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A regrettable rush to execution
3.1.2007
By Peter W. Galbraith |
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January 3, 2007
In his final minutes, one of Saddam Hussein's
executioners shouted, "Go to hell, Saddam." The
condemned man replied dryly, "You mean the Iraq that
is today." After his body dropped through the trap
door, the assembled witnesses chanted Shi'ite
slogans.
It was Saddam that turned Iraq into hell during his
35 years in power. He murdered as many as half a
million Iraqis and plunged his country into two
catastrophic wars with neighboring Iran and Kuwait.
But Saddam was not executed for any of this.
Instead, he was hanged for ordering the killing of
148 Shi'ite men and boys in the village of Dujail in
reprisal for an assassination attempt that took
place there in July 1982. While the trial was
criticized by human rights groups, the verdict was
consistent with the evidence. Saddam's signature was
on the order for the execution and he freely
admitted that he had signed the document. His
explanation -- that the killings were justified
since the would-be killers were linked to the
Iranian-backed Dawa Party and Iraq was then at war
with Iran -- was no defense. Reprisal killings of
innocent people are by definition a crime against
humanity. |
Former U.S. State Department Official,
Peter Galbraith.
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The manner of Saddam's execution made it clear that
Iraq's Shi'ite leaders -- and in particular Prime
Minister Nouri al-Maliki -- were more interested in
revenge than justice. Al-Maliki, a Dawa Party
leader, signed the death warrant in apparent
disregard of Article 70 of the Iraqi Constitution
that gives Iraq's president and two vice presidents
the responsibility for ratifying death sentences.
Saddam's execution meant there would be no
accounting for his other crimes: the destruction of
the marshes and the Marsh Arabs in the 1990s, the
murder of tens of thousands of Shi'ites in the
aftermath of the 1991 uprising, the killing of 8,000
members of the Barzani clan in 1983, the 1990
invasion of Kuwait, and the murder of tens of
thousands in various purges over his decades in
power.
Obviously, it was never practical to try Saddam
Hussein for every crime he committed. But the rush
to execution actually interrupted Saddam's ongoing
trial on genocide charges in connection with the
1987-1988 "anfal" campaign against Iraq's Kurdish
minority. That trial was scheduled to resume Jan. 8
and would have concluded in a matter of months.
The Kurdish genocide was the gravest -- and by far
the best documented -- of Saddam's crimes. I
stumbled across its beginning in September 1987
when, as a staff member for the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, I got permission to visit
Kurdistan. When Haywood Rankin from the US embassy
in Baghdad and I crossed from Arab to Kurdish
territory, we were amazed that places shown on our
maps no longer existed. Later, we came across
deserted towns with bulldozers parked next to
partially destroyed houses and realized what was
happening. By 1990, Saddam had destroyed 4,500 of
Iraq's 5,000 villages. He also used chemical weapons
to attack at least 200 villages and towns. In
September 1988, I led a mission with Chris Van
Hollen (now a Maryland congressman) to document a
series of bombings on 48 villages that took place
days after the end of the Iran-Iraq war.
Sixty-five-thousand survivors made it to Turkey and
the ones we interviewed provided graphic -- and
totally believable -- accounts of what they
experienced.
The rubble of destroyed villages combined with
eyewitness accounts made for a compelling case. But,
Saddam's killers -- bureaucrats that they were --
kept detailed paper records of their work, along
with videotapes of executions and torture sessions.
The Kurds captured these records during the 1991
uprising that followed the first Gulf War, and a few
months later Jalal Talabani (now Iraq's president)
gave me custody of 14 tons of
documents that eventually went to the National
Archives. Supported by a congressional
appropriation, Human Rights Watch used the documents
to demonstrate that Saddam had committed genocide
and thus helped lay the foundation for the case that
was eventually brought.
The Kurdish trial also promised to shed light on a
deeply amoral period in western diplomacy where the
major powers, including the United States, chose to
overlook genocide for strategic and economic
reasons. According to his former foreign minister,
Tariq Azziz, Saddam apparently intended to make an
issue of western support in his trial. This could
also have been awkward for some in the current
administration. While serving in the Reagan or Bush
administrations, some of the principals of the
current war -- including Donald Rumsfeld and Colin
Powell --played down the significance of Iraq's use
of poison gas, including, in the case of Powell,
against the Kurds. And months after the 1988 gas
attacks on the Kurds, the current president's father
-- with the apparent support of his defense
secretary, Richard Cheney -- doubled US financial
assistance to Iraq.
An extension of Saddam's life for the few months
would have made little difference to his eventual
fate. But it would have made an enormous difference
to have had an irrefutable record that Saddam was
responsible for the genocide against the Kurds. As
it is, the door is open to a future leader in
Baghdad asserting it was never proven. Saddam's
trials could have served as the basis for truth and
reconciliation, as similar processes have done in so
many other countries. Instead, the hanging will
further divide Iraqis, and not just the Sunnis whose
protests were predictable. Only President Bush, who
still sees al-Maliki as a genuine national leader,
could believe Saddam's execution, as it was carried
out, to be a milestone on Iraq's path to democracy.
Saddam got the justice he so deserved. The rush to
execution by Iraq's revenge-driven sectarian
government denied the same to all but the tiniest
fraction of his victims.
boston com
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