On nerve gas and morning sickness

I was eight years old when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s ninth prime minister, was hanged. I have memories of a fuzzy photograph of the gallows on the cover of the Pakistan Times. The more distinct memories were of the curfews that followed and the thousands that disappeared. I remember not understanding why we could not leave the house because of the rioting and the tear gas. An older cousin explained that tear gas was like someone rubbing cayenne pepper in your eyes with sandpaper while being suffocated with a pillow. It frightened me.

Chemical agents still frighten me. Their entire purpose is to mutilate and horrifically incapacitate. Tear gas is considered a lachrymatory agent that burns the eyes and causes short-term blindness. There are other chemicals such as blister agents that cause severe rashes, nerve agents that cause seizures, or ricin that causes gastrointestinal haemorrhaging. In the late Eighties, when drawing a series of editorial cartoons on Iraq’s then president, Saddam Hussein, I came across some photographs in the newsroom of the Halabja chemical strike on the Kurds. The Kurdish village of Halabja was subjected to nerve and mustard gas — killing thousands. The photographs were grotesque: bodies strewn on the streets, eyes gaping wide open; dead parents shielding dead babies; corpses blistered beyond recognition. Those that survived had to deal with cancer and severe birth defects. Saddam was a monster and I drew him as such.

The world is now concerned about the possibility that the Syrian government might use chemical weapons on its population. According to international observers, engineers working for the Bashar al-Assad regime have started combining the chemical precursors needed to make sarin and mustard gas, which would be deployed against anti-government rebels. The use of chemical agents in dense, urban areas would be catastrophic. Assad’s regime is fully guilty but who are the suppliers of these chemicals? Precursor chemicals and manufacturing equipment come from a variety of sources. The Syrian government has a native capacity for manufacturing chemical weapons. But, as with Halabja in Iraq, there is information pointing to Western companies having supplied chemicals to Syria. There will likely be no action taken against these manufacturing companies. For all the British outrage, there are many British companies that export military equipment to Syria. This is despite the British government’s promise to block such transactions as recently brought up in the House of Commons. Such companies will continue to silently ply their trade — publically admonished by governments, but privately given the ‘wink, wink’ to continue.



The newsbytes from Syria have taken a backseat to the headline-catching, morning sickness of the pregnant Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge. Immediately, this royal news became a top trending topic on Twitter. Her illness is diagnosed as hyperemesis gravidarum, which is a severe form of morning sickness. In the late 1950s and 1960s, an estimated 10,000 babies worldwide were born with severe physical deformities because their mothers had taken thalidomide drugs, which were marketed as a remedy for hyperemesis gravidarum. Thalidomide was taken off the market in 1961 due to public pressure but it was only a few months ago, in August of 2012, that the company, Grunenthal, issued an apology saying it regretted the consequences of the drug that led to birth defects during the 1950s and 1960s. In their apology, Grunenthal mentions, “We ask that you regard our long silence as a sign of the silent shock that your fate has caused us.”

The cruellest lies are told in utter silence.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 6^th, 2012.