Alert users who use IE or AOL browsers have told me that the way our archived pages here on JWN have been redesigned, they couldn’t scroll down to the bottom of the post I put here last night. It was a long post. So with the aim that all of you could read the whole post, I’m re-posting the bottom half of that post in the ‘jump’ portion here.
Maybe it would make sense to have one Comments board, though. So if you could go back and add your comments to the board on the previous post, that should work??
Of course, if you are able to read JWN in Netscape, Firefox, etc., you’d be just fine.
Meantime, my technical person will work on correcting the underlying prob as soon as he can. If any of you has a great fix for this, could you email me? Thanks!
Author: Helena
Saddam’s trial: precedents from Nuremberg
So. Thursday, Saddam will be arraigned, which should mean that we hear what the charges against him are. At that point he will join two other men who were once powerful and extremely abusive national leaders but who are now on trial for their misdeeds: Slobodan Milosevic (who will begin the Defense phase of his own case next Monday), and Théoneste Bagosora, the alleged military mastermind of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide.
The circumstances of Saddam’s trial will be very different from the public, UN-organized proceedings against Slobo and Bagosora. According to the AP, Saddam’s initial proceedings,
- are taking place under a blanket of secrecy because of fears that insurgents, many of them Saddam supporters, might exact revenge on those taking part.
U.S. and Iraqi officials refused to say where Thursday’s hearing would take place or release the name of the presiding judge. No pictures will be allowed of any of the Iraqi participants – except for the defendants – to protect them from attack. Only a few journalists will be allowed to attend.
But evidently, the threats are not all coming from one side:
- Issam Ghazawi, a member of Saddam’s defense team, said he received threats in a telephone call Wednesday from someone who claimed to be a minister of justice who promised that anyone who tried to defend Saddam would be “chopped to pieces.”
It does sound like chaotic circumstances in which to try to hold a proper trial. Not quite like the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1945-46, though several aspects of the two trial proceedings are the same.
Primarily, at the political level, we are talking about a former leader who committed many grave rights abuses but who is beaten on the battlefield and then put on trial by the military victors–or, in this case, forces closely associated with the victors.
In the case of Slobo and Bagosora, by contrast, the political body that organized their respective tribunals is the UN, which has tried to do so in a very “fair”, due-process-y manner. (And indeed, ICTY, the former-Yugoslavia tribunal, has tried people from all of the major population groups involved in the various Balkan wars, not just the ethnic Serbs.)
At Nuremberg, of course, they didn’t “get” Hitler or Goebbels, both whom presumably shot themselves as the Allies closed in. The highest ranking Nazi they got was Goering. The Tribunal sentenced him to death–but he cheated the hangman by killing himself the night before execution with a cyanide pill.
Anyway, what I want to blog about a bit are some of the general lessons for the Saddam trial from those three earlier tribunals–but particularly perhaps, the “forgotten” lessons of Nuremberg.
Continue reading “Saddam’s trial: precedents from Nuremberg”
Let’s hear it for the rule of law!!!
Today’s Supreme Court decisions on Padilla, Hamdi, and Rasul (the latter being the Gitmo case) are great news for all those of us who believe that women and men are better ruled by laws than by autocratic and idiosyncratic individuals.
Thank you, the Supremes!!!!
I found a great new blog today, SCOTUSblog, as in the Supreme Court of the US. It seems to be written by a group of close and well-informed SCOTUS watchers.
I’m not going to duplicate the great posts they’ve put up there today. I just wanted to highlight a few quotes they had picked out from the various opinions written by different Supremes on these cases.
First this, Justice Stevens writing for (sadly) a minority group of four justices who failed to persuade the majority that the Court should indeed take up Padilla’s case as brought:
- At stake in this case is nothing less than the essence of a free society. . . . Unconstrained Executive detention for the purpose of investigating and preventing subversive activity is the hallmark of the Star Chamber.
As I said, that group didn’t win a majority in the case of Rumsfeld v. Padilla (a case that had been brought by Rumsfeld in response to an earlier case against His Rummyship by the poor, long-detained US citizen Jose Padilla.) But what the majority did say was merely that Rumsfeld had been the wrong address for Padilla’s original suit.
They said Padilla should have brought it instead against the commander of the navy brig in South Carolina where he has been held for 814 days now. Also, from what they had ruled in the case of the habeas petition brought by another US citizen, Yaser Hamdi, for which apparently His Rummyship was “the right address”, was that a US citizen–even one alleged to be an enemy combatant– does have the right to petition US courts against his detention.
(Thanks to George Paine of Warblogging.com for having kept a “Padilla watch” day counter on his site for many of those 814 days.)
In this SCOTUSblog post, Lyle Denniston writes:
- The Supreme Court’s first review of the Bush administration’s handling of the war on terrorism may force a fundamental reordering of constitutional priorities, especially in the way the government may deal with individuals caught up in that war. Amid all the writing by the Justices in today’s three historic rulings, no sentence stands out as vividly as this one, “A state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation’s citizens.”
