A morning paper on Monday lauded the move by the Hague Court to put on trial a Dutchman charged with shipping chemicals to Iraq in 1980s while describing him as a ”scapegoat” whose trial would help drop hundreds of other similar cases against Saddam and his aides as well as US and European officials and companies that supported them. ”Putting a Dutchman in the dock who acted as a sort of middle man buying chemicals from US and European companies and selling them on to a criminal regime in Iraq, with the world watching, is always going to be a delicate exercise,” said `Kayhan International.` It questioned, ”Why the Hague has suddenly decided to put (Frans) van Anraat in the dock now, while there are still thousands of documents and receipts which clearly show that German, American, British and French companies sold all sorts of chemicals to Saddam in the 1980s?” Anraat is charged with shipping (with the help of European and American companies and governments) more than 1,100 tons of chemicals to Iraq from 1986 to 1988 that were used to make deadly mustard and nerve gas against thousands of Iraqis and Iranians, the paper added. Stressing that the man knew the ingredients he was buying could be used to make poison gas and end in the battlefield, it said his indictment says the lethal gas was used in attacks on several villages including Halabja and Sardahst with the intention of wiping out the ethnic Kurdish population on both sides of Iran-Iraq borders. ”Several are expected to testify during the three-week trial, including the Iranian survivors of the 1987 Iraqi nerve gas attack on Sardasht, Kurdistan Province,” added the daily. Noting that trying a Dutchman on charges of selling chemicals to a former dictator could indeed ”be a step towards implementation of justice for tens of thousands of survivors,” the article further argued, ”Then again, it could also be a perfect excuse for the West to get away with its own double-standards, misleading policies and poor human rights record.” Referring to hundreds of cases of human rights violation in Iraq and the occupied Palestinian territories, it said the world would finally wake up and ”take a firm stance against these criminal producers of weapons of mass destruction and violators of human rights on a global scale. That day, the axis of evil (US, Britain and the occupying Zionist regime of Israel) will no longer be able to conceal their crimes.” It stressed that there would be a time, in the short run, when the world will no longer listen to the West and its ”unfounded allegations against the Islamic Republic ... which has been and still is one of the main victims of their weapons of mass destruction, state terrorism and human rights breaches.”