Let Iraqis try Saddam

The United Nations Organisation, which has not been as forceful as it should have been in condemning the United States led invasion and occupation of Iraq, should insist that a properly constituted Iraqi Court should try former Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, for any and all crimes committed against his people.

In turn, the United Nations should demand that representatives of the International Red Cross, as well as lawyers of Saddam’s own choosing be allowed access to the man, who would have cynically denied the same courtesies to prisoners of his former regime. There is no need to descend to Saddam’s old concept of justice. It should be made clear to the United States by the United Nations Organisation (UN) that the Court to try Hussein, who was captured by United States troops on Sunday, should not be one rustled up by either the US or the recently appointed and controlled US Iraqi Council. The United Nations must be firmer with the United States than it has been since the Americans set out to invade and ultimately invaded Iraq and destroyed much of that country’s infrastructure on the wholly unjustified grounds that the oil rich Middle Eastern country had weapons of mass destruction, and the delivery systems with which to attack the US.

It is bad enough that Saddam Hussein should have inflicted such cruelty on his people, particularly the Kurds, many of whom were gassed by his forces clearly at his behest. The world has condemned, and correctly, Saddam not only for the atrocities against his own people, and Iran against which he waged war in the 1980s, but for his repeated denial of justice to opponents. Many of them languished in jail for years without the benefit of trial, and without being able to access legal representation. Any establishment by the United States, directly or through the Iraqi Council, a creature of the US, of a Court to try Saddam Hussein would be to legitimise, however unintentionally, the former Iraqi dictator’s denial of justice to the many of his countrymen who had suffered under him for more than two decades. The treatment by the United States of alleged al Qaeda prisoners, who were held in Afghanistan, during and after the American invasion of that country following on the September 11, 2001 attacks on the New York World Trade Centre and other US buildings, has been a troublesome display of unconventional ‘justice.’  The detainees have been shackled, blindfolded, denied the right to see lawyers, and in all too many instances denied the courtesy of meeting, where relevant, with diplomatic representatives of their countries.

The United States of America has stubbornly refused to yield, and the American authorities may very well dictate to the Iraqi Council, that what is good for al Qaeda accused is good enough for Saddam. In our book and in the eyes of most people Saddam is a criminal of the worst sort. Nonetheless, there should be no need to remind the United Nations that justice must not only be done, but be seen to be done. The US helped draft and is one of the signatories to the UN Charter, which guarantees fundamental human rights. In addition it is a signatory to the 1864 Geneva Convention which governs, inter alia, the treatment of prisoners of war. The United Nations Organisation has a responsibility to the world that it is prepared to see justice, and very much outside of inverted commas, done in the case of Saddam. It is up to the Iraqi people to call on Saddam to answer for his cruelty to them.  US President George Bush must be held to his words that any trial of Saddam must be able to “stand international scrutiny.”