The US occupation forces’ much-hyped effort to put Saddam Hussein and his henchmen on trial in Iraq is now in complete shambles.
On January 15, the former Chief Judge, Rizgar Amin, resigned from his job after complaining of political interference from the Iraqi government, which has been described by the the powerful and shadowy US government body that created the “Iraqi Special Tribunal” as being “in charge” of the proceedings.
Some body– unclear exactly which– then proposed Amin’s deputy, Saeed al-Hammashi to succeed him. But the Iraqi government’s “Debaathification Commission” then accused Hammashi of having been a Baathist. He was taken out of the running and the job was given to Judge Raouf Rasheed Abdel-Rahman, who opened today’s resumtpion of the proceedings…
Which almost immediately degenerated into chaos.
According to that account, by the Daily Telegraph’s Oliver Poole,
- The new chief judge … helplessly banged his gavel yesterday as a defendant was dragged from court, the defence team left in protest and Saddam walked out shouting: “Down with traitors.”
…Mr Abdel-Rahman opened proceedings with the clear intention of stopping more outbursts from Saddam and his henchmen. Political speeches would not be allowed, he said.
“If any defendant crosses the lines he will be taken out of the room and his trial will be carried out without him.”
Within minutes, his strictures resulted in the departure of half of the defendants and all defence lawyers. Barzan Ibrahim Hassan al-Tikriti, Saddam’s half brother and the former head of intelligence, ended a lengthy statement about his health by calling the court “the daughter of a whore”.
When he refused to leave, two guards grabbed him and the three men started pushing and shoving. Still fighting and egged on by Saddam, who was shouting “Long live Iraq” and waving his fist, al-Tikriti was then dragged from the room.
That led to further scenes as the defence team protested at what it called his mistreatment.
Mr Abdel-Rahman ordered one lawyer to be evicted after he refused to stop shouting complaints. The rest of the defence team walked out in protest despite warnings from the bench that “any lawyer who walks out will not be allowed back into this courtroom”.
After lawyers appointed by the court arrived in their place, Saddam refused to accept them, saying that he had the right to leave if he did not recognise his legal representatives. As he stood up, a guard pushed him back into his chair.
“You do not leave; I allow you to leave when I want to,” Mr Abdel-Rahman said, before ordering his removal.
Saddam, by now in control of proceedings, replied: “I led you for 35 years and you order me out of this court?” He then left, accompanied by two guards and followed by two other defendants who had refused to accept their new lawyers.
The session increased doubts that the trial can afford the defendants a fair hearing.
In the absence of Saddam Hussein and his chosen legal team, Abdel-Rahman continued with the trial, bringing in more prosecution witnesses, who were questioned by the prosecution attorneys for three hours.
Miranda Sissons, who has been observing the trial on behalf of the International Center for Transitional Justice, noted the passivity of the court-appointed “defense lawyers” during those appearances. She told the NYT’s Robert Worth that, “They said nothing during three hours of testimony this afternoon, even as prosecutors and the judge peppered the witnesses with questions about accusations of torture and executions ordered by Mr. Hussein and his lieutenants.”
In a press release issued January 27, Human Rights Watch had warned about the risks of the bench and the entire trial becoming politicized. The organization’s Richard Dicker went memorably on the record there saying,
- “The removal of Judge al-Hammashi from the trial created the appearance of a court that is continually subjected to political interference… Sitting judges cannot be shuffled around as though they were deck chairs on the Titanic.”
H’mm, an interesting analogy don’t you think? I mean, if we are really talking about the trial as the Titanic, then it doesn’t make any difference if the deck-chairs get rearranged or not, does it?
Here, anyway, are links to two JWN posts I put up about the trial back on December 22: Saddam trial: Iran’s opening bid … and Legality and the Saddam trial.
Here is a fairly lengthy coment I left over at the “Grotian Moment” blog a couple of days ago. It’s about the unavoidable influence that politics inevitably has on the conduct of the trial.
Actually, the inevitability of the “politicization” of transitional justice efforts, in any situation of deep political transition, is a major theme of much of my recent work on transitional justice. Too many lawyers (especially lawyers growing up in the insulated bubble of the US) think that somehow– poof!– a few high-level prosecutions can suddenly make everything right in the world, even after episodes of truly atrocious violence and in deeply traumatized societies struggling to escape from very violent inter-group conflict…
But they can’t…
That’s why I’m glad that the government of East Timor has decided not to seek proscutions of Indonesians or others responsible for the terrible suffering inflicted on their people during their 27 years of being under military occupation by Indonesia– as I wrote about here.
