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Thinking
the Unthinkable
Saddam
Trial: Arraignment or Apology
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By Felicity
Arbuthnot**
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December
15, 2005
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Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and his former intelligence chief Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti during their trial in Baghdad December 5, 2005 (Reuters photo)
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When
Saddam Hussein announced to the US-inspired kangaroo court in
Baghdad that he was “Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq,” he was
ridiculed in the media. He was right. Iraq’s “sovereignty and
territorial integrity” were guaranteed by the United Nations,
whose founding Charter deems illegal the invasion of another UN
member state.
Since
the supine secretary general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan,
finally stated 20 months after the invasion that it was
“illegal,” it is worth addressing what Saddam Hussein and his
co-defendents are being tried for and whether they are owed apology
rather than prosecution.
After
the horrors rained on Iraq under occupation—torture in hidden
prisons, Abu Ghraib’s unspeakable depravities at the hands of US
personnel, destruction throughout Iraq of countless thousands of
homes with their occupants buried alive within them, uncounted
thousands of families shot by troops for simply driving on their
country’s roads—Saddam’s crimes against humanity, while
appalling, hardly compare.
Further,
with two attorneys assassinated, others on both sides and the judge
threatened with death, and US pressure over all, the court can only
be as bad as or worse than the accusations against those that
operated under the former regime.
For
the 13 years prior to the 2003 invasion, the world was drip-fed an
incessant diet of the regime’s crimes: the attack on the Kurds at
Halabja in 1988; the allegations of over six hundred Kuwaiti
prisoners still held in Iraq from the 1991 invasion of Kuwait;
Iranian prisoners held from the eight-year Iran-Iraq war (inspite of
the fact that for several years before the invasion, exchanges of
prisoners or remains had been taking place with relative
regularity); hidden chemical and biological weapons programs; and
even—in an inspired bit of psych-ops bogeymanism to soften up US
opinion in the run-up to the invasion—Saddam was “discovered”
to still be holding an American pilot shot down in 1991, Michael
Speicher. And torture chambers and mass graves, mass graves, mass
graves.
If legality has been further turned on its international head by this trial, it has to be questioned how selective it has become. |
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No
charges are being brought over Halabja, it seems. Understandably,
that can of worms won’t be opened. The United States sold Iraq
chemical weapons and, reportedly, advised on their most
“effective” use. There is also a US War College Report that
points the Halabja finger at Iran. America was supplying them, too.
Stirring
up wars is a nice little earner. No word has been heard of the
missing Kuwaitis, previously also a pet subject of Anne Clwyd MP,
now Tony Blair’s human rights advisor on Iraq. She has not
mentioned them since the invasion. The Iran-Iraq exchanges were
halted after the invasion, and Michael Speicher has never been heard
about again. One can only imagine what new grief after hope his
family have been put through by lies in high places.
Mass
graves? One can only speculate that perhaps they, too, have become
largely embarrassing as so many were in the southern areas where
British and American troops buried countless thousands in
1991—including bulldozing young Iraqi conscripts alive into
trenches. Other mass grave were undoubtedly also from the US-driven
Iran-Iraq war where the south was the front line.
As
for charges related to secretly producing weapons of mass
destruction that could destroy Western targets in 45 minutes?
Don’t think so.The real WMDs were, of course, a raft of dodgy
dossiers and more duplicity in high places. The regime even
delivered an 11,800-page document to the United Nations in late
2002, seemingly accounting for all. But we will never know, since US
officials liberated it from the weapons inspectors office in an
“unprecedented” act and returned about a third, so extensively
blacked out as to be “incomprehensible” according to UN
ambassadors.
The
charge Saddam Hussein and his co-defendents face is that, after an
assassination attempt against him and those in his convoy in July
1982, in the village of Dujail, 142 villagers were executed after
trial. Execution for treason was legal under Iraq’s Consitution,
as it is in the United States, where the 1,001st person since 1976
has just been executed by lethal injection for alleged gang-related
murders a couple of years before Dujail. After the 2003 invasion of
Iraq, the death penalty was briefly abolished but brought back under
pressure from the US desert-booted, bunkered “viceroy, Paul
Bremer.
When
Saddam went to Dujail, he said in his speech, “The days are gone
when Iraq belonged to foreigners.” Dujail, we are told, is the
best-documented case of atrocities. Let us hope it is not an excuse
to flag a message to the countless Iraqis who feel hostile to
foreigners illegally occupying their country for oil for all and
piping water from the great Tigris and Euphrates rivers for Western
allies Turkey and Israel.
Given the horrors of the last 20 months in Iraq, , why aren’t others in high places in Saddam’s illegally squatted palace in the dock? |
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Sabah
Al-Mukhtar, president of the Arab Lawyers Association and specialist
in international law, points out, regarding Dujail, that whatever
the human rights considerations regarding the horror of executions,
the
Iraqi Constitution, then as now, was and is still valid; that a
Judicial Order, ratified as Head of State in official capacity, is
subject to State Immunity under the Vienna Convention—and that
contrary to perception, the United Nations recognises the current
government is absolutely wrong, both substantially and factually.
Iraq as a State, has, was and still is recognised as a State. The
concept of recognition relates to States not governments. UN
Resolution 1546 did not recognise the government, but simply
welcomed it, which is a statement expressing political, rather
than a legal status.
If
legality has been further turned on its international head by this
trial, it has to be questioned how selective it has become. Given
the horrors of the last 20 months in Iraq, the frying suffocation of
prisoners in metal containers in Afghanistan’s summer heat under
US-UK watch and actions “as in Iraq,” says Al-Mukhtar, why
aren’t others in high places in Saddam’s illegally squatted
palace in the dock?
Oh,
and the traditonally dressed, dishdasha-, keffiyeh-wearing
Barzan Al-Tikriti in secular but conservative Iraq showed up at the
Dujail trial “in jeans and red cowboy boots.” If you believe
that, the fairies are back in my garden.
**
Felicity Arbuthno is a journalist and activist who has visited
Iraq on numerous occasions since the 1991Gulf War. She has written
and broadcast widely on Iraq, her coverage of which was nominated
for several awards. She was also Senior Researcher for John
Pilger’s
award-winning documentary Paying the Price – Killing the Children
of Iraq.
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