Saddam’s
Trial In Context: Episode Of Victors’ Injustice
By Nicola Nasser
10 November, 2006
Countercurrents.org
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.
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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