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ACCORDING TO Ayad Allawi, the Iraqi prime
minister, Saddam Hussein is "distraught and
depressed" and begging for mercy. According to
others, Saddam Hussein spends his days playing
dominoes with ex- cronies. According to just about
everybody, Saddam Hussein is surprised to be alive,
having naturally assumed that his first courtroom
appearance last July was a prelude to execution.
But if his real state of mind is unknown, so, too,
is Saddam Hussein's ultimate fate.
Indeed, thanks to the fighting in Baghdad, the
insurgents in Fallujah and the mudslinging at home,
the original source of instability in Iraq has been
almost forgotten. While he sits in prison, technical
hurdles have derailed ambitious plans to bring
Saddam and his ex-associates to trial. According to
those who have worked with them, the Iraqi judges
investigating the many charges against Saddam are
unaccustomed to the rigorous requirements of
evidence, unaccustomed to international human rights
law and unaccustomed even to working eight-hour
days.
Political infighting isn't helping. Clearly there
are some in the new Iraqi leadership who would
prefer not to hold a trial at all, or at least not
one involving lawyers, presentation of evidence and
national debate.
While visiting the U.S. last month, Allawi several
times stated his preference for a fast trial, and a
fast execution, possibly as soon as this month.
It's not hard to guess why: A short trial would let
a lot of senior Baathists off the hook, would
consolidate former opponents of Saddam behind Allawi,
and would dispense with the whole thorny problem of
"guilt."
With bombs exploding in the Green Zone, the fate of
Saddam seems to many a secondary priority. But what
if this logic is backward? Leave aside abstract
ideals of justice and human rights and consider the
practical reasons to get this tribunal under way:
What if the insurgency, the bombs and the massacres
are happening precisely because there has been no
national discussion of the past?
Listen to Kanan Makiya, the former Iraqi dissident
who has dedicated himself to investigating the
archives of the former regime. Makiya thinks that
what matters is not whether the Iraqis remember
Hussein's reign - but how they remember it.
Was the Baathist state a totalitarian regime under
which the entire nation suffered? Or was it a
conspiracy of the Sunni minority against the Shiite
majority?
If Iraqis come to believe the former, argues Makiya,
it might still be possible for them to unify behind
a new national government. If Iraqis come to believe
the latter, the result could be ethnic civil war.
A complete trial of Saddam that showed the extent of
the corruption, forced collaboration, violence and
terror he imposed on the entire nation, might help
Iraqis understand that all of them - Shiite, Sunni,
Kurd - suffered in different ways.
If Makiya's views aren't convincing, listen to
Leszek Balcerowicz, who was the Polish finance
minister during his country's economic
transformation at the beginning of the 1990s.
Ruminating recently on the parallels between
post-communism and post-Baathism, Balcerowicz noted
that along with inflation and price controls, one of
the most serious obstacles to reform in Poland was
the information imbalance.
Because there was no free press before 1989, Poles
knew little about the real state of their country.
After 1989, there was a lot of free press, and it
was all negative. Fed on a diet of "isn't everything
terrible," many began to idealize the past and
reject the present. Something similar may be
happening in Iraq today. Increasingly, everything
that is wrong in Iraq, from the malfunctioning
infrastructure to the ethnic tensions, is blamed on
the U.S. occupation.
A wider debate about how Iraq got to where it is -
how Hussein mismanaged the country, murdered whole
villages and stole the nation's money - might help
persuade Iraqis to invest in the present.
http://www.philly.com
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