Author: Helena

War crimes trials: procedures or politics?

The war-crimes trial of Saddam Hussein and seven other co-defendants
opened briefly today
(see also
here
), and was adjourned after just 2 hours and 11 minutes of court time. They
are charged with the murder of 143 men and boys in Dujail in 1982, and also
with forced expulsions and illegal imprisonment, in connection (I believe)
with that same incident.

Much of the commentary in the western media has focused on details of the
procedures that the Iraqi Special tribunal (IST) is using as it conducts
these trials, with Human Rights Watch and other rights groups
focusing
on the distinct lack of due-process protections afforded to the defendants,
as well as on other flaws in IST procedures.  The big fear that such
groups express is that the work of the IST will prove to be only “victors’
justice”.

But I would contend that there are different kinds of “victors’ justice”,
and not all of them are bad (though probably, the vast majority of them are.)

The WaPo’s Anne Applebaum seems to share my feelings on this score.  She
has
a piece
in today’s paper in which– as I have done previously– she notes that the
procedures used at the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1945-46 were also, from the
due-process point of view, extremely flawed. And yet, she and I join with
the rest of the present international consensus in judging that all-in-all,
the Nuremberg Trials were very successful indeed.  How can we do this,
despite our judgment of the deeply flawed nature of the procedures used there
(and ideed, also, the extremely biased nature of the Statute of the court
itself)?

I think that Applebaum and I justify our arguments about the over-all success
of Nuremberg in slightly different terms, because we are looking at slightly
different things.

She writes:

Nuremberg was, in retrospect, a huge success, and as the trial
of Saddam Hussein begins today in Baghdad, it is worth remembering why. If
it achieved nothing else, Nuremberg laid out for the German people, and for
the world, the true nature of the Nazi system. Auschwitz survivors and SS
officers presented testimony. Senior Nazis were subjected to cross-examination.
The prosecutors produced documents, newsreels of liberated concentration
camps and films of atrocities made by the Nazis themselves. There were hangings
at the end, as well as acquittals. But it mattered more that the story of
the Third Reich had been told, memorably and eloquently.

Regarding Saddam’s trial, she uses a similar metric of “truth-establishment”:

In the end, it is by the quality of that evidence, and the clarity
with which it is conveyed, that this trial should be judged. The result is
irrelevant: Quite frankly, it doesn’t matter whether Saddam Hussein is drawn
and quartered, exiled to Pyongyang, or left to rot in a Baghdad prison. No
punishment could make up for the thousands he killed, or for the terror he
inflicted on his country.

But if his Sunni countrymen learn what he did to Shiites and Kurds,
if the Shiites and Kurds learn what he did to Sunnis, if Iraqis come to realize
that his system of totalitarian terror damaged them all, and if others in
the Middle East learn that dictatorships can be overthrown, then the trial
will have served its purpose. That, and not an arbitrary standard of international
law, is how the success of this unusual tribunal should be measured.

I agree with Applebaum that the greatest contribution that Nuremberg
made to the consolidation of democratic practice in  Germany was its
establishment of a nearly incontrovertible record of exactly what the Nazi
regime did to Germans and others during its 12 years in power.  But
I think it is also very important to take into account– which she doesn’t–
the time-frame over which this record came to be important to Germans
.  A few years ago, intrigued by this question I started interviewing
a few experts in that period of German history to find out their views of
exactly how it was that the records established at Nuremberg came to play
such a strong, constructive (and, I would hope, lasting) role in the “re-education”
of the German citizenry.  And these experts, who included both Germans
and Americans, were unanimous in noting that the record of Nazi misdeeds
compiled and archived by the Nuremberg court did not become important
to Germans themselves until the early 1960s…

Continue reading “War crimes trials: procedures or politics?”

