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November
9, 2006
Episode of the Victors' Injustice
Saddam's
Trial in Context
By NICOLA NASSER
American and European official and public
opinion reactions to Saddam Hussein's guilty verdict on Sunday
artificially removed both the trial and the death sentence out
of context and focused instead on "flaws" in the legal
technicalities of a fair trial and on death penalty as a punishment,
which exposed the trial/s in Baghdad as merely another episode
in the U.S.-British so far unsuccessful efforts to establish
their occupation of Iraq and to develop the current status quo
there as the new order.
Saddam's trials were staged to buy the U.S. and British leaders
as well as the rulers of their new Iraq some time for political
survival, but the trials needed no time to prove they are counterproductive
and will in no way make the conclusion of a farce trial a turning
point, a "milestone" or an end of era as President
George W. Bush and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki prematurely
stated.
Democrats' crushing victory in the U.S. mid-term election was
the latest proof that his administration's gimmick of orchestrating
trials of Saddam Hussein was a failure that clearly turned the
pre-planned verdict against Saddam into a popular verdict against
Bush himself, in a referendum on his performance in the war on
Iraq that broke his grip on power in Washington by depriving
him of ruling with his own Republican party in charge of both
houses on Capitol Hill, as he has done for six years.<:p>
While the western public opinion has criticized the trial on
the grounds of its legal flaws the official European, Australian
and Russian reaction in particular was confined to criticizing
the death penalty and to some warnings against the fallout of
the verdict on the Iraqi internal situation. Without underestimating
both accounts this reaction fell short of Iraqi as well as Arab
expectations: A farce trial orchestrated by an occupying power
with the aim of changing a regime by an outside invading force
outside the framework of international law should have had the
priority to condemn as a matter of principle.
American and western experts and mainstream media, like Nehal
Buhta of Human Rights Watch (HRW), Malcolm Smart, Director of
the Middle East and North Africa Programme, Sonya Sceats of the
international law program at Chatham House, the Amnesty International,
the New York Times and The Times of London have condemned or
criticized the trial as a "shabby affair," a "shameless
show trial concocted for political purposes," a "circus,"
and a "deeply flawed and unfair" trial where "political
interference undermined the independence and impartiality of
the court" by which "Iraq got neither the full justice
nor the full fairness it deserved."
Justice served or not, the pre-staged trials are unsuccessfully
trying to put on trial not only Saddam Hussein but the status
quo ante, which on all comparable accounts has been proved preferable
if not better than the status quo since the U.S.-led invasion
in 2003. Nuri al-Maliki's statement that "The Saddam Hussein
era is in the past now" was premature and could cost Iraq
its territorial integrity, unity and sovereignty and hundreds
of thousands more of Iraqi lives before it becomes a true description
of the facts on the ground.
The fact that curfew was imposed on metropolitan Baghdad and
three nearby provinces, including Iraq's largest province of
Al-Anbar, Baghdad's international airport was closed, all US-led
and commanded Iraqi troops and security forces were put on high
alert and all military leaves were cancelled on the eve of Saddam's
verdict testify contrary to al-Maliki's statement. All those
precautionary measures do not indicate in any way that Saddam
is already a bygone history. Al-Maliki government's recent decision
to retract a U.S.-sponsored legislation to purge tens of thousands
of Baathists except for some 1,500 top party officials is a further
proof that Saddam and his party are still a power to reckon with.
U.S.-made Tribunal
Of course justice was not served. Saddam's trials have proved
to be the worst form of victors' injustice, where Al-Malki --
whose Dawa party had been behind the Dujail assassination attempt
-- was trying the man whom he failed to assassinate during wartime
when the man was the constitutional president of his country
and where Bush, the leader of the occupying power, was trying
the legitimate leader of the occupied country.
All evidence confirm Saddam trials are American in all except
for conducting the proceedings in Arabic instead of English by
Iraqis instead of Americans, which was the only logical option
to convey the American message to Iraqis who do not understand
English, thus turning the tribunal into another U.S. propaganda
outlet to support the Voice of America and Al-Hurra satellite
TV channel.
The "Iraqi Governing Council" the occupiers installed
immediately after the invasion in 2003 established the "Iraqi
Higher Criminal Court" with the permission of U.S. ruler
Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority on Dec. 13, 2003,
three days before Saddam Hussein's capture.
Scott Horton, chair of the International Law Committee of the
New York City Bar Association, said: "This entire process
from beginning to end is being closely superintended by the United
States," he told IPS. "This whole process is funded
by a 138-million-dollar grant from Congress and a large staff
of people working out of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad called the
'Regimes Crime Unit'."
Horton said Washington has especially tight control over the
tribunal's schedule: "Access to the courtroom is controlled
by the Americans, security is controlled by the Americans, and
the Americans have custody over the defendants who must be produced
before the trial can go forward, so whether they have the trial
on day x or day y depends on the Americans giving their okay,"
he said.
The U.S. and Britain selected the judges, who were sent to London
for training; "rehearsals" were staged in Italy and
the Netherlands. Any judges who showed signs of impartiality
were dismissed. Three defense lawyers and one witness were kidnapped
and executed during this farce of a tribunal, held deep in Baghdad's
Green Zone behind bulletproof barriers and under armed guard.
