Saddam wins big! (And human rights take a thumping)

Posted by Joshua Holland at 2:30 PM on December 28, 2006.

Under "Iraqi law*," Saddam Hussein must hang before January 27 for ordering the deaths of 148 people in the town of Dujail in 1982. CBS reports that the execution will be recorded, but it's not clear if the tape will be broadcast.

As I've written before (here, here, here and here), the trial was a joke -- an utter sham. And while Saddam Hussein, the decrepit old man, doesn't deserve much in the way of sympathy, the fact that the Bushies -- in order to score domestic political points -- threw away an opportunity to bring to justice Saddam Hussein, the former president of Iraq who ordered the gassing of as many as 30,000 Kurds, will go down as one of the great tragedies in a war that's been replete with them.

Saddam couldn't have hoped for a better end than a swift death after an illegitimate trial by Western occupiers, or a better legacy than that which will result from it.

Saddam might have been tried for genocide in proceedings that conformed to at least the minimal standards of due process. And he would have been found guilty, sending a loud message to future dictators. Instead, his death will be perceived by much of the world as a textbook case of victor's justice -- the final act in a decades-long dance with the West in which Saddam ended up martyred on the altar of Pan-Arabism after an illegal invasion by the U.S. and Britain.

It may not be a very accurate portrait of his reign, but it'll gain traction as Iraq continues to fester and the Sunni-Arab world continues to sweat the emergence of a "Shiite Crescent" in the ME. And it'll gain more currency if Iraq's Sunni insurgents follow through on their promise to react to the execution by canceling ongoing peace talks with the Iraqi government and the U.S. and launching a new wave of violence.

Let's put the opportunity that we passed up into context. Since 1951, when the Genocide Convention came into effect, there have been 9 genocidal campaigns, including the gassing of the Kurds in Halabja**. To date, no head of state has ever been held accountable for any of them -- Saddam might have been the first in history (see note about Rwanda, below).

Consider what's happened to the other heads-of-state accused of the crime:

• Pakistan's Bangladesh War, 1971: Pakistani president Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan wiped out between 300,000 and 3 million people while fighting Bengali nationalists in then East Pakistan. Tried for other crimes -- not genocide -- he was placed under house arrest for five years, and died a free man in 1980. He was buried with honors. A case against the Pakistani armed forces was filed in the Federal Court of Australia this year-- twenty-six years after Khan's death -- for genocide and war crimes.
• Burundi Genocide 1972: between 100,000 and 150,000 Burundian Hutus were massacred. Former Burundian president Michel Micombero, under whose regime the bloodshed took place, died of a heart attack in exile in Somalia in 1983.
• Cambodia, 1975-1979: Under Pol Pot, nearly a quarter of the population died in Cambodia's "killing fields." After years of exile in Thailand and a few years under house arrest, the Khmer Rouge announced in 1998 that they'd hand Pol Pot over to an international tribunal (one opposed by the U.S.). Pot died the night that the decision was announced, either from a heart attack or suicide, depending on whom you ask.
• Indonesian-occupied East Timor, 1975-1999: Under Haji Mohammad Suharto, about a quarter of the East Timorese population were killed by Indonesian security forces. Suharto, who came to power in what historian Peter Scott called "a three-phase right-wing coup -- one which had been both publicly encouraged and secretly assisted by U.S. spokesmen and officials" -- lives in seclusion today. Attempts to bring him to justice have failed due to his "poor health."
• Ethiopia, the "Red Terror" of 1977-78: under Mengistu Haile Mariam, as many as 1.5 million Ethiopian opponents killed in one of the worst acts of genocide in history. This month, after a 12-year trial, Mariam was found guilty of genocide. But he's lived in exile in Zimbabwe under the protection of Robert Mugabe since 1995, and attempts to extradite him have so far failed.
• Balkans, 1990s: several mass killings including the Srebrenica Massacre. Former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic died soon before his trial at the Hague for crimes that included genocide concluded; former Bosnian president Radovan Karadiic was indicted for genocide and is currently a wanted fugitive, whereabouts unknown.
• Rwandan genocide, 1994: 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus killed. One could argue that Jean Kambanda, who pled guilty to charges of genocide in 1998, was, technically, the first head of state to be found guilty of the ultimate crime (he later appealed, saying he wasn't aware of the charges to which he admitted guilt, but the verdict was upheld). But the Rwandan genocide started after the country's internationally-recognized president, Juvénal Habyarimana, was assassinated, and Kambanda was the "interim prime minister" of the caretaker government that perpetrated the crimes during its 100-day rule, not a legitimate national leader.
• Darfur, present: So far, the international community has been hobbled in its reaction to the genocide in Darfur by institutional limitations and tensions remaining from the Iraq war. Although it's universally recognized that the militias that have slaughtered tens of thousands in Darfur are backed by Sudan's government, they nevertheless provide a legal cut-out between the bloodshed in Darfur and the government in Khartoum that will make the future prosecution of Sudan's leaders, including president Omar al-Bashir, difficult.

After the Holocaust, the world said "never again." 55 years after that promise was codified under international law, Saddam Hussein could have been the first leader to ever pay a price for the crime. Instead, he'll hang for a far, far lesser offense -- a run-of-the-mill bit of savagery like any of a hundred others committed by dozens of other dictators. It may be something that few care about right now, but over the long run I think history will record it as a shameful abrogation of responsibility on the part of the U.S.-led coalition and the fledgling Iraqi government.

* I put "Iraqi law" in quotes for a reason. Human Rights Watch said that Iraqi jurists and lawyers lacked "an understanding of international criminal law," and Scott Horton, an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Law School who monitored the trial, said: "In my experience, everything that comes out of Baghdad is very carefully prepared for U.S. domestic consumption .... There is a team of American lawyers working as special legal advisers out of the U.S. embassy, who drive the tribunal."

** What does or does not qualify as an act of genocide is hotly contested. An old professor of mine argued that a literal reading of the Genocide Convention reveals dozens of acts since its passage that would qualify as genocides. The nine I listed are those where something approaching a consensus exists. Feel free to debate my choices or ommissions in the comments (here's the legal definition).

Tagged as: iraq, genocide, international law, saddam hussein

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.