Bush and Rice “call” the Iraqi referendum

So here’s what’s happened so far today re the Iraqi constitutional referendum:

    1. At or before 2 p.m. today London time (9 a.m. US Eastern Time) — a bare 18 hours or so after the polls had closed in Iraq– Condoleezza Rice was able, miraculously, to “call” the results in London. What an amazingly talented woman! To think that she could coordinate the collection, counting, verifying, and announcing of the results of a poll involving so many millions of far-flung voters, in such a short space of time! What a testimony to this woman’s truly extraordinary powers!!! (Heavy irony alert.)
    (By the way, did I mention that Rice told the breathlessly waiting world that the draft constitution has “probably passed”?)
    2. U.N. elections chief Carina Perelli (who by the way is in all kinds of her own professional trouble over there at the UN, and who is thus in a fairly weak position in global politics) “stressed that final results were still days away and any early estimates were “impressionistic”. And–
    3. President Bush hailed the vote as a victory for “opponents of terrorism”: “The vote today in Iraq is in stark contrast to the attitude, the philosophy and strategy of al-Qaida, their terrorist friends and killers,” Bush said.

As we should all know by now, in order to defeat the draft constitution, its opponents needed two-thirds of the voters in at least three of Iraq’s 18 provinces to vote “No.”
The “announcements” by Rice–and before her, Amb. Khalilzad and Iraqi transitional Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari– that hailed the defeat of the No vote apparently conceded that the No-voters had won the required vote in Al-Anbar and Salah ad-Din provinces. But they “believed”(Rice) or “guessed” (Zebari) that the No campaign had failed to win that threshhold anywhere else, including in Ninawa, which had been thought of as the site of a possible/probable No victory.
Oh but wait, here’s another part of that AP report from Baghdad (dateline around 2 p.m. Sunday, US Eastern Time):

    … Some ballot boxes were still making their way to counting centers in the provinces. Provincial election workers were adding up the paper ballots, which will be sent to the counting center in Baghdad’s Green Zone for another check to reach the final, certified result.

So all that business about “guessing” and “believeing” that there’s a victory for the Yesses is based on– ? Just about nothing, if they haven’t even finished hauling all the ballot boxes in for the counting of the paper ballots yet, right?
Small surprise, therefore, that AP’s Sameer Yacoub was also reporting this:

    Some Sunni Arab leaders of the “no” campaign decried the reported results and insisted their figures showed the constitution’s defeat, though they did not cite exact numbers. Some accused the United States of interfering in the results.
    “We are warning of acts of fraud. This might lead to civil disobedience if there is fraud,” said Saleh al-Mutlaq, head of the National Dialogue Council “We consider that Rice’s statement is pressure on the Independent Election Commission to pass the draft.”

It is, anyway, really outrageous that Rice and Bush should have hurried in so unseemly (and mendacious) a manner to be the the ones to “announce” the result of the referendum. It seems almost like they wanted large portions of the Sunni population to be angry both with them and with thosee Kurds and Shiites who will take everything they want from the new “constitution” and start running with it…

    Addendum, Sunday 4 p.m.: I just had time to give this latest analysis from Gilbert Achcar a quick read. It confirms what I wrote here and elsewhere last week about the effect of Kalilzad’s last-minute intervention having been to sow some confusion and dissension in Sunni ranks in Iraq.
    The latter third of Gilbert’s piece looks particularly interesting: It is his translation of “an analysis of the referendum in the Sunni provinces by an insider Sunni source, published on the evening of Saturday October 15 after the end of the vote.” This source, Mufakkirat al-Islam wrote:

      Sheikh Abdul-Sattar Muhammad, one of the imams and preachers of Fallujah, said that al-Qaida’s organization made a huge error in preventing the people by threats and intimidations to take part in the vote, adding that al-Qaida contributed with other groups to the marginalization of the Sunnis and their impotence in the face of Shiites, Kurds and secular parties… He said also that if al-Qaida’s elements had let the people vote, the constitution would have been rejected by 100% of Sunnis and would have been aborted, while it would have been proved that Sunnis are not a minority in Iraq…
      Whereas the Islamic Party has deliberately contributed in splitting the votes of the Sunnis in calling for a “yes” vote, Zarqawi has also given a gift to the occupation and the Safawi [a pejorative formula used in Sunni circles to designate the Shiites deemed to be “Iranian agents”] followers of Sistani by contributing unknowingly, through their threats to the voters, to the neutralization of the Sunni votes opposed to this constitution, under which the Iraqis may have to live miserably for a long period…
      The question now in Iraq is when will al-Qaida’s organization stop allowing the assassination of Muslims under various pretexts, after the murder of some Sunnis in Ramadi today because they took part in the vote, and, before that, the authorization to kill members of the Islamic Party. Before that also al-Qaida’s followers turned their weapons against members of other armed groups during the second siege of Fallujah under the pretext that they ought to accept Zarqawi’s leadership after Usama bin Laden’s appeal to this end. This attitude weakened the ranks of the resistance and allowed US occupation forces to execute their well-known offensive in the southern part of Fallujah…

