Arriving at a peaceful settlement will take some time and will require a great deal of honesty as well as transparency. But the short answer is yes, this time it is different and there is reason to be hopeful for peace.

While the West frets over the increasingly bellicose utterances of North Korea's deranged delinquent dictator and wrings its hands in frustration over the on-going bloodbath in Syria, attention has strayed from Iraq as it spirals towards civil war.

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.

Throughout the war, our governments insisted that they had a genuine humanitarian interest in bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq. To put it simply, this is a lie, and needs to be exposed as such. A brief look at the West's record in the Middle East provides all the evidence we need in order to unearth the great myth of 'humanitarian intervention' in Iraq.

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.

Last week Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers' Party or PKK, called for a ceasefire with the Turkish state. The announcement garnered widespread international coverage largely because the announcement was made to coincide with the Persian/Kurdish New Year and not long after the government announced it was in direct talks with Ocalan himself. But will this lead to a meaningful lasting peace?

The great achievement of post-Saddam Iraq is its transition from a centralised and mainly Sunni dominated one-party rule to federalism and power-sharing between Sunnis, Kurds and Shia, and small minorities. All this is, or should be, governed by the constitution, approved by over 80% of the people in a referendum in 2005.

The Kurdistan region is clearly thriving as the safest, most stable, and prosperous part of Iraq, with a headstart of 12 years of relative freedom from Saddam. The number of deaths through terrorism is about 200 since 2003. It has built a major energy sector from nothing in just a few years. And it has helped stabilise the rest of Iraq and could be a model for it to follow.

It is not a secret, anymore, the torment and suffering the Kurdish population have endured under nationalistic and fascist regimes. It is painful enough to be tortured under inhumane methods, but to be a victim of ethnical cleansing is another level of intense suffering.

It is no secret that Kurdistan has become wealthy, and that they are developing rapidly with a modern outlook on life. However, this does not mean that the Kurds must neglect their past, and not seek justice for the crimes that were committed against them under the Ba'aath party regime.

New freight and passenger lines between, say, Basra, Baghdad, Kirkuk, Dohuk and Ceyhan in Turkey would drive new markets and knit people together wherever the borders are. And Iraq would be the transport hub of the whole region.

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.

Three Kurdish women have been found murdered outside the Kurdish Insitute in Paris, with gun shot wounds to the head. One of the women is reportedly the co-founder of the militant Kurdish separatist movement, the PKK.

Talabani will leave behind a legacy that only a few can achieve in their lifespan. Indeed, he united both Kurds and Arabs, and devoted his life to both the Iraqi and Kurdish Cause. A good leader leads by example, and I am certain that through Mam Jalal's achievements and struggle, he has opened a box of hope for the future of both Iraq and the Kurdistan region.

We realise that genocide is understood by most to be the gravest crime against humanity it is possible to commit, and that it is no small thing to ask the British government to recognise our treatment under Saddam as genocide.