And now, the Saddam trial is collapsing into shambles…
Well, a part of me would have loved to see a decent, thorough-going trial of the man and of all those who enabled and connived in his war-crimes and crimes against humanity. (Which would include, in at least an “accessory” role, people like Donald Rumsfeld and other US enablers.) It would be great to have had all Saddam’s misdeeds brought together and made public in an incontrovertible historical record, and to see the forces of Baathist authoritarianism incapacitated forever.
Both those things may yet happen. But I very much doubt that this embarrassing farce of an “Iraqi Special Tribunal” will be the vehicle through which they happen. Actually, at this point, I strongly doubt they will ever happen at all.
And meantime, one of the chief things we see happening with this “Special Tribunal” is the continued politicization of the justice system inside the “new” Iraq.
Well, let’s see now. The latest judge is:
1. A Kurd.
2. From Halabja.
3. An alleged former Saddam regime torture victim.
4. Approved by those who are actually running the “trial” (i.e. the occupying power).
5. Truly impartial – of course!
Not that anyone questions the guilt of the accused, but COME ON!
Oh yeah – the propagandists have dubbed him with the utterly silly title “The Sword of Justice”.
GIVE ME A BREAK! How can ANYONE pretend to take this farce seriously?
Iraqi Bleeding.
More five Academics PhD killed in Baghdad in last days, the last one of my friend I know him Dr Hilal Albyati he is miraculously escape the shooting that killed most of his grads.
What a loose those who build Iraq and those future of Iraq by them Iraq can continue to be the only state that knew to use its petromoney to built brighter life of the nations.
To those who collecting books for Iraqi it’s not about book or Building the enemy have a goal to destroy State of Iraq…
Who cars about dictators his stupidly brings the disastrous to my nation and my home country let him go to hill.
Iraqi Bleeding.
More five Academics PhD killed in Baghdad in last days, the last one of my friend I know him Dr Hilal Albyati he is miraculously escape the shooting that killed most of his grads.
What a loose those who build Iraq and those future of Iraq by them Iraq can continue to be the only state that knew to use its petromoney to built brighter life of the nations.
To those who collecting books for Iraqi it’s not about book or Building the enemy have a goal to destroy State of Iraq…
Who cars about dictators his stupidly brings the disastrous to my nation and my home country let him go to hill.
Hmmm… I don’t think anyone really cares for Saddam’s sake that the trial is “fair” or not. But it should LOOK fair to score political points (!) in Iraq, and — more important to the powers that be — abroad. Also, I guess there’s some sort of moral imperative lurking in the background for the benefit of other like trials in the future.
Somehow, though, I can’t get outraged at the failure of a political ploy to not look like a political ploy.
Personally, I’m not outraged but I’m saddened…. Everything COULD have been handled so much better since the beginning of the occupation, including both the much broader tasks of political and social reconstruction, and this trial.
Perhaps it’s true to conclude that– given the circumstances and nature of the original assault upon Iraq in March 2003– it was truly hopeless to ever have hoped that anything less than a complete human disaster could ever have been salvaged from it… but back then (as always) I was unwilling to give up all hope.
As it is now, the debacle of the Saddam trial constitutes a huge setback to both: (a) hopes for the institution of a robust rule-of-law regime inside Iraq and (b) hopes for progress toward an accountable rule-of-law regime globally…
But actually, I wonder, does it form a setback in the latter domain? If the US invasion of Iraq– which was massively violative of any concept of the “rule of law” at the international level– had been able to provide something like a legitimate trial of Saddam Hussein, would that have “muddied the waters” and made the illegal and violative nature of the invasion less clear for all to see?
I also have very grave doubts indeed about the whole of the recent enthusiasm for using war-crimes trials to held “end” deeply rooted conflicts. (In most cases, they don’t. They only perpetuate inter-group polarities– in rwanda, former Yugoslavia, or Iraq… ) from this point of view, I think we have to start seeing the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials as “exceptions”, which “worked” only because they were embedded within much broader projects of political and social reconstruction of those two occupied and defeated countries.
If you don’t have the working broader poroject of social and political reconstruction, no kind of a “trial” process can save the situation…
I guess I need to lay these thoughts out better in a main post sometime soon.
New evidence demonstrated in 2005 that torture and mistreatment have been a deliberate part of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism strategy, undermining the global defense of human rights, Human Rights Watch said today in releasing its World Report 2006 World Report 2006.
http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/01/13/global12428.htm
“everything COULD have been handled so much better since the beginning of the occupation”
Helena, with all respect, they could not have. The invasion and occupation of Iraq were utterly wrong actions from every possible viewpoint and in every possible sense of the word. It is impossible to do a thoroughly wrong thing in the right way.