    This is, it seems to me (HC), very revealing stuff. The people associated with Mufakkirat al-Islam are prepared to criticize Al-Qaeda even quite openly in this medium… If the Americans and their present Iraqi proteges had been prepared to engage a broader spectrum of Iraqi Sunnis in serious discussions about the governance of the country, then they might have had a good chance of increasing this rift between Sunni-Iraqi nationalists and the agents of Al-Qaeda. As it is, those nationalists whose views were represented by Mufakkirat al-Islam look as though the will continue to be opposed to the new order that they feel is being imposed on them…

Epistolary fraud? Almost certainly

Juan Cole’s explanation of why the “Zawahiri Letter” looks like a forgery is very convincing to me. (Al-Qaeda’s leadership itself has also claimed it is such.)
Juan argues that basic elements in the greetings, etc., used in the “Letter” indicate that:

    Most likely it is a black psy-ops operation of the US. But it could also come from Iran, since the mistakes are those a Shiite might make when pretending to be a Sunni. Or it could come from an Iraqi Shiite group attempting to manipulate the United States.

Hey, Juan, don’t forget the Brits! Remember that (1) Blair’s guys have a huge presence down there in the Shiite areas of southern Iraq, and (2) British rightwingers were the author of the infamous 1924 “Zinoviev Letter” which, by apparently associating Ramsey Macdonald’s Labour Party with the machinations of the Soviet Comintern, lost Labour the British General Election of that year.
The role the Zinoviev Letter played in that election has been extensively studied in Britain, including in recent years. Many Labour leaders thought the British intelligence services had been complicit in its production. But that Wikipedia entry states that a 1999 study by the British Foreign Office’s chief historian found that, intelligence responsibility for the letter was “inherently unlikely.”
The Wikipedia entry also noted that:

    Although much of its content otherwise persuasively echoes Comintern vocabulary, the letter contains errors (such as “Executive Committee, Third Communist International” – a nonsensical title) which led many even at the time to denounce it as a hoax.

Well, who knows who the true author is this time round, of what looks very likely to have been a Zinoviev-letter-type hoax– and also one released just before a key nationwide vote.
(Anyway, here’s another important question: Has anyone in the British media found out yet what those two SAS guys were actually doing when they were barrelling around Basra, heavily armed and dressed as Arabs, and they got arrested by the Iraqi police just over three weeks ago?)
On Tuesday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (that is, Negroponte) put the text of the “Zawahiri Letter” up on its website in both Arabic and English, accesible through a portal on which this statement is made:

    The United States Government has the highest confidence in the letter’s authenticity.

But it is not really the US government that needs to be “convinced” of the letter’s authenticity, is it?

Zbig

Zbigniew Brzezinski , writing in the Int’l Herald Tribune yesterday:

    during the last four years, the Bush team has thus been dangerously undercutting America’s seemingly secure perch on top of the global totem pole by transforming a manageable, though serious, challenge largely of regional origin into an international debacle.
    To be sure, since America is extraordinarily powerful and rich, it can afford, yet for a while, even a policy articulated with rhetorical excess and pursued with historical blindness. But in the process America is likely to become isolated in a hostile world, increasingly vulnerable to terrorist acts and less and less able to exercise a constructive global influence.
    Flaying away with a stick at a hornets’ nest while loudly proclaiming “I will stay the course” is an exercise in catastrophic leadership.
    But it need not be so. A real course correction is still possible, and it could start soon with a modest and common-sense initiative by the president to engage the Democratic congressional leadership in a serious effort to shape a bipartisan foreign policy for an increasingly divided and troubled nation.
    In a bipartisan setting, it would be easier not only to scale down the definition of success in Iraq but actually to get out – perhaps even as early as next year. And the sooner the United States leaves, the sooner the Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis will either reach a political arrangement on their own or some combination of them will forcibly prevail.
    With a foreign policy based on bipartisanship and with Iraq behind us, it would also be easier to shape a wider regional policy that constructively focuses on Iran and on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process while restoring the legitimacy of America’s global role.