(David Walsh, World Socialist Web Site, 7 November 2006)
Whose Moral Authority
The victors' unjust trial also lacked moral authority. "We
cannot even claim moral superiority," wrote Robert Fisk,
for if Saddam's mistakes are to be "the yardstick against
which all our iniquities are judged, what does that say about
us? We have won. We have inflicted justice upon the man whose
country we invaded and eviscerated and caused to break apart."
"Iraq is now swamped with mass murderers, guilty of rape
and massacre and throat-slitting and torture in the years since
our liberation' of Iraq. Many of them work for the Iraqi government
we are currently supporting, democratically elected, of course.
And these war criminals, in some cases, are paid by us, through
the ministries we set up under this democratic government. And
they will not be tried. Or hanged. That is the extent of our
cynicism. And our shame. Have ever justice and hypocrisy been
so obscenely joined?" (Robert Fisk, The Independent, Nov.
7, 2006)
The invasion of 2003 was a war crime; in the subsequent three-and-a-half
years, the U.S. occupation was responsible for the deaths of
655,000 Iraqis according to a John Hopkins University study;
from 1991 to 2003 the United Nations sanctions imposed under
the U.S. pressure claimed the lives of one million Iraqis through
malnutrition and disease.
Refuting Bush's statement that the trial was "a landmark
event in the history of Iraq (and) a milestone in the Iraqi people's
efforts to replace the rule of a tyrant with the rule of law,"
which the New York Times described as "overreacting,"
Malcolm Smart called the trial an "an opportunity missed"
and said it "should have been a major contribution towards
establishing justice and the rule of law in Iraq."
But it was not! Worse the fallout from the "missed opportunity"
could create further obstacles to moving from a one-party-one-leader
system into a multi-party western-style democratic one, because
the verdict if executed would doom reconciliation efforts and
exacerbate the internal Iraqi divide to the point of no return
away from a full-fledged civil war to settle it.
To judge with an obvious overwhelming vengeance the leader of
a one-party system that ruled the majority of the non-western
world during the cold war era at the hands and from the "liberal"
perspective of his enemies and the enemies of the system could
not be a fair trial; neither could be to judge him in isolation
of the ongoing struggle between what he symbolizes and its antithesis.
The Real Divide
However it is still too early to say the saga of Saddam Hussein
and what his era stands for is over, because he, whether dead
or alive, symbolizes the ongoing and unabated fierce and brutal
struggle between the occupiers and the occupied and between two
visions: One offered by the American occupying power for Iraq
and the region and one offered by Pan-Arabism as symbolized by
Saddam Hussein and Jamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt before him, despite
their mistakes and flaws of their approaches and systems.
Twice the US bought official Arab connivance or silence for targeting
Iraq in 1991 and 2003 by offering to weigh in on Israel to withdraw
from the Arab territories it occupies since 1967 in a land for
peace deal but twice Arab governments were tricked to sacrifice
Iraq for nothing. Therefore in Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon
and Egypt in particular any calls for celebrating Saddam's downfall
would fall on deaf public ears; at the official it's another
story.
Iranian and Kuwaiti cheers are very well understandable, but
they should not obscure the fact that they are an expression
of solace and dominated by the overwhelming vengeance of the
foes, but could not in any way be interpreted as proof that the
peoples of both countries would not come sooner or later to their
good senses to put Saddam's trials in their proper historical
context.
The Iraqi cheers from more than 17 ethnic and sectarian organized
foes are similarly understandable, but more resistant to common
sense because Saddam represents their antithesis and their battle
with what the man stands for, whether he is alive or dead, may
never be won; however this doesn't justify short memory on their
part.
True thousands of their followers were killed by Saddam's state,
but they were killed in battle while fighting the "dictatorship"
during war time against Iran in the north and against the US
in 1991 in the south; the victims were not carrying flowers and
celebrating family events at their homes, but were carrying weapons
supplied by Iraq's war enemies and playing in the hands of those
enemies in battles on which their ruling leaders now commemorate
as "uprisings."
The unfolding "mass graves" tragically contain alongside
their bodies the bodies of thousands of Baathists, Saddamists
and official Iraqi troops whom they slaughtered in cold blood.
The mass graves of the victims of their current atrocities that
will be discovered in future will condemn their leaders who incited
and recruited them at least as accountable as Saddam if not more
in any objective reading of history.
Saddam Hussein's purged "party comrades" may have more
convincing grievances against his rule and could have a more
credible case against him in court, but unlike their sectarian
and ethnic counterparts --would not call in a foreign invasion
to empower them to settle their accounts and did not hesitate
for a moment, together with other national, pan-Arab and Islamic
opposition to Saddam, regardless of sect or ethnicity, to join
forces against the occupation of their country.
The issue at stake here is the foreign occupation that destroyed
the Iraqi state and not the dictatorship or the democratic structure
of an Iraqi regime in an occupied stateless country; all, Saddam
inclusive, will be judged by where they stand vis-à-vis
the occupation.
Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist in Kuwait,
Jordan, UAE and Palestine. He is based in Ramallah, West Bank
of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.
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