Confessions of a Misguided Trio

Saddam Execution

Over the last few days I have been contemplating a number of things, including, but not limited to...

How those who had previously stated their utmost disgust in regards to the death penalty, such as PM Howard, and FM Downer, fully endorse the execution of Saddam Hussein. Why they are willing to send official communiques of disgust to country's such as Singapore when they are about to execute a guilty drug courier, yet not in the case of Saddam Hussein...

When I have spoken to people about my concerns, the majority of them are offended that I didn't think justice had been served, that given Saddam's outright evilness, how dare I even suggest that justice wasn't served. I will leave debate over the death penalty out of this post, but if you honestly believe that justice for the countless victims of Saddam's reign was served when he was found guilty and executed for the deaths of those executed in Dujail, and no others...

Then I am forced to question your sanity.

The International Herald Tribune, on Tuesday (January 2nd 2007), published an Op-Ed piece entitled 'Justice, But No reckoning'. Within it Najmaldin Karim, a neurosurgeon and the president of the Washington Kurdish Institute says the following...

Killing Saddam now, however, for ordering the massacre at Dujail in 1982, means that he will not face justice for his greatest crimes: the so-called Anfal campaign against the Kurds in the late 1980s, the genocidal assault on the Marsh Arabs in the 1990s, and the slaughtering of the Shiite Arabs and Kurds who rose up against him, with American encouragement, in 1991...

...Saddam Hussein did not confront the full horror of his crimes. Building on previous initiatives by Arab nationalist governments to persecute the Kurds, he turned ethnic engineering and murder into an industry in the 1970s. Hundreds of thousands were evicted from their homes and murdered. Swaths of Kurdish countryside were emptied of their population, men, women and children taken to shallow graves and shot.

Initially, the United States backed those of us who took to the hills to save our lives and freedom, but in 1975 (and here is an irony) Gerald Ford agreed to stop financing us in order to settle a border dispute between Iraq and Iran. As so many times since, human rights were no match for a desire to keep the oil flowing. During the 1980s, entire towns, including Qala Diza in Iraqi Kurdistan and Qasr-i-Shirin in neighboring Iranian Kurdistan, were destroyed. To ensure that survivors would never return to their homes, the mountains were laced with land mines. The widows and children were detained in settlements lacking fresh water and sewage disposal; these were called "mujammat" in Arabic, which translates, with all the dreadful implications, as "concentration areas."...

...Saddam Hussein's trial shed new light on these tragic years. Documents came to light revealing that his regime coordinated with Turkey in its efforts to isolate Kurdish villages in 1988, in which he used chemical weapons. This should lead to some important soul searching in Turkey.

But the failure to put Saddam Hussein on trial for the Anfal offensive itself will cheat us of learning the full details of investigating whether the Turks suppressed evidence of Iraq's use of chemical weapons by preventing foreign doctors from seeing Kurdish refugees; of knowing the extent to which Saudi Arabia and Egypt may have aided Saddam Hussein's weapons production.

Kurds aren't the only ones who will be cheated out of full reckoning. In 1991, as we all know, the retreating Iraqi army massacred Shiite Arabs as well as Kurds who had heeded President George H. W. Bush's call to overthrow the Baathist regime. According to the 2004 report of the Iraq Survey Group, the dictator used chemical weapons against Shiite Arab civilians in 1991. Without putting Saddam Hussein on trial for these offenses, or for his campaigns against the Marsh Arabs of the south, will we ever know what really happened?

If one is to subscribe to conspiratorial theories then is it viable to speculate upon the "State Secrets" that will continue to remain "State Secrets"?

posted by Mark @ 8:17 PM