'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Trials of trying Saddam, revisited

Ways back in mid-december 2003, right after Saddam Hussein was captured, I wrote here:

No doubt about it: the trial of Saddam Hussein has many, many political aspects to it. It certainly won't be the simple, gloating "victory lap for the Coalition" that many in the US media now think it may be.

Time has proven me right. Indeed the chaotic jousting over who gets to make the key decisions in this case that I predicted back then has continued till today, and is currently escalating.

Today, the NYT's John Burns is reporting that:

The Iraqi tribunal preparing the trial of Saddam Hussein has been thrown into turmoil by the dismissal of nine senior staff members and a threat to dismiss 19 others, including the chief investigative judge.

Burns said that the issue burst into public view Tuesday when one of Ahmed Chalabi's aides,

confirmed that Mr. Chalabi had begun to press for the removal of former members of Mr. Hussein's ruling Baath Party from the tribunal's staff of judges, prosecutors and administrators. Mr. Chalabi contends that the 28 men he has cited for removal are ineligible under Iraqi law to work at the tribunal because of their party affiliation.

Burns also reports that Chalabi contends that the "Iraqi" Chief Judge of the Special tribunal, Raid Juhi, should be among those dismissed-- but had agreed to hold off from pushing for this.

Today, AP confirms that nine, relatively low-level employees of the court have indeed now been dismissed-- and adds that, "The cases of 19 others, including the chief investigative judge [Juhi], are under review."

This, at a time when the eminent Egyptian-American international law expert Cherif Bassiouni has just published an open letter to Iraqi PM Ibrahim al-Jafaari urging him, among other things to, "Erase the American Footprint" from the trial process. Pointing out the many ways in which the "Iraqi" Special Tribunal is in fact a US creation, Bassiouni writes:

A large segment of the public in Iraq and the broader Arab world suspects that the tribunal is an attempt by the United States to divert attention from its own abuses in Iraq (and at the Abu Ghraib prison, in particular) and to justify the invasion by focusing on Saddam’s crimes. Many Muslims wonder why there is a tribunal for Saddam but not one for the Israeli leaders they consider responsible for ongoing abuses of the Palestinians.

All the above just underlines ever more strongly the essential fact that, as I have long argued, war-crimes trials are always intensely political, regardless of the conceit of those in the international legal and human-rights fraternities who like to claim that these kinds of processes somehow "stand above" politics, in some kind of rarefied realm of suprahuman do-goodism.

Moreover, because war-crimes trials-- especially those conducted in the context of any kind of an ongoing conflict-- are inherently political, their conduct can only ever be as clear, useful, and constructive as the political environment within which they are embedded.

Which means, in Iraq, that the war-crimes prosecution process like everything else is completely tainted by the chaotic politics of the US occupation-- and even, I would venture to say at this point, virtually certain to collapse into yet further murky chaos and rounds of recrimination, polarization, and even bloodletting, as the politics of the US occupation continues to collapse.

Enough!

Either turn the guy over to the Iraqi government to do as it sees fit with him-- he is, after all, an Iraqi citizen; and many of his worst crimes were committed inside Iraq, and against Iraqi citizens; the Americans' only claim over him is one of force majeure.

Or, take the question of how he should be tried to the Security Council, and let them figure it out.

John Burns's piece in the NYT has a lot of interesting tidbits...

The background to this is that, back when the IST was first created, Ahmad Chalabi was still the Pentagon's good buddy; his American-educated nephew salem was the court's first Executive Director...

But then, the Pentagon turned against Chalabi, and Iyad Allawi became annointed as their favorite. Salem Chalabi was kicked out, and a bunch of Allawi's people were brought in-- many or most of them being people who espoused his line of trying to "rehabilitate" as many former Baathists as possible. (He and probably most of those new court appointees were all themselves not-yet-fully-recovered Baathists, anyway.)

And then there was an election. And Allawi lost. So now the winner of that election is trying to take control of the apparatuses of the state... Well, the main winner was the United Iraqi Alliance list, headed by Jafaari, and onto which Chalabi had insinuated himself... That's the politics behind what's happening at the IST-- and only a small part of that "political intervention" in the court's affairs is purely Iraqi.

Most of it is American. (As Bassiouni points out.)

Which makes this quote in Burns's piece even more ironic:

United States Justice Department lawyers who have led the work of the Regime Crimes Office, which has spent more than $35 million helping tribunal investigations and building a special courthouse, have made no secret in recent months of their exasperation with Iraqi politicians' attempts to interfere with the tribunal's work.

No doubt they were "shocked-- shocked!" (i.e., not shocked at all) to discover that the Iraqis would try to "politicize" this trial.

Get over it, Bushites. You're losing control in Iraq rather fast these days. The unraveling of this political-from-the-get-go attempt at a special war-crimes court is just one of the many things that will be unraveling there for you over the weeks and months ahead.

Save the situation while you still can. Execute a withdrawal from Iraq that is total, speedy, and generous. Let someone else take on the trials of trying Saddam Hussein.