A Kurdish leader in exile has demanded that Germany pay millions of marks in reparations for helping Iraq produce the poison gas it used against its Kurdish population.
Sami Abdul Rahman said in Hamburg last week that “the Bonn government should pay us compensation, exactly as it did to the Jews who were gassed in World War II.”
Rahman said his people knew exactly who in Germany made available the equipment to produce chemical and biological weapons in Iraq.
He said at least 50,000 Kurds are dead or missing as a result of gas attacks by the regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. But until now, “not a single penny” from Germany has reached the hundreds of thousands of Kurdish refugees who escaped the deadly attacks.
“Just nice words won’t help us,” said Rahman, a former Iraqi minister who went underground in 1974 after a Baghdad court sentenced him to death for treason.
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