Star-Telegram | 10/24/2005 | Justice in Baghdad

Posted on Mon, Oct. 24, 2005

Justice in Baghdad

By FRIDA GHITIS

Special to the Star-Telegram


AMSTERDAM - In cafés throughout the Netherlands, Iraqi refugees clustered around TV sets, watching the start of Saddam Hussein's trial in Baghdad's Green Zone. In the smoky gathering places of their adopted land, they stared nervously at the shaky images and strained to make out the barely audible sound of proceedings against the man whose agents had snatched their relatives in the middle of the night, the man who turned their country into a land of dread, torture and perpetual war.

Then they heard the Western commentators argue whether Saddam would get a fair trial, or whether the proceedings should be dismissed as political theater or "victor's justice."

As survivors of the Iraqi dictator heard the commentators expound on the flaws of Iraq's efforts to try Saddam at home, prosecutors at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, in The Hague, dealt with their own tribulations in the trial of another deposed president.

The day before Saddam faced his judges, the prosecutor in the case of Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president, warned that the trial, which began in early 2002, could take another four or five years.

Milosevic, charged with 66 counts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, is believed to have orchestrated mass murders and other ethnic cleansing as Yugoslavia came apart in the 1990s. He has turned his trial into a high-level international charade.

The U.N. tribunal, presumably the model that the Iraqis should be following, has scrupulously protected his rights, and the cunning Milosevic has exploited the rules to absurdity.

Legal scholars argue that The Hague is creating a treasure of useful jurisprudence. But the endless trial is hardly one that Iraqis would wish to emulate.

Undoubtedly, the Baghdad process is highly flawed. But Iraqis had every right to resist sending Saddam to the Netherlands. No matter how flawed their trial, the Iraqi judges -- who traveled to the Netherlands, Britain and Italy to train in international law -- are trying to make this an example of justice rather than revenge.

This is no kangaroo court, and it is certainly nothing that the Arab world has ever seen. Until now, the very concept of a living "former president" was almost unheard of in the dictator-ridden Middle East.

The many regimes in the region where dictators still rule will try to discredit the proceedings, as will many in the West who deplore America's Iraq war.

Iraqi refugees watching from the Netherlands or anywhere else in the world are not the ones rushing to dismiss the importance of this trial. They are quick to remind anyone who will listen just how much they suffered under Saddam's rule, in a regime that killed so many of its citizens that it needed bulldozers to dispose of the bodies.

That was back when Abu Ghraib was a place infamous for the torture inflicted on countless thousands of Iraqis by Saddam's henchmen, before the infamy that came later, when American soldiers became the torturers.

Human Rights Watch conservatively puts the number of Iraqis in Saddam's mass graves at almost 300,000. Saddam's Iraq was a country that launched wars that killed more than a million people. It was a regime that killed 5,000 of its own with chemical weapons, long before such weapons became synonymous with bad U.S. intelligence.

When the trial resumes Nov. 28, Iraqis deserve to see the man who turned ancient Mesopotamia into a modern killing field stand to face justice. They deserve to tell the stories from a generation of sorrow to a world that will not dismiss their suffering simply because it inconveniences current political goals.

And if Iraq is ever to move forward, Iraqis of every sect and tribe should see the incontrovertible record of how each segment of their society suffered the brutality of Saddam's sadistic rule. The wounds from Saddam's rule are infecting today's conflict. They must be lanced and cleaned. And Iraqi judges, in the end, may prove better surgeons than the robed ones in The Hague.


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