Well, I’m not so happy about the possibility of just some of the domestic Iraqi groups “forcibly prevailing” over the others after a US withdrawal. (But remember the scale and lethality of the attempts to “forcibly prevail” that are being pursued in the country right now…) Otherwise, though, well said. I just wonder how many people in the Democratic Party leadership are listening.

Uganda etc on ‘Transitional Justice Forum’ blog

We have a terrific new contributor over at our Transitional Justice Forum blog. She’s called Joanna Quinn, and she’s written some really interesting things about transitional justice issues in Uganda and a bunch of other countries. (See here and here, for starters.)
At the second of those links, she and I have started having a pretty interesting discussion. Check it out. Indeed, we’d really love it if some of you could take the plunge over there and contribute a few comments or questions to our Comments boards.
Uganda is really, really interesting right now. Last week, the government claimed that the ICC had issued five or so indictments against members of the Lords Resistance Army (LRA), which has maintained a really vicious civil war in the north of the country for several years… But no word from the ICC directly on these indictments. Is the government jumping the gun? How will the ICC’s intervention (whatever it turns out to be… so far, they announced only a “judicial investigation” into the situation there) affect the politics of war and peace?
I want to say thanks to those of you who sent in suggestions re the new blog… I haven’t had time to implement them all yet, but fully intend to. Rome not built in a day, etc.
One thing we need more of over there is contributors and commenters who want to argue a fairly robust pro-prosecutions line… So far their voice is very under-represented at TJF, and we definitely want to have them there. Do any of you folks from here want to do that, or do you have friends you might tell about TJF who might want to do it? (Or, tell me about them and I’ll invite them along.)

Sunni dissension, Iraq

According to both Al-Hayat and the BBC, Ayatollah Sistani has now (through his aides) called on Iraqi Shias to vote “Yes” in Saturday’s referendum.
The Hayat article notes in addition that the Sunnis of Iraq are split between those in favor of and those opposed to the constitution draft. It says that the Association of Muslim Scholars (still opposed) has called on the Iraqi Islamic Party (now recently supportive of the latest draft) to reverse its position again. The Hayat piece says that IIP offices in Mosul were attacked, and one of its members was killed…
All, sadly, in line with what I was writing here.

Maggie

Well, happy 80th birthday, Lady Thatcher.
How about this intriguing Thatcherian utterance, described by Tina Brown in today’s WaPo:

    The former chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain, Lord Palumbo, who lunched with Mrs. T six months ago, told me recently what she said when he asked her if, given the intelligence at the time, she would have made the decision to invade Iraq. “I was a scientist before I was a politician, Peter,” she told him carefully. “And as a scientist I know you need facts, evidence and proof — and then you check, recheck and check again. The fact was that there were no facts, there was no evidence, and there was no proof. As a politician the most serious decision you can take is to commit your armed services to war from which they may not return.”

This, of course, was the same Lady (then Mrs.) T who famously, back in August 1990, urged W’s father “not to go wobbly, George” in terms of his confrontation with Saddam.
That was then, and now is now. I wonder what snippets of conversation the once-Iron Maiden exchanged at the gala birthday party hosted for her in London today, with favored guest Tony Blair?

