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Indict Saddam
By Kenneth Roth
The Bush administration’s frustration with a decade of increasingly porous sanctions against Iraq has led to active consideration of military action. Yet one alternative has yet to be seriously tried – indicting Saddam Hussein for his many atrocities, particularly the 1988 genocide against Iraqi Kurds.
As deposed Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic discovered, indictment for grave abuses can delegitimize a dictator and undermine his grasp on power. Even if Saddam escapes arrest, his indictment for heinous crimes would demonstrate that Iraq’s desire for normal international relations is a pipe dream so long as Saddam is at the helm. That would weaken Saddam’s support among the many governments that have been lining up for years to do commercial deals with him in anticipation of an end to sanctions. It would also encourage Iraqi officials to overthrow him.
Cowardice
Unfortunately, governmental cowardice and opportunism have stymied past attempts to indict Saddam, as Human Rights Watch learned during its intensive efforts to bring him to justice in the 1990s. At the top of any indictment should be Saddam’s 1988 genocidal Anfal campaign against Iraqi Kurds, described by Jeffrey Goldberg in this week’s New Yorker. Named after a Koranic verse justifying pillage of the property of infidels, the Anfal campaign unfolded as the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war was winding down. Iraqi Kurds had taken advantage of Saddam’s preoccupation with Iran to seize control of parts of mountainous northern Iraq. But as soon as Iraqi troops could be withdrawn from the Iranian front, Saddam shifted them to the north.
Several thousand Kurdish villages were destroyed, forcing residents to live in appalling camps. In at least 40 cases, Iraqi forces under Saddam’s cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, used chemical weapons to kill and chase Kurds from their villages. Then, during the Anfal campaign from February to September 1988, Iraqi troops swept through the highlands of Iraqi Kurdistan rounding up everyone who remained in government-declared “prohibited zones.” Some 100,000 Kurds, mostly men and boys, were trucked to remote sites and executed. Only seven are known to have escaped.
The full scope of the Anfal horror became known only after Saddam’s defeat in the Gulf War. The Iraqi military’s withdrawal from the region in October 1991 after the imposition of a no-fly zone made it feasible for the first time in years for outsiders to reach the area.
Human Rights Watch investigators took advantage of this opening to enter northern Iraq and document Saddam’s crimes. Some 350 witnesses and survivors were interviewed. Mass graves were exhumed. And Kurdish rebels were convinced to hand over some 18 tons of documents that they had seized during the brief post-war uprising from Iraqi police stations. These documents were airlifted to Washington, where Human Rights Watch researchers poured through this treasure trove of information about the inner workings of a ruthless regime.
With this extraordinarily detailed evidence of genocide, Human Rights Watch launched a campaign to bring Saddam to justice. At the time the U.N. Security Council was creating special tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, but there was no consensus for similar action on Iraq. France and Russia, each with extensive business interests in Iraq, threatened to wield their veto. China, worried about analogies to its treatment of Tibetans, was disinclined to support an International Criminal Tribunal for Iraq. With no International Criminal Court then in the works, and the Pinochet option of exercising universal jurisdiction in national courts not yet widely recognized, the prospect of criminal prosecution was remote.
http://www.hrw.org/editorials/2002/iraq_032202.htm