It’s not quite clear which of today’s decisions that quote was a part of.
Here is Denniston’s summary of the results of today’s three decisions:
Transition? What transition?
- Update note, Monday a.m.– I wrote the following Sunday evening, before news came in that they’d brought the transition ‘ceremony’ forward. Most of the post still stands, except that where I’d speculated on a large-ish, TV-clip-friendly ceremony what they had ended up in a small back room, far from public view, for all the world like a drug deal or an illicit sexual liaison… Oh, and the flag on view–they had no space to ‘haul it up’– was the Saddam-era one… Read on…
Today, the counter on the CPA’s inimitable website breathlessly tells us, “4 days to a Sovereign Iraq©”. (Oops, how did that copyright symbol sneak in there?) If you go to this page on the CPA site, however, you’ll get a good idea of just how circumscribed that “sovereignty” will be.
That’s the page where they list and have (often non-functioning) “links” to the text of some 12 CPA “Regulations”; some 99 (and counting… ) “Orders”; 17 “Memoranda”; and a dozen or so “Public notices”.
It’s the “Orders” that are really important these days. You could call ’em diktats. You could call ’em edicts. You could call ’em fatwas. But “orders” is a fine, descriptive word. And that page even tells us about their status:
- Orders are binding instructions or directives to the Iraqi people that create penal consequences or have a direct bearing on the way Iraqis are regulated, including changes to Iraqi law.
Baghdad fashion maven Paul Bremer has promulgated no fewer than 18 of these 99 orders since the beginning of May, and may well be promulgating additional ones even as I write.
“Penal consequences.” Sounds bad. And it could indeed be pretty bad, especially if anyone’s hoping for anything that might look like real sovereignty to be happening come July 1.
(That reminds me. I know from growing up in the UK that when a foreign country is “given” its independence there’s supposed to be a flag-raising ceremony. Have they figured out yet which flag they’re going to raise in Baghdad, come Thursday? Will it be the ridiculous, made-in-Washington “design” featuring the two suggestive blue stripes that Bremer came up with some weeks ago? Will it be Iraq’s traditional national flag, the red, white, and black stripes with the three green stars? Will it be Saddam’s adaption of that, that had “Allahu” and “Akbar” scrawled between the stars? Or perhaps, this?)
But anyway, I’ve been thinking some about flimsy, totally stage-managed “independence-granting” events that take place under circumstances of military occupation… The fate of the Palestinian Authority, created as a result of just such an event in the 1990s, immediately came to mind…
ICTR’s lengthy processes
In this article in a recent issue of Boston Review, I gave a bird’s-eye view of how painfully lengthy and long-drawn-out the trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) have been.
I recalled that Rebecca West, reporting on the Nuremberg Trials as they entered their eleventh month, wrote that, “the courtroom was a citadel of boredom. Every person within its walk was in the grip of extreme tedium.” But Nuremberg, I suggested had nothing on the ICTR! For at Nuremberg, the entire trial, covering all 22 defendants, took only ten months and ten days.
Well, ICTR has recently (June 17th) completed the trial of its 21st defendant, Sylvestre Gacumbitsi. ICTR has been in existence for 9 years and 7 months (= 115 months).
In three of those cases, the defendants copped a plea bargain. For the 18 contested cases, the average length of each trial was 29.1 months. (Yawn, yawn!)
By the way, that’s counting only the time taken by the trial of first instance. Most or all of those convicted by the court in Arusha, Tanzania then pursue their appeals to the joint ICTR/ICTY Appeals court, sited in The Hague.
The court’s incredible foot-dragging is actually even worse than that:
Israel and the BBC
You’ve probably read a lot from time to time about various pro-Israeli organizations slamming the BBC for being “anti-Israel”. Well now, the Mass Media Unit at Glasgow University, in Scotland, has published a new study that shows that, in the case of BBC One news and ITV News–the two major t.v. news organizations in the UK–just the opposite is the case.
The press release announcing the release of the study says:
- The study suggests that television news on the Israel/Palestinian conflict confuses viewers and substantially features Israeli government views. Israelis are quoted and speak in interviews over twice as much as Palestinians and there are major differences in the language used to describe the two sides. This operates in favours of the Israelis and influences how viewers understand the conflict.
Focusing on the two channels’ new programing since the start of the current intifada, the researchers, “examined around 200 news programmes and interviewed and questioned over 800 people.”
Why am I not surprised by the findings? perhaps because I have worked in the Anglo-Saxon media for so long and have certainly seen the chilling effect that “silencing” organizations like FLAME, CAMERA, etc have had on nearly all the major media outlets here in the US, and only slightly less so in Britain. I certainly appreciate the fact that the Christian Science Monitor, being owned by a church rather than subject to the pressures of advertisers, has been ready to keep my columns running for all this time; though I know that they have come under great pressure for doing so.
I’d love it if the Glasgow Media Unit would turn their same methodology onto the major t.v. news outlets here in the US. I am sure the results would be even more depressing.
