It could be a massive symbol of change if Halabja were to become known worldwide for pomegranates rather than weapons of mass destruction. Fortunately, the land wasn't contaminated around Halabja.

Halabja is one of those place names, like Srebrenica and Katyn, that are etched into the collective memory of the extremes of man's inhumanity.

The more countries that mark the Kurdish genocide, through parliaments, governments, towns, civic groups, school talks and visits the better. There is a handful of memorials in Britain. There should be more. The 25th anniversary of Halabja has helped develop an international momentum that puts the past Kurdish Genocide and the future of the Kurdish people firmly on the map.

While many of the world's governments want to prevent genocide, they almost never act to achieve this aim. This despite most being signatories to the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide which is explicitly designed to compel them to do just that.

The Halabja poisonous gas attack is known by several names, namely 'bloody friday', which took place on March 16, 1988. Chemicals weapons were used against civilians indiscriminately by the Iraqi government. The attack killed thousands of people, and injured more than 10,000.

The Commons has formally agreed to recognise the genocide against the Kurds 25 years after the poison-gas attack on Halabja and following a concerted campaign by Kurds and their British supporters, led by Iraqi born Conservative MP Nadhim Zahawi, to break the silence on this untold story.

We are not only marking the tenth anniversary of the fall of Saddam but the 50th anniversary of the beginnings in 1963 of a campaign of demonisation of the Kurds that proceeded to full-blown genocide, most notably at Halabja where 5,000 people were killed and many more hideously injured by Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction.

The untold story of the Kurdish genocide was the subject last week of a major international conference organised, just a stone's throw from Parliament, by the Kurdistan Regional Government in the UK.

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. This often astonishes people because it remains very vivid and even vicious in British politics. The usual historical perspective about past events hasn't yet overcome often hysterical arguments about this intervention.

Next year's 10th anniversary of the Iraq war may focus on the feebleness so far of federalism and the country possibly breaking up without the urgent...

I am making another comparison in support of the campaign for the UK and the wider international community to recognise other events that finished 24 years ago: the genocide against the Iraqi Kurds which began in 1963 and culminated in the use of weapons of mass destruction, most notoriously at Halabja in 1988.

The Iraqi Kurds are trying to encourage the world to understand that a decades-long process of genocide killed hundreds of thousands of people and that it remains a living legacy that affected almost all people in a region just twice the size of Wales, or about the same size as Holland.

The palestinian cause has become internalised within Human rights discourse, and Muslim movements, the Kurdish cause in contrast has been marginalised, and sidelined. Kurdish population is close to 40million while palestinian population exceeds four million, but enjoy the sympathy and support of the Arab world.