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ELEANOR HALL: To
Iraq now where later this month Saddam Hussein's
deputy, Tariq Aziz will become one of the first
members of the former Iraqi dictatorship to face
trial.
As Saddam Hussein's voice and propagandist in the
outside world, the former deputy prime minister and
foreign minister was one of the most widely
recognised faces of the dictatorship.
Now he's facing charges of genocide.
Here's a part of what his lawyer told Mark Willacy
on AM this morning about the trial.
(sound of Badir Ezat speaking)
MARK WILLACY: "These charges are very ironic," says
Badir Ezat.
"For example, they have charged Tariq Aziz with the
gassing of the Kurds in Halabja in the late '80s. He
had nothing to do with that. In fact, Tariq Aziz
laughed when I told him about that charge."
ELEANOR HALL: Well, one man who doesn't think
the charges are a laughing matter is Iraq's Interim
Minister for Human Rights, Bakhtiar Amin, who is
himself a Kurd.
He told our Foreign Affairs Editor Peter Cave that
Tariq Aziz must answer for millions of deaths, and
for his part in colluding with corrupt United
Nations officials to use the Oil-for-Food program to
spread international terrorism.
BAKHTIAR AMIN:
It's first of all difficult to give you an exact
figure, but it's in millions. At least half a
million Kurds who are perished, a quarter of million
of people exposed to chem-bio of Saddam, in 281
locations – among them 250 villages, 31 mountain
tops and valleys, and the town of Halabja where
5,000 people, within minutes, were killed and 20,000
wounded.
And we have hundreds of thousands of Shia from the
uprising and we have all segments of the society who
have victims – Christians, Assyrians, Chaldeans,
Syriacs, Turkumen. We have Sunnis; we have Midian,
Sabiya communities – every single community has
suffered, so it's by million.
PETER CAVE: Tell
me, how important is it for those people – the
people who carried out these atrocities – are
tracked down and prosecuted?
BAKHTIAR AMIN:
Well, to heal the wounds of this society, it's
essential that justice is done, and to avoid
vendetta and a continuous cycle of violence, justice
is primordial in the reconstruction of this country.
So justice comes first, but we have to have a
program for reconciliation and national dialogue in
this country. We need to look at models of South
Africa, Guatemala, Chile, and elsewhere, to create a
truth and reconciliation commission. And every
country has its own specificity, but we can learn
from others' experiences. The Iraqi context needs a
truth and reconciliation commission and I hope that
this new government – the elected government – will
establish such a mechanism.
PETER CAVE:
Would you draw a line between Saddam Hussein and
members of his cabinet like Tariq Aziz, who is
supposed to be tried later this month?
BAKHTIAR AMIN:
Tariq Aziz was a senior member of former Iraqi
government, and he was a member of the revolutionary
command council, besides being a deputy prime
minister. He took part of the decisions of the
revolutionary command council on national security
issues and strategic issues – wars and genocide in
this country.
And he was also a part of this concealing and
cheating policy during the Oil-for-Food program and
inspections on weapons of mass destruction.
And I have a personal experience with Tariq Aziz,
which is that my father-in-law was assassinated in
Beirut in 1994. And they killed him with a silenced
gun, and as a reward, Tariq Aziz rewarded him by
seven million barrels of oil. So this is an example
of how Oil-for-Food program was used for
international terrorism. And to gun down opponents
of the Iraqi regime, and that program – supposed to
be monitored by the UN, and they were paid for that.
This is not an accusation of all UN – there are many
decent people within the UN that I respect highly.
But there are so-called dignitaries and bad apples
in this organisation who benefited from the misery
of an impoverished nation while they were shedding
crocodile tears for the Iraqi children.
And they lived as parasites on the Iraqi childrens
and the Iraqi people's misery and they stole the
bread of Iraqi children whose loved ones are in mass
graves.
ELEANOR HALL: Iraq's Interim Minister for
Human Rights, Bakhtiar Amin speaking to our Foreign
Affairs Editor, Peter Cave, in Baghdad.
http://www.abc.net.au
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