Anyway, here, in digest form, were their major findings on the British t.v. news programs:
What war does to womens’ and girls’ lives
Yesterday, a truly amazing piece of reporting by the WaPo‘s Ariana Eunjung Cha told the story of a 23-year-old mother of two in Baghdad, widowed by last year’s war, who has turned to prostitution in an attempt to buy necessities for her kids, her brothers, and the rest of her family.
The piece is so well-written, and so painful. Bill the spouse immediately questioned why the paper only ran it in the “Style” section, which seems totally to trivialize it. I agree.
One of my main reactions, after “wow” at the reporting and a great gaping sadness at the content of the story, was to be really, really glad that there is a strong enough presence of women in the “corps” of foreign correspondents that a piece like this gets done. (As opposed to men foreign correspondents, a goodly number of whom in the bad old days when I was out there as a hack would actually frequent women working in that sector as a matter of course; and who certainly would seldom have either wanted to do a great story like Cha’s, or been in a position of the right kind of intimacy to be able to do it.)
Cha credits Shereen Jerjes, presumably a female Iraqi stringer, with contributing to the work on the report. And a female photojournalist called Andrea Bruce Woodall has an incredible series of photos there on the young woman’s life, as well– including one, of her just at the start of a sexually intimate encounter with a man, that Woodall apparently took from inside a closet in the woman’s bedroom.
I want to come back to this question of the new role that empowered women journalists can make in the way we all understand the costs that war imposes on women and families, and on journalism in general, later.
But while I’m here in the realm of reporting (by women) on post-war prostituion tragedies, I can’t avoid linking to this truly outrageous story from a refugee camp in the DRC, where Kate Holt reports on the lives of young-teenage Congolese girls forced into prostitution by the war there, and who their johns there are:
Continue reading “What war does to womens’ and girls’ lives”
Actualités importantes rwando-congolaises
Et maintenant, des nouvelles assez bonnes venantes du sommet d’Abuja… Selon ce bulletin de l’agence AFP,
- Les pr
Muraho, Rwanda! (Hello, Rwanda!)
This week, I have been seriously back into writing my Rwanda material up for my book on Violence and its Legacies. I think it’s a lucky week to be doing this, because today, President Paul Kagame officially opened the “real” start of the work of the country’s gacaca court system. (That’s “ga-cha-cha”, for an English speaker.)
This story from Hirondelle News Agency gives a very good, succinct explanation of how the gacaca courts will work.
If you’re really interested in the gacaca courts, you should look at this September 2003 report, the latest in a series of very well-researched studies produced by Penal Reform International. (It’s long!)
For an exploration of some of the theoretical issues involved in the Kigali government’s attempts to deal with the sequelae of the genocide, you can look at this Boston Review article of mine, that ran a couple of years ago.
The gacaca courts are special organs of “popular justice” whose job is to deal with the more than 100,000 residents of the country who are accused of having taken a low- to mid-level part in the 1994 genocide. Their operation is certainly not without its problems–this is putting it mildly!–but establishing them has been the best way Kagame’s government could devise for dealing with that huge number of suspects. Many of the suspects have been detained in the country’s badly overcrowded prison system for eight or nine years by now without having had any chance of having the allegations against them tested in a judicial proceeding.
In the PRI study, the researchers identified the following big challenges that emerged during the lengthy “pilot” phase of the gacaca courts:
Saudi instability, contd.
I am not the only person judging (as I did in this recent post) that Saudi Arabia may well be on the verge of a major breakdown. Today, during a meeting of many other Middle East specialists whom I respect, I heard serious discussion of planning for the contingency of a “civil war” in the Kingdom.
Well done, George W. Bush!! (Irony alert there.) Within just the past 18 months your policies have transformed Iraq into a land of brigandage and rampant insecurity, and a place of refuge for many terrorists and other criminals; and your inattention to what’s been going on in Saudi Arabia means there’s a growing chance that it will now go the same way, too.
I am not actually a supporter of any nation having military bases outside its own borders. (Or inside, come to that: look at demilitarized Costa Rica. But that’s a different story.) But I do note that for many years right through to 2003, the Kingdom’s major defense posture depended heavily on the presence of some 7,000-10,000 US military people.
In April 2003, Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, still cock-a-hoop in the wake of the “victory” in Iraq, announced it would withdraw nearly all the US military from Saudi. According to this April 30, 2003 report in the Chicago Tribune:
- the United States will soon withdraw about 7,000 U.S. military personnel from Saudi Arabia and terminate a significant military presence there that lasted more than a decade, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced Tuesday…
The Persian Gulf, Rumsfeld said, “is now a safer region because of the change in Iraq.” [!!, ~HC] He also said U.S. planes no longer are needed to enforce a “no-fly” zone over Iraq. American military aircraft patrolling the southern half of Iraq did so in part from Saudi Arabia.
The U.S. also is likely to continue to use air bases in Iraq, increasing its military “footprint” in the region overall.