yellowing newspaper clipping reporting his arrival — but has been suffering ever since and still spends long periods in hospital every year.
Hassan Hassani Saadi, also injured by Iraqi mustard gas, tells a similar story of vomiting, dizziness, days in a coma and being burned all over. Two decades on he has been left blind in one eye and has just 20% vision in the other. His lungs are permanently scarred and his cough is especially bad at night. He is 43 but looks 10 years older.
In a country whose religious culture and official propaganda glorify sacrifice and martyrdom, these men's stories convey the banal pity of war. The effect is more Wilfred Owen than rose-scented Shia Muslim paradise.
Their experiences were shared by 60,000 Iranians injured in chemical warfare attacks in what the Islamic Republic still calls the "imposed war" or the "sacred defence". It was the first time since the first world war that mustard gas was used and the first time ever that nerve agents such as Sarin and Tabun were employed. Iran complained bitterly that the raw materials were supplied to Iraq by western companies while the US and other governments "tilted" towards Saddam and looked the other way.
It wasn't the first time I had seen the terrible effects of these banned weapons. I visited Iran several times during the war; in February 1986 in a Tehran hospital, courtesy of the Ministry of Islamic Guidance, I met Hamid Kurd Alipoor, then a 19-year-old conscript with the Revolutionary Guards. A few days earlier he had been sheltering in a sandbagged bunker when an Iraqi shell detonated nearby.
Hamid was swathed from neck to waist in yellow, disinfectant-soaked bandages. His eyelids, I reported, were "scorched and puffy, his swollen face grotesquely patterned with slices of bright new pink flesh striped over cheeks and forehead the colour of overdone toast." Like so many others he was diagnosed as likely to suffer permanent lung damage long after he had passed the immediate risk of infection and blood poisoning and his burns had healed.
By 1986 Iraq was using chemical weapons as an integral part of its battlefield strategy. Over time, Iranian forces were issued with gas masks and chemical warfare suits that were also distributed to visiting journalists, who were instructed how to inject themselves with an antidote in the event of a nerve gas attack. It was a sinister and frightening experience - even for those who knew they would be back in the safety and comfort of a Tehran hotel within a day or two.
So it is gratifying that the Tehran museum — dedicated last summer but yet to formally open — plans to focus on the enduring human consequences of that grim period. "The government calls the war the 'sacred defence'. We don't like that. We hate war and that's why we have established this museum," said Dr Shahriar Khateri, of the Society for Chemical Weapons Victims Support. "We have witnessed its devastation and we are still dealing with the consequences of something that ended 20 years ago. We need to teach the younger generation that war is not a computer game."
Khateri, from Khorramshahr, was just 15 when he volunteered to fight. "Later I saw pictures of the first world war and it was very similar to our experience: trenches, dead bodies and heavy artillery firing for hours," he recalled.
Earlier awareness, Khateri argues, could have saved lives. The most notorious use of chemicals was against the Iraqi Kurdish village of Halabja in 1988, though an Iranian Kurdish town, Sardasht in West Azerbaijan province, was attacked by the Iraqis the year before. If there had been a stronger reaction then, he says, Halabja might have been spared its terrible fate. (Khateri, incidentally, is firmly opposed to Iran developing nuclear weapons. The government, defying UN demands that it cease enriching uranium, insists it wishes only to generate power for civilian purposes.)
Mohammad Reza Taghipur Mughaddam, the director of the museum, was injured by a conventional high-explosive shell which hit the ambulance he was in, causing the loss of both his legs above the knees. "People help me all the time because I am in a wheelchair," he said. "The problem is that if you've been injured in a chemical attack your injuries are not visible. People don't always ask me if I was wounded in the war but when they do they always thank me for helping defend their homes and families."
Koroush, my guide and interpreter in Tehran, who had dismissed my idea of an interview with disabled Iranian war veterans as an old story, did just that, visibly moved as he embraced and thanked these former soldiers as our meeting ended.
"We want to show the whole world that chemical weapons have done this to us," said Saadi. "We want to show how painful the consequences are. We don't want revenge. We just want to show what happens so it won't happen again."
Source : http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/26/iran-iraq-war
28.11.2008 - 10:58 GMT:+1
