Double standards from Iraqi judges

Opinion from the Sunday Herald :

16 Mar, 2009

REALPOLITIK: Trevor Royle

Sometimes it's easier to win a war than win the peace - Iraq was the prime example of recent times. Not only did it expose the US neoconservative foreign policy as wrongheaded and downright dangerous, but it showed that the coalition had no idea whatsoever what to do with the country once the expected cheap military victory had been achieved. In place of the cheering crowds promised by Iraqi exiles wearing rose-tinted glasses, there was a sullen population which was soon up in arms against the infidel invaders.

As the country descended into chaos the only hopeful shaft of light came from the knowledge that Saddam Hussein and his henchmen would face punishment before the courts. So it proved. Once Saddam and the rest of the "most wanted" had been rounded up, they were put through the judicial process and due punishment was meted out to them; some going to the gallows the others facing hefty prison sentences. With the experience of the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal to draw on, the US-led coalition wisely left the matter of punishment in Iraqi hands.

The jurisdiction of that 1945-46 court is still hotly debated. At the time, many legal experts were concerned about its legitimacy and its capacity to impose the death sentence, feeling that any trial of the vanquished by the victors could never be impartial. Just as bad, why execute one villain such as the ghastly and incurable anti-Semite Julius Streicher while giving a soft prison sentence to the feline technocrat Albert Speer, who as one of Hitler's slave masters was indirectly responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews? Far better and far safer, argued Nuremberg's critics, to provide the sentence of death in perpetual exile that Napoleon received in the previous century.
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In the end, the issue was decided by the notion that however flawed the trials might have been there was a sense of catharsis in the punishments, that the evil of Nazism had to face justice in a court of law. Later, the fledgling United Nations passed Resolution 95 which enshrined the Nuremberg principles in international law, although it was not until 1993 that it was activated to deal with the war crimes in the wake of the conflict in the Balkans. That uncertain background meant that it was spot-on to give the Iraqis the right to deal with their own villains. A tribunal of five judges was appointed and their set to work with a will. Their remit was quite simple: to try those suspected of committing major crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in general during the Saddam regime.

To begin with, the judges seemed to be on the case but last week there was what might be called an Albert Speer moment. In the dock was Tariq Aziz, the silver-haired deputy who was regularly wheeled out to be the acceptable face of Saddam's regime. Worldly and a fluent English speaker, he was a familiar presence on Western television screens; it helped that he was a Christian, though that was probably less a matter of conviction than an accident of birth. In common with earlier defendants he was on trial for a specific crime, in his case the execution of 42 merchants accused of illegal price-hiking in 1992. For his pains, Aziz was sentenced to 15 years in jail, a relatively lenient punishment even though it could be terminal for a man in his seventies. There was little hard evidence that Aziz was directly involved in this shameful act which was sparked by a reaction to UN food sanctions, but few would doubt that he must have been party to it.

While a vote against any decision taken by Saddam was to invite a bullet in the back of the head, it remains true that Aziz was inextricably mixed up with Saddam's regime. He wore a Ba'ath Party uniform, was a member of the revolutionary command council and was privy to all its decisions. In the strictest legal sense, that does not make him automatically guilty, but it hardly means that he is a lilywhite innocent. Watching the proceedings, it was difficult to avoid the impression that Aziz owed the sentence to a perception that he was more cultivated than Saddam's ruffians. As evidence look no further than the death sentences handed down to Saddam's half brothers Sabawi Ibrahim Hassan and Watban Ibrahim Hassan for their involvement in the same incident.

Getting such things right is never easy. At the same time, another Iraqi court gave a harsh sentence to Muntazar al-Zaidi, the journalist who abused George W Bush during the US president's last visit to Baghdad. Three years for throwing a shoe but five times that amount for helping to destroy a country: some sentences simply don't add up.