|
December 31, 2006
Washington, - MY personal battle with Saddam
Hussein — which began in 1972 when I abandoned my
medical career in Mosul, Iraq, and joined the
Kurdish armed resistance — is at an end. To execute
such a criminal, a man who reveled in his
atrocities, is an act of justice.
The only issue for me is the timing —
executing him now is
both too late and too early. Too late, because had
Saddam Hussein been removed from the scene many
years ago, many lives would have been saved.
Killing Saddam now, however, for ordering the
massacre at Dujail in 1982, means that he will not
face justice for his greatest crimes: the so-called
Anfal campaign against the Kurds in the late 1980s,
the genocidal assault on the Marsh Arabs in the
1990s, and the slaughtering of the Shiite Arabs and
Kurds who rose up against him, with American
encouragement, in 1991.
The sight of a tyrant held to account, if only
briefly, has been an important precedent for the
Middle East. The shabby diplomacy that has allowed
dictators to thrive is now discredited.
Sadly, however, we have not had full justice. Saddam
Hussein did not confront the full horror of his
crimes. Building on previous initiatives by Arab
nationalist governments to persecute the Kurds, he
turned ethnic engineering and murder into an
industry in the 1970s. Hundreds of thousands were
evicted from their homes and murdered. Swaths of
Kurdish countryside were emptied of their
population, men, women and children taken to shallow
graves and shot.
Initially, the United States backed those of us who
took to the hills to save our lives and freedom, but
in 1975 (and here is an irony) Gerald Ford agreed to
stop financing us in order to settle a border
dispute between Iraq and Iran. As so many times
since, human rights were no match for a desire to
keep the oil flowing.
During the 1980s, entire towns, including Qala Diza
in Iraqi Kurdistan and Qasr-i-Shirin in neighboring
Iranian Kurdistan, were destroyed. To ensure that
survivors would never return to their homes, the
mountains were laced with land mines. The widows and
children were detained in settlements lacking fresh
water and sewage disposal; these were called
“mujammat” in Arabic, which translates, with all the
dreadful implications, as “concentration areas.”
While I escaped to America, my family was not so
lucky. My brother-in-law and nephew were summarily
executed. They never had anything remotely
approaching a fair trial, never got to write a will,
never got to say goodbye to my sister.
Saddam Hussein’s trial shed new light on these
tragic years. Documents came to light revealing that
his regime coordinated with Turkey in its efforts to
isolate Kurdish villages in 1988, in which he used
chemical weapons. This should lead to some important
soul searching in Turkey.
But the failure to put Saddam Hussein on trial for
the Anfal offensive itself will cheat us of learning
the full details — of investigating whether the
Turks suppressed evidence of Iraq’s use of chemical
weapons by preventing foreign doctors from seeing
Kurdish refugees; of knowing the extent to which
Saudi Arabia and Egypt may have aided Saddam
Hussein’s weapons production.
Kurds aren’t the only ones who will be cheated out
of full reckoning. In 1991, as we all know, the
retreating Iraqi army massacred Shiite Arabs as well
as Kurds who had heeded President George H. W.
Bush’s call to overthrow the Baathist regime.
According to the 2004 report of the Iraq Survey
Group, the dictator used chemical weapons against
Shiite Arab civilians in 1991. Without putting
Saddam Hussein on trial for these offenses, or for
his campaigns against the Marsh Arabs of the south,
will we ever know what really happened?
For all the mistakes that the United States has made
in Iraq — and I feel the betrayal of 1975 was the
worst — I am a proud (naturalized) American because
this country brought the murderous despot to trial.
Still, it is a great shame that he will not be held
accountable for all of his crimes, and a far greater
tragedy that he was allowed, sometimes with American
complicity, to commit them in the first place.
Najmaldin Karim, a neurosurgeon, is the president
of the
Washington Kurdish Institute.
nytimes com
Top |
® 