Spanish Documentary Captures Halabja’s ‘Hope’ on Film
BARCELONA, SPAIN – When two Spanish filmmakers filmed their documentary last year on the 1988 poison gas attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja in northern Iraq, they found that the catastrophes of what happened there were best symbolized by one survivor: 40-year-old Omed Hama.
He was still only months-old when the regime in Baghdad bombed the town in 1974, killing 52 people, including his mother and brothers. His father remarried and Hama was brought up in the only family he would know. Again in 1988, when he was 14, he lost that family too in the infamous poison gas attack by Saddam Hussein’s forces, 26 years ago this week. Again he and his father, a conscript who was away fighting in Saddam’s eight-year war against Iran, became a family of two.
Hama’s story is captured in “Halabja: Life after Death,” a 35-minute documentary by Spanish filmmakers Julian Flordelis and Eduardo Ubeda that debuted in the Spanish city of Zaragoza on Friday to remember the March 16, 1988 attack on Halabja.
The film, produced with the support of the Zaragoza City Council, portrays life in Halabja a quarter-century after the devastating attack. The Kurdistan Regional Government's (KRG) representative in Spain, Daban Shadala, attended the screening in Zaragoza.
The documentary includes testimonies and interviews with a number of survivors who managed to escape the fate of the estimated 5,000 people who were killed in the attack, carried out by Saddam’s forces to punish rebels who had taken over the frontline town in the closing weeks of his 1980-88 war with Iran.
The film focuses not only on the past, but also the spirit with which residents have revived Halabja, now grown into a city, and the Kurdish government taking the first steps to turn into a new province.
“Above everything else, the people of Halabja have a strong desire to move forward,” Flordelis told Rudaw. “They were capable of rebuilding the city which was literally wiped out and if a foreigner comes and goes to Halabja without knowing what happened 26 years ago, they could never guess.”
The filmmakers, who both work for local television Aragon TV, found that Hama, whose first name means “hope” in the Kurdish language, best personified his town’s rise from the ashes.
“The documentary is a criticism of chemical weapons, and our ‘hope’ is that such an attack does not happen again,” the filmmakers said in an email exchange with Rudaw.
Although the filmmakers found that the tragic memories of the chemical attack were still in the front of the minds of survivors, it was Flordelis who was moved to tears when he went with Hama to see the place he lost his family as a teenager.
“When we arrived we understood how difficult it was for him to be there. I broke down and I started crying. Omed comforted me, hugged me, and I didn’t know what to tell him, because it had been the most devastating story I had ever heard,” Flordelis recalled.
Omed works in the Memorial for the Victims of Halabja, built to remember the victims, and every day he shows visitors pictures of his dead family members, making sure in this way they shall not be forgotten.
Another life portrayed captured on film is of 28-year-old Osamah Golpy, who was born in a refugee camp after the attack and returned to Halabja in 1991.
“His memories are built on memories of suffering. In his childhood the most important dates were not birthdays, but the dates of deaths,” said the filmmakers.
Enrique Bernad, professor of contemporary history at the University of Zaragoza and a well-known specialist on genocides, also spoke at the screening about who the Kurds are.
“There is a general ignorance about the Kurds and this happens to all the groups which don’t have a country of their own,” Bernad told Rudaw. “In Spain, the ignorance about what happened in Halabja is complete,” said Ubeda who expects the documentary to inform a greater number of people.
The filmmakers said they returned after finishing their work with a greater appreciation for the people of Halabja.