Quaker retreat coming up

Tomorrow afternoon, I get the huge pleasure of leaving town and joining many friends (Friends) from my Quaker meeting here in a weekend-long retreat over near Richmond. I’m really looking forward to it. I know many of my Jewish friends have spent the time since sundown yesterday fasting and praying as they “take account” of all their actions over the past year, which I gather is the main point of the Yom Kippur observances. I sort of feel in need of some of the same moral and existential stock-taking… Though mind you, the main focus of this retreat is on “community building”, so it might end up a little different. Who knows?
Last week, I got to teach two classes at the Quaker school we have here in Charlottesville– Tandem Friends School. I was working with a group of 15-year-olds, leading them in two 70-minute explorations of some of the key teachings of John Woolman. They are great young people. Many of them were deeply engaged in thinking through the tough challenge of how to make the world a better place using only life-affirming and non-violent means.
We talked a lot about how, back in the 1750s, John Woolman traveled up and down the east coast of (what would later become) the US, talking to the many Quakers living and farming here then who did so on the basis of their reliance on slave labor. He and a small bunch of other Philadelphia-area Quakers had become opposed to the practice of slavery, but their dilemma was how to persuade all the other members of their beloved Religious Society of Friends that participating in the institution of slavery was not– as some Quakers still held– the ethical thing to do in those times, but was indeed an abomination.
Gradually, over the years, Woolman, Anthony Benezet, and other anti-slavery activists won more and more (Quaker) converts to their cause. Quaker shipowners in Newport RI gradually turned away from their previous, often very lucrative, engagement in slave-capturing expeditions across the Atlantic. Quaker farmers in Virginia and the Carolinas gradually found ways to manumit (free) their slaves– which often wasn’t an easy thing to do. And then, finding that there was no way to make a living on this poor soil if you had to actually pay your farm labor, most of them ended up selling up and moving either to the “new” lands of the west, or to cities, to take up various trades. (And yes, Woolman had a lot to say about the colonists’ taking of the lands from the Indians, too.)
Anyway, my fascination with Woolman stems from this. He and his allies did the slow, steady work of persuasion which over time transformed the Quakers into a solidly anti-slavery body, and was the foundation on which in the 19th century they started to build a nationwide anti-slavery movement. I would like to think that today, we American Quakers could do the same with our opposition to war and global domination. (And by and large, we don’t even have to start where Woolman did, by persuading our own co-religionists that those things are an abomination.)
Quakers are generally (and imho, quite rightly) very wary of self-aggrandisement. If we weren’t, I would have suggested my local Quaker meeting (church) or one of our bigger bodies should take out huge ads all over the country saying something like: Quakers! We were right about slavery so listen to us on war!
Nah… I guess that’s not how we do things… Just telling other people that you’re right and they’re wrong is not, after all, a very successful strategy of persuasion. In fact, as I well know, it can really put people’s backs up…. A strategy based on listening and building relationships is still– now, as always– the best way to win real attitudinal change.
Okay, I know I practice it only very imperfectly here on the blog. But I try, I try.
In Woolman’s journal (the full text of which is available online) he shows that he has listened very carefully to the arguments made by the Quaker slaveowners and slavetraders of his day, and he recounts those arguments in impressive detail– and with an impressive lack of judgmentalism– in the journal. Nowadays, reading it, you’d be more inclined to be aghast… “They believed they were actually doing the Africans a favor by bringing them here to ‘Christendom’!?!?!” “They actually used Biblical stories to try to justify slavery!?!?!” “They believed what?!?” And maybe at the time, Woolman was inwardly pretty aghast, too, given his very different view of the ethical quality of slavery. But the way he describes those forms of argument– and then, methodically, lists the responses he’d given to them– is all written in very straightforward prose. (With never an exclamation point in the whole text, as far as I can recall. Come to think of it, had they invented them then?)
So why am I writing all this here? I’m not entirely sure. I am in a Yom Kippur-ish kind of a mood. Also, the burden of just closely following the whole horrible disaster of this war every so often starts to get to me, and I need to take some time out. Re-reading Woolman, as I have done recently, helps to give our present set of struggles some good perspective. Going to the retreat should be another way to do the same thing.
There is this pesky fact that I’ll be there, Quaker-retreating away like nobody’s business, at the very same time the Iraqi referendum is being held. Oh well.. It’s not as if the referendum is going to change a huge number of things in the greater scheme of things. There will still be plenty to write about– in Iraq, in the rest of the world, when the retreat finishes, Sunday.
But before I go, I’ll post an ‘Iraq open thread’ here so y’all can have a good conversation about it in my absence. This post here, however, is not yet that thread.

