It is the twentieth anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the invasion of Iraq by the United States, aided by the United Kingdom and Australia and 44 other countries, including Spain, groups of a coalition that President George W. Bush baptized as “that of the will” and Democratic Senator Kerry of “the one of intimidated and bribed”. A flag hoisted on a lie: the “weapons of mass destruction” of Saddam Hussein’s army, but that “the three from the Azores” had a basis to preach it: Bush and Tony Blair knew that their countries had provided the Iraqi dictator with said weapons and Aznar, who had also done so by numerous Spanish companies.
The Spanish participation in the arsenal was discovered by Rafael Gómez Parra, a reporter for the weekly Interviú, who with the photojournalist Pablo Vázquez verified in the Iraq-Iran war (1980-1988), surrounded by corpses of civilians, the casings of chemical bombs with the logo of the Basque company Gamesa, today absorbed by Siemens, and the ominous “Made in Spain” (Interviú, number 624, April 27, 1988).
I remember that my ‘valid interlocutor’, as the unforgettable Cuco Cerecedo used to say, in Moncloa de González, called me to tell me that Gamesa’s lawyers were going to crack us down – I was the director of the weekly – and he gave me the name of the person I was leaving. to sue. “You have made my day. Tell him, please, to send me the text of the complaint as soon as possible, which I already have on the front page for next week: ‘From defending the ETA member Txiki Paredes Manot shot by Franco to defending the murderers of Iranian children’”. Silence thicker than the curtains in my grandmother’s house. “Do not tell me…”. The lawsuit never came, of course.
But those of Gamesa (Grupo Metalúrgico Auxiliar, SA) were not the only Spanish weapons with which the dictator Hussein devastated Iranian populations –and, already involved, also Kurds–. Unión Explosivos Río Tinto, today Ercros, supplied him with projectiles of heavy artillery –it is true that, in his exquisite neutrality, he also sold out to the Iranians–; Trebelan, articulated trailers; Esperanza y Cía., various weapons and, among others, Expal (Explosivos Alaveses), napalm and mustard gas bombs, as well as antipersonnel mines –and not ‘antipersonnel’, whatever the Spanish Royal Academy says–. And always violating everything what was within reach: the prohibitions of chemical weapons of the Geneva Protocol of 1925 after the disasters of the First Great War, the recommendations of the United Nations and the Spanish laws themselves, skipping the mandatory Customs export items.
The extreme left-wing press had already reported an event that occurred in March 1985, conveniently silenced by the self-sacrificing authorities and also by the press: a Boeing chartered “by ESPLA [por Expal], related to Explosivos Río Tinto, in the town of Páramo de Masa”, with cargo of “napalm and the sinister and deadly mustard gas” suffered an accident at the Getafe military air base, Madrid, and “only chance prevented it from being would cause a catastrophe. Apparently, since then, only transport by boat has been used” (Vanguardia Obrera, Organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Spain (Marxist-Leninist), no. 506, May 30-June 12, 1985).
Although since 1982 the use of “weapons of mass destruction” by Hussein was already known. From then dates Iran’s first claim to the United Nations denouncing the use of chemical bombs by the Iraqi aggressor. The UN took it easy and did not present the report of the investigative mission to the Security Council until March 26, 1984, reaping the US veto to condemn the Baghdad regime. I am not aware that the Soviet Union also vetoed it, although it would not surprise me because, Hussein’s ally, it also provided him with weapons, at least conventional ones. Iran reiterated its protest before the UN and chastened Secretary General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar proposed a resolution urging both parties to negotiate peace and refrain from using chemical weapons. But it was not until 1986, when the Iranian counter-offensive began to be victorious, that he decided to attend to the claims of the Ayatollahs’ regime and send a second investigative commission – in which the Spanish Manuel Domínguez, a medical colonel specializing in injuries caused by atomic weapons, participated. biological and chemical – which concluded without a doubt that Hussein used mustard gas bombs, the iperite of World War I, and nerve gas, the fearsome tabun.
Spain has been, and perhaps continues to be, a leading economy in this ill-fated industry and already in 1927 it disobeyed the Geneva Protocol to suppress the rebellion of Abd el-Krim in the Rif. First with pesticides such as phosgene and chloropicrin from France, and then oxol and thiodiglycol, precursors of yperite, from Germany. But immediately the National Factory of La Marañosa (Madrid) was built to produce its own bombs of iperite, phosgene and other toxic agents destined for the war in Morocco. We have the dubious honor of being the first to use them in aerial bombardments. The international protests of the Riffian leader had as much echo and understanding as those of the Iranian ayatollahs. From then on, the military chemical industry had a notable development in Spain, but its golden age was the decades from the 70s to the 90s of the last century and in its list of dishonor, Eduardo Serra, a cork who was Undersecretary of Defense with Suárez and Calvo Sotelo, Secretary of Defense with González and Minister of Defense with Aznar: “the defense link with the United States”, was portrayed by the newspaper El País.
Back to the anniversary of the Gulf War
Following the gruesome massacres of the Iraq-Iran war – half a million to one million casualties, plus 100,000 Kurds killed in 4,000 destroyed villages – the defeated Hussein was forced to destroy his arsenals of chemical, biological and long-range ballistic missile weapons under international control. In other words, in 2003, the three from the Azores, the UN and the international community knew that their “weapons of mass destruction” was a hoax.
Paradoxically, it was the US and British armies that used them in Iraq: uranium-238 warheads, known as depleted uranium, ambushed under the hypocritical label of conventional weapons. And a way to get rid of, or generously share with humanity, the 700,000 tons of U-238 that the US has as waste from its nuclear power plants and which discovered its high capacity to pierce armor and its remarkable capacity for explosion. It is a side effect that the active life of that depleted uranium is 4,500 million years –I am not mistaken in a zero: four thousand five hundred million years–, that is, a little bit of radioactivity fatally illing people, drying up the earth and transmitting through the air, the food chain and the waters.
The same thing that Britain wants to do now by supplying Ukraine with depleted uranium ammunition to bomb the Dombass and Crimea. We are cleaning the world of undesirables for our grandchildren. Even desirable.
The only action worthy of Spain in “one of the most serious crimes of our times”, as the London newspaper The Guardian defined the invasion of Iraq, and not “a blunder, nor an error, nor a confusion” was the withdrawal of the Spanish troops by President Zapatero, the first measure of his mandate in April 2004. Everything else, complicity in the crime. Even his, because while he withdrew troops with his left hand, he increased arms sales six-fold with his right, as Gervasio Sánchez reminded him when he invited him “to visit some of the countries at war or with internal or neighborhood conflicts to which his government He has sold weapons in recent years, violating the arms control law approved by the Spanish Parliament in December 2007. I even extend the invitation to his wife and two daughters. Mr. President, I want to see his face when he explains to his family the reasons why he has become the best arms dealer in the history of Spanish democracy.
Let Díez catch us confessed or, at least, uniformed with NBC suit, that of the armies against chemical and/or bacteriological warfare.