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I have always resisted the temptation to talk about the Iraqi situation from the outside, I have repeatedly emphasized that there are very subtle factors in the situation which are impossible for someone outside it to grasp. I'm back in Baghdad now. I have been staying in Amman for the last six months caring for the endless suffering of my son who has been injured by a trigger happy American soldier and is still in a very serious condition of brain damage for the last year and a half. The two most significant features of the Iraqi situation at present is the campaign for the election of a new parliament which is due on December 15th. The other major issue is the trial of Saddam Hussein and some of his senior aides which has been going on now for more than a month.
The parliamentary elections are going on according to the deadlines that were dictated by a time table which was formulated by Paul Bremer the former American diplomat who served as the first administrator of occupied Iraq. Paul Bremer left Iraq in June of 2004 after transferring sovereignty to Iraqi authorities, but he left behind a script with hard and fast deadlines for drafting a constitution and forming a government. The script will culminate next Thursday with another election for a permanent parliament one of its first functions is to oversee the formation of a cabinet that would serve for a full four years term. President Bush himself adhered to this script very doggedly in spite of very serious misgivings by some of his most senior cabinet members and his own staff for the last 18 months and in the face of some very serious drawbacks, an unremitting violence and the opposition of the third main component of Iraqi society, the Sunni Arabs. Now, president Bush is counting on the results of the impending elections to save his administration and his own political career. The fight for its control is going on mainly between two major groups the Kurds the Shiites. Former Prime Minister Dr. Alawi and groups of Sunni Arabs who have at last agreed to participate in the ongoing efforts to build a new political structure replacing the one which was dismantled after the downfall of Saddam and his regime. The defused opposition by at least some of the Sunnis was enough to allow the approval of the constitution which was agreed upon last month to proceed with the next elections that are supposed to bring a new government with a mandate to govern for a full four years term. In the meantime to keep the script and preserve a sense of momentum the Bush administration has constantly finessed the deadlines and ease the hard choices to the future and gambled that the Sunnis would participate, which they finally seem to be doing. The elections are expected by a lot of Iraqis to bring Dr. Alawi back to the Prime Ministerial job with Dr. Pachachi an extremely likely candidate for the president’s job. I shall come back to the elections in few days time for a better discussion and an analysis of its results. The other major issue that is occupying in the country at the moment is the trial of Saddam Hussein.
The trial of Saddam Hussein has been going on now for more than a month in a specially prepared court house in front of a special tribunal that was specifically created to try him. Saddam and some of his more senior aides are being tried for crimes against humanity, the environment and for crimes that are known to have been committed against his own people and against his neighbors which have resulted during two very nasty and futile war in no less than a million dead Kuwaitis, Iranians and Iraqis. The current trial is about the murder of a 148 Shiites from the village of al-dujail, which were murdered as a result of a failed assassination attempt on him by some of the inhabitants of that village when the dictator was visiting it on July, 1982. The current trial has been characterized by certain characteristics and raises in my mind very serious and critical question marks. The most astonishing is that this fellow is being tried like some minor offender or a petty criminal who is accused of robbing a neighbor of a few dinars or someone who in a serious brawl has caused his adversary a minor injury. The dictator is receiving a great deal of attention from the court itself which in an evident attempt to show its transparency and impartiality was granting him a lot of freedom to shout and interrupt the proceedings. The court was trying to prove always that he has full rights and was treating him very evidently as innocent until proved otherwise. A state of affairs that Saddam himself was stressing all the time, he constantly repeated that he was innocent and above all that he was claiming that the court itself which was trying him was itself illegal and unconstitutional which the senior judge was listening to very quietly and almost respectively.
Saddam was afforded an astonishing team for his defense which included in addition to a local group dozens of lawyers from some of the Arab countries, but most attention was focused on some international lawyers and advisers who have been signed up to act for the former leader, amongst whom were the former American attorney general Ramsay Clark, an ex-minister of justice from the state of Qatar, the French lawyer Jacques Verges whose his past clients included the famous Nazi criminal Klaus Barbie and Carlos the jackal. Then there was the speculation that controversial millionaire Giovanni di Stefano whose friends and clients read like a “who’ who” of the world’s most notorious figures was also involved in the defense of Saddam. The making of the defense team raises some of the most serious questions, which I have just alluded to, the most simple is that how are these very distinguished legal professionals are going to defend this fellow when most of the crimes he is accused of have been committed in day light and in front of the whole world? Is their defense accepting the trouble and possible danger to their own precious lives is happening purely for the sole purpose of having justice being served and providing an indicted person with the chance of proving himself innocent and acquittal? Or are there other more suspect and ulterior motives and inducements? At any rate, the way the trial is going on promises to be very prolonged, the current case is one of more than a dozen.
The prosecution are said to have prepared few tons of documents looking at them in the most cursory manner will take years to finish. Saddam Hussein should have been tried earlier and quicker, I am not suggesting that he should have been done like that of the previous Iraqi leader general Qassem or like that of Ceasescu or even the Nazi criminals who were tried in Nuremberg after the end of the World War II. I think this fellow should have been given a quick, but fair trial and that the Iraqis should have been finished with this aspect of their agony under Saddam and it seems very likely that this agony is going to last a lot longer. What I am saying is not only my personal opinion, this view is shared by many Iraqis who look at this exercise as no more than a charade, as part of the ongoing program of confusing the people and keeping them busy with minor problems whilst the masters are going on quietly with their more important and strategic agendas. The whole show is run by the American administration and its powerful allies, these people will never let anyone hang Saddam, he is their man, he has been very useful to them in the past, he is still very useful for them now even in his pathetic and defeated state. When they are finished with him and he is no more useful to them he is going to die very slowly from some unknown ailment which will be very difficult to pin point, like the deaths of the former Shah of Iran and the most recent one of the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
Dr. Najeeb Hanoudi
Baghdad, Iraq
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
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