“I also have very grave doubts indeed about the whole of the recent enthusiasm for using war-crimes trials to held “end” deeply rooted conflicts. (In most cases, they don’t. They only perpetuate inter-group polarities– in rwanda, former Yugoslavia, or Iraq… )”
Helena, you appear more and more to be buying into the myth of Iraq as a country of “deeply rooted, centuries-old inter-group conflict” that was “held together only by the power of a dictator” and bound to break out into civil war in the absence of a strong, uniting hand. It is simply no such thing. Iraq is not and never was in any way equivalent to Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia in that respect. The current state of conflict between Sunnis, Shi’as and Kurds (surprise, surprise – the very three groups consistently identified by the Bush regime’s so-called “experts”) is a direct result of the U.S. invasion and occupation of the country. It is the result – intention or inadvertent – of U.S. manipulation, exacerbated by opportunists (e.g. the Kurdish mafiocracy leaders, the Iranian-based Shi`a leaders) and outside Shi`a and Sunni extremists. It was by no means inevitable, and the best – indeed the only – hope of reversing it is to remove the U.S. presence and other foreign influences allowing Iraqis to work things out among themselves.
“Somehow, though, I can’t get outraged at the failure of a political ploy to not look like a political ploy.”
What is outrageous is not that a political ploy looks just like what it is. What is outrageous is that this trial is not being treated by those in power as something serious, but as a way to score political points.
“I don’t think anyone really cares for Saddam’s sake that the trial is “fair” or not.”
I care deeply that the trial is legitimate and fair and legal in every way. I don’t care about this for Saddam’s sake at all. I care about this because human rights are universal and human rights demand it. I care also because it is the right of the Iraqi people to see Saddam and the other Iraqi criminals prosecuted for their crimes.
By the way, in addition to the criminals of Saddam’s regime, there are plenty of other Iraqi criminals who should be prosecuted for their crimes, such as the criminals of the two Kurdish mafiocracies and in fact much of the rest of the current “leadership” of The New Iraq™.
Salah and Shirin, great contributions, thanks.
Shirin: The invasion and occupation of Iraq were utterly wrong actions from every possible viewpoint and in every possible sense of the word. It is impossible to do a thoroughly wrong thing in the right way. … I guess the evidence in favor of your view is pretty strong in the present case, yes! However, a big part of my commitment as a person and a Quaker is to maintain that however bad things are in inter-human relations, actual humans still have decision-making power that can, okay, not undo the wrong that’s been done, but at least help to make things better from there on out.
That’s why, even though I opposed the decision to invade Iraq in every way that i could, once the invasion had ben undertaken I worked on trying to point out decisions that could be taken by all sides to avert additional and even worse disasters. And I still think it’s important to go back and identify those decision points– both before and after the invasion– and say, look, the Bushies could have done X at point Y, or done A at point B– but they chose not to. To me, in a sense that makes the indictment against them even stronger– especially if we (or I) pointed out the possibilities of those better decisions along the way and they chose to ignore my advice.
In a sense, it’s too “easy” just to say “the invasion was a great evil and therefore everything connected with it and flowing from it is evil too.” In a sense, that lets them off the hook for what is actually a whole very long string of disastrous and/or malevolent decisions.
Also re the “deeply rooted conflicts” Maybe that was the wrong term to choose. I should tell you the widely peddled picture of the inter-group hatred in former Yugoslavia is also an overwhlemingly mistaken and Robert Kaplan-fed myth… And in Rwanda, the Hutu-Tutsi division was hardened and ruthlessly manipulated by the Belgians… So the three cases are not as dissimilar as you imply. But that the Sunni-Shiite divide is currently intense– and of course is further exacerbated by this trial– seems to me incontestable.
This just fresh thing I had heard it from a western guy today while I was shopping.
First he never mentioned any thing to me while discussing a bout a new fridge to my house, after 1/2 hour, he asked me are you Turkish! I replied no I am Iraqi.
He went silent, joining my discussing which one we can choose; suddenly he said I have my two families in Iraq working there.
So the talk opened and then he told us that two of his brothers in Iraq working with the security forces, their families in Dubai after they purchased two properties there.
He told us they got a good paid job there, they paid in full their mortgagee for their properties here “home country” they speak fluent Arabic, they had good relation with local Iraqis because there are not “white skin” that which I believe they survive from any troubles there, also their kids speak Arabic.
The main thing from this story I would like to share with you it’s a fact most Iraqi I believe agrees of it.
His brothers told them that if the Americans leave Iraq now and repair all the damage done to the country by them, it will be the most beautiful and better place!!!!!