THE
ROVING EYE The occupiers'
trial By Pepe Escobar
Occupied Iraq has virtually no security,
electricity, water or jobs. Last Saturday, instead
of basic necessities for a decent life, Iraqis had
a referendum - already suspected of massive fraud
- on a constitution few have even seen.
Starting on Wednesday, Iraqis, and the
rest of the world for that matter, get a running
soap opera - the trial of Saddam Hussein, under
whose regime, for all its terror, and then 12
years of economic sanctions, Iraqis at least had
security, electricity, water and jobs.
This "trial of the century" - or at least
the early 21st century - starts at a secret Green
Zone location, by an anonymous court,
and under extreme,
US military-imposed security measures. It's a made
in USA affair - in administrative and financial
terms.
The court, the training and the
whole proceedings cost US$75 million - courtesy of
US taxpayers (the budget was allocated in May
2004). About 300 people - paid by the Americans -
work on the trial machinery. The five "secret"
Iraqi judges - Shi'ites and Kurds, no Sunnis - are
paid by the Americans, live inside the Green Zone
and are protected by the Americans from being
kidnapped or killed.
They have received
special training from US, British and Australian
legal experts and have even staged a mock trial in
London. They are supposed to be "independent" in a
country on which "the United States continues to
wield vast influence", according to the
understated Associated Press. Human Rights Watch
has warned on the record that the trial may be
"violating international standards for fair
trials".
The initial charges against
Saddam will focus on the killing of 143 Shi'ites
in the village of Dujail, north of Baghdad, in
1982, after an assassination attempt against him.
Recently disclosed images from Iraqi TV at the
time show Saddam touring Dujail in triumph - but
not the hostility of the crowd.
The
assassination attempt was claimed by the Shi'ite
Da'wa Party. Current Prime Minister Ibrahim
Jaafari happens to be a leader of the Da'wa Party.
As far as he's concerned, Saddam should be
pronounced guilty in no time. "We are not trying
to land on the moon here ... It's enough [to try
Saddam] on Dujail and Anfal. The tribunal is just
and open, he has a defense lawyer and the verdict
will match the crime ... I don't want to intervene
in judicial proceedings, but why do we say now
that more time is needed?"
Six other
people are being tried alongside Saddam. They
include his half-brother Barzan al-Tikriti - who
was the head of the terror-inflicting Mukhabarat
intelligence services; his notorious henchman Taha
Yassin Ramadan; Awad Hamed al-Bander, the judge
who sentenced many in Dujail to death; and four
Ba'ath Party officials. The prosecution charges
that Saddam himself, as head of state, certified
the executions pronounced by an Iraqi special
tribunal presided by Bander.
This won't be
an American-style courtroom drama. There's no
jury. The chief judge will question a number of
witnesses. Many have already been interviewed
before the trial. The five judges decide whether
Saddam and his six co-defendants are innocent or
guilty. Saddam will have the right to call
witnesses.
If he is convicted, his defense
team will be able to file a number of appeals
before the sentence - expected to be death - is
applied. If it's death row, Saddam must be
executed - in fact hanged - within 30 days of the
ruling on his last appeal. The description of the
trial procedures is provided, once again, not by
Iraqis, but by Americans - at the National
Security Council and the State Department.
This special Iraqi tribunal was instituted
by former American proconsul L Paul Bremer in
December 2003 - curiously only three days before
Saddam, according to the official Pentagon
version, was captured in his hole on the ground.
The tribunal is supposed to judge crimes committed
by Iraqis - inside and outside the country -
between July 17, 1968 (when the Ba'ath Party took
power) and May 1, 2003, as well as war crimes
perpetrated during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988)
and the invasion of Kuwait (1990-1991).
So
a string of trials may be in the offing -
concerning, for starters, the Anfal campaign of
1987-1988 which killed at least 5,000 Kurds, the
invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the suppression of the
Shi'ite uprising of 1991 (which may have killed
200,000 people) and the widespread assassination
of Shi'ite religious leaders, like the Grand
Ayatollah Baqr al-Sadr.