Referendum prospects & maneuvers

I have a column on Iraq in the Christian Science Monitor today. The title is In Iraq, a rush toward democracy could trigger civil war.
Well, I didn’t write that headline… I would have phrased it a little differently, since what they’re rushing toward doesn’t exactly look like “democracy” to me… More like a series of murky deals concluded behind closed doors.
As so often, though, it was really tough to write something on Monday-Tuesday for a Thursday paper, about a topic that was such a fast-moving target. The major intervening development has been the “breakthrough” that Zal Khalilzad achieved yesterday by winning the support of some (but by no means all) of the country’s Arab Sunni political leaders for yet more last-minute changes in the “constitution” document to be voted on Thursday.
The text of the Constitution now looks like a ragged old patchwork, it’s had so many post-“deadline” changes sewn into it… And of course, we now learn that a major provision in it is a textrual promise there that it can– indeed will– be changed very rapidly after the referendum.
I think the effect of all these last-minute shenanigans may well be to sow confusion among the Sunni voters, who had previously been reported to be lining up pretty solidly behind those who urged them to (a) take part in Saturday’s referendum, and (b) do so by voting “No.”
In addition that position, two others are now being advocated in the Sunni community: To take part and vote “Yes” to the newly fiddled-with version; or to stay away from the polls altogether.
Those urging abstention are the Islamist militants. Those urging a “Yes” vote are apparently the Iraqi Islamic Party– hard to find out quickly who else. Those urging a “No” vote are, according to the NYT article linked to above:

the powerful Association of Muslim Scholars, which represents hundreds of Sunni clerics from across the country. At least two other Sunni leaders, Adnan al-Dulaimi of the Conference of the Iraqi People and Kamal Hamdoon, a Sunni member of the constitution drafting committee, said Wednesday that they would also continue to oppose it.

It strikes me that what has been achieved with the latest round of (quite extra-procedural) textual finessing of the document is not (gasp!) a more perfect Constitution for Iraq, and most certainly not a document that will help Iraqis to escape from the cluitches of the present violence and insecurity. What has been achieved is to sow dissension in Sunni Arab ranks, with the effect of weakening that community’s political cohesion– and also, with the possible consequence that the “No-voting bloc” fails to get the required 2/3 majority required to block the document.
(Though how can anyone be assured that we will ever know what the “true” vote in the majority-Sunni provinces ends up as being?)
I end my CSM column warning of the danger of a full-blown civil war that could spread further throughout the region…

    What can the US do to avert such a disaster? Some people say the US should stay in Iraq to prevent the outbreak of a civil war. But this misreads the record of the 30-month period the US has already spent as the occupying power there. During those 30 months, ethnic and sectarian tensions have worsened considerably. There is no reason to expect that another 12 or 30 months of US presence would be any different.
    If the US stays, the intra-Iraqi civil strife is very likely indeed to continue, or even escalate. But if the US announces a speedy departure, and then leaves in good order – who knows? The Iraqis may fall into civil war afterward, or they may not. But at least the US troops will not be caught in the middle, and the US will not be as morally responsible for the strife. Also, if the US troops are clearly on their way out, then no Iraqi community will find it as easy to overreach politically as the Kurds and Shiites have done recently (while protected by the imperfect shield of the US troop presence). And all sincere Iraqis will realize – as South Africans did some dozen years ago – that if they want to save their country they will need to find a way to deal with each other.
    Will that happen? It still might. Who would have thought back in 1990 that black and white South Africans could find a way to work together? And if Iraqis should lack confidence in negotiating their future among themselves and feel they still need a reassuring outside presence – well, there are many candidates for the job more qualified than the US military.
    Despite many good intentions, US policies have thus far brought Iraq to the brink of internal breakdown. This week’s referendum won’t stop that process. Within the next six to eight months, the best thing that could persuade Iraqis to hold their country together is a speedy and total exit of US troops.

The prospects all seem to me fairly depressing. But at least, within the US, the ground-swell of opinion that is ready to criticize Bush on his handling of the war, and to seriously consider a pullout, is finally starting to build.