War crimes trials in Iraq, contd.

Today’s WaPo has a good piece by Rajiv Chandrasekaran that gives more information on the war-crimes court that the Iraqi Governing Council is setting up.
At some stage–and, I hope, soon!– the people of Iraq clearly need to find and adopt a workable way to deal with the multiple, very grievous harms inflicted on them during the 35 years of Saddamist rule. Trials of former perpetrators of genocide and crimes against humanity may be a part of that process. But I sincerely hope they are not the whole of it. (It is worth recalling, for example, the deep healing value of the amnesties that were at the heart of South Africa’s recent transition from authoritarian minority rule to full democracy…)
And in the mean-time, while we await an authentically and accountably Iraqi approach to dealing with the painful legacies of the saddamist past, we have the US occupation forces giving its creature, the IGC, the right to hold trials of accused Saddam-era rights abusers. Neither the US occupation force nor the IGC is, I should add, democratically accountable in any way to the Iraqi people.
This is pure John Locke!
I just went out and bust out my tattered copy of Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, and yes, there it is, Locke’s whole disquisition on how “the power to punish”, or as he calls it, “executive power”, lies at the heart of political power.

Locke was the famed 17th century British Enlightenment philosopher whom US conservative-libertarian thinkers regard as an icon. (He was also a shareholder in the infamous Royal Africa Corporation, whose main business was the transatlantic shipping and marketing of enslaved African persons. One of his sidelines was the writing of the Articles of Constitution of South Carolina which, by an amazing coincidence, enshrined the holding and trading of enslaved persons… )
So anyway, about today’s Iraq… The CPA is evidently propceeding on the basis of the Lockean notion that whoever gets to punish the malefactors of the past will thereby gain political legitimacy– inside Iraq and perhaps, too, internationally.
It’s not a stupid notion. Nearly everybody–except a few diehard Buddhists and quirky Quaker pacifists like myself–wants at some level to see Saddam and his hench-people punished. (For myself, I certainly want to see them totally incapacitated from being able to stage any comeback of their repressive, atrocity-laden form of rule, and preferably also rehabilitated into being productive members of society.) The IGC could thus reasonably be expected to gain in approval and perhaps legitimacy if it is seen as doing an acceptable job of trying and punishing the Saddamists.
No doubt that was a big part of the intent of the CPA when it decided to hand this “power to punish” over to the IGC. Never mind that the IGC has almost zero effective powers to do anything else useful in Iraqi society– maybe staging these new trials could win its people some bonus points from the country’s potential voters…
Another interesting question arises, however. According to Sy Hersh’s piece, as described here yesterday, the US military in Baghdad seems to have exercized the right to try to “turn” and put on its own payroll some leading members of the saddamist Mukhabarat… Presumably, that offer to farouq Hijazi and others reportedly turned must have come with some offer of amnesty from prosecution… Indeed, maybe it was only by having a credible threat of prosecution in place in the first place that they were able to “convince” Hijazi and others to start working for the Americans? I’m thinking Admiral Canaris here…
So it seems that although the IGC will be allowed to stage trials of some nature– according to the AP announcement today they’ve already fitted out a courtroom for the job!–the US military will still have a commanding hand in deciding who may be plucked off the docket and taken into its own very special “Protection Program”?? How much will moves like this do for the IGC’s desperate search to be taken seriously as an authentically “Iraqi” body?
As Chandrasekaran writes in today’s WaPo:

A senior U.S. official in Washington said the Bush administration intended to deliver Iraqi suspects to the Iraqi courts for trial, although U.S. authorities may retain physical control over some to prevent escape attempts… ”

Don’t you love that: to prevent escape attempts? So that’s why Farouq Hijazi will not, presumably, be handed over to the new court??
Chandra identified Salim Chalabi, nephew of you-know-who, as “a key architect” of the planned tribunal. Well, I know a person should not be judged according to her or his relative’s misdeeds… But still, I do recall a few previous news stories that did not reflect well on the integrity of the younger Mr. C, himself.
The occupation forces currently admit to holding around 5,000 Iraqi detainees. (No doubt the number is rising rapidly even as I write.) Only 38 of these are members of the 55-person Saddamist leadership whose faces were printed on the infamous deck of cards.
There are quite understandable concerns about the conditions in which ALL these detainees are held. Under the Fourth Geneva Convention there are fairly strict regulations about the kinds of detentions that an occupying force may undertake of members of the civilian population of the territory occupied. One of the important protections afforded such detainees under Geneva 4 is that the International Committee of the Red Cross should have timely access to them.
But the ICRC’s international “delegates”, who normally carry out this function, were all withdrawn after the terrible bombing of their headquarters in October.
Meanwhile, back on September 1, the IGC created an interim government that included a “Minister of Human Rights”. This person is Abdel-Basit Turki, a Sunni. A couple of weeks ago he gave an interview to the UN newswire IRIN in which he noted that:

There’s a rumour that there have been human rights violations against the detainees… In the last few months, there was only one channel to meet the detainees, and that was through the Red Cross. Since they left, I asked to meet with the detainees. This is an important issue of my ministry, but it will also present a good image to the population. I hope this will have a positive response from Mr Bremer. I’m supposed to find out soon.

He also said:

There are two kinds of detainees — one kind is impossible to reach, because they are [on] the ‘List of 55’ [created by US troops and put on playing cards] or are on a blacklist. We don’t know how many of them there are, but we think there are roughly 300 people in this group.
The second type of detainees are people taken to jail since the situation has not settled down. There are about 5,000, according to a list from the Coalition Provisional Authority. We found out this information from asking the Coalition Provisional Authority.

So, it all seems fairly complicated. You have one “ministry” in the IGC-created “government” that is watching out for the human rights of the current generation of detainees, and another IGC body– the new court– that will be seeking to organize trials and punishments for the perpetrators of the previous era of rights abuses… I wonder if and how they get together and talk to each other?
I wonder how the current human rights of the people of Iraq can be assured in a situation of military occupation by a foreign power?
This is a particular challenge given the ICRC’s decision to pull out its Delegates. In numerous other trouble spots around the world, the regular visits that the ICRC makes to prisons are an important means of protecting prisoners’ rights…
By the way, this piece is a follow-up to a post I put up on JWN on this same issue yesterday– and also to a couple of columns I wrote on this topic in Al-Hayat in recent weeks.
I need to talk to my editors at Hayat about giving them a fixed term for the rights they have to my columns. And then, once that is up, I could post the English-language texts up here. (I have that kind of an arrangement with the CSM. There, the term is 3 months.)