The legal
daughter from hell Saddam's defense, for
the moment, is a total mess. The Iraqi lawyer in
charge is Baghdad-based Khalil al-Dulaimi, who has
met Saddam only six times. But it is Raghad,
Saddam's oldest daughter, who is really in charge
of everything - an authority conferred by Saddam's
wife and his two other daughters.
Two
months ago, Raghad fired almost the entire defense
team, except for Dulaimi. Several Iraqi lawyers
have volunteered to help him. The prosecution had
two years to review the case, Dulaimi says he was
given only two weeks.
In spite of the
alleged $15 billion or more that Saddam would have
stashed (there was never any proof), there's no
money for his defense, according to Ziad
al-Khasawneh, a Jordanian lawyer who resigned
three months ago because he could not stand
Raghad. He charges that Raghad is in fact
supported - generously - by the royal families of
Jordan and Qatar, buying loads of designer gear
and jewelry in Amman, always paid for in hard cash
carried in a leather briefcase by a male
bodyguard.
Raghad was married to Hussein
Kamel (they have three children), the man
responsible for Iraq's fabled weapons of mass
destruction program who defected to Amman in 1995
and then told three UN senior executives that the
program had been dismantled (thus eliminating,
eight years in advance, the official Bush
administration reason for invading Iraq). Kamel
was lured back to Iraq six months later, under the
belief he would be forgiven, only to be executed
under the orders of - who else - Saddam himself.
One of Saddam's foreign defense lawyers is
Franco-Lebanese Andre Chami. He charges that at
the moment "we have a parody of trial and a parody
of defense". Chami says only himself and Dulaimi
have been properly authorized so far to defend
Saddam.
But Dulaimi, according to Chami,
is inexperienced, "has no strategy" and has never
even practiced as a penal lawyer. Chami never met
Saddam. But he met Raghad three times, in Amman
and in Libya. Chami has read the 800-page Dujail
dossier. He says, "It's totally empty. In France,
any judge would dismiss the case, it would not
even go to trial." The prosecution, he says, has
just used the original Iraqi special tribunal
dossier about the assassination attempt against
Saddam, and turned it upside down. "This is a
political trial," he charges.
Raghad has
approached Anthony Scrivener, a former chairman of
the Bar Council of Britain, to head the defense
team's challenge of the legitimacy of the
tribunal. In 2004, Scrivener published an article
in London's Independent on Sunday saying, "The
trial of Saddam Hussein and some of his nasty
colleagues has already degenerated into the realms
of a promising theatrical farce."
Saddam's
defense team insists - and will continue to insist
- that the trial has no jurisdiction because it
has been created by an occupying power which has
no right to change the legal system of an occupied
country.
Abdel Haq Alani, an Iraqi lawyer
based in Britain and at least for the moment the
chief defense strategist, has already hinted that
the defense strategy will be to delay everything
all the time; to insist that this court is illegal
under international law; and to insist that Saddam
has sovereign immunity from prosecution because
everything he did was legal under the previous
Iraqi constitution.
As far as Dujail is
concerned, the defense will argue that the 143
people who were executed had been found guilty
under Iraq's laws and Saddam's only role was to
sign their death warrants - just as George W Bush,
as governor of Texas, sent 152 people to death.
From tyrant to martyr? Harold
Pinter, the new Nobel Prize of Literature winner,
has described the American invasion of Iraq as "a
bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism,
demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of
International Law".
The world will be
watching whether international law will be
respected during Saddam's trial. The first few
images - hopefully unedited - will be crucial. If
they convey the impression of an occupiers' trial,
the game is over. It means no credibility
vis-a-vis the Iraqi population, the predominantly
Sunni Arab world, and the world at large.
This trial - the first test - is based on
a concrete fact. But the defense has a point as it
contests the legitimacy of the tribunal itself.
Thus the danger: Saddam the tyrant has a golden
opportunity to (re)present himself to the Sunni
Arab popular masses as Saddam, martyr of the
American empire.
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