CNSNews.com Correspondent
Monday, March 28, 2005

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  A spokesman for the prosecutor's office in Rotterdam said this was the first time a Dutch citizen was being prosecuted for genocide. "If he is convicted, the maximum sentence could be life imprisonment," said Wim de Bruin.

The 62-year-old businessman appeared in court earlier this month to hear charges against him, and his request to be released from prison was denied.

Van Anraat is accused of selling thousands of tons of chemicals that were then used by the Iraqi military to make mustard gas and nerve gas.

Some 5,000 Iraqi Kurds were killed in an attack on the town of Halabja during 1988. Van Anraat has been accused of continuing to deliver the chemicals even after he saw horrific pictures of what Iraq was doing with the items he supplied.

Defense lawyers say van Anraat did not know that his chemicals were being used to make poison gas with which Saddam attacked civilians.

De Bruin said his office first learned about van Anraat from the U.S. Customs Service, which was investigating him for allegedly violating United Nations sanctions against Iraq.

In the early 1990s, van Anraat was arrested in Italy at the request of American authorities, but then he fled to Iraq, where he stayed until 2003. After the fall of Saddam Hussein, he returned to the Netherlands where, after an investigation, he was arrested by Dutch authorities.

He is believed to be one of the most important suppliers of chemical agents to Iraq.

"It is too early to tell what the outcome will be," said de Bruin. "Even while he is in jail, we are still continuing the investigation."

Media in the Netherlands dubbed van Anraat the Dutch Chemical Ali after an earlier nickname given to Saddam's cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, who was in charge of Iraq's chemical weapons program. Al-Majid was captured in Aug. 2003 and faces charges before the same Iraqi special tribunal that will try Saddam.

The Dutchman's next court appearance will be in June.

Meanwhile, the same Rotterdam court is also prosecuting a Dutchman who is accused of war crimes in Liberia's civil war.

Lumber merchant Guus van Kouwenhoven, who is in custody, allegedly helped set up militias in the West African nations and supplied them with weapons through timber companies he operated in those countries.

Liberian militias took part in widespread massacres of civilians during the 1990s.

Van Kouwenhoven is alleged to have been an advisor to Liberia's deposed dictator, Charles Taylor, now living in exile in Nigeria.

De Bruin said van Kouwenhoven was arrested last week and would be charged with war crimes.

Global Witness, a human rights organization investigating rights violations related to the exploitation of natural resources, helped to document evidence of van Kouwenhoven's activities for U.N. reports.

Patrick Alley, a spokesman for the group, said the arrest sends a strong message to other individuals involved in supplying weapons to rebel organizations.

"I think any business that is engaging in one of these conflict zones, that knows that its money is being used to purchase arms or to fund rebel groups -- or maybe even worse, they don't know what their money is being used for and they don't even try too hard to find out -- they're really going to worry about what's going to happen now," Alley said.

"It shows people that they can be arrested and maybe have to answer for what they are doing."

Alley said his group was documenting other cases of businesses involved in natural resource-related human rights violations in places such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, South-East Asia and in some of the former Soviet states.

De Bruin said this was the first time a Dutch national was being prosecuted for war crimes since World War II.

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