Re: Saddam Hussein… should he go free or executed???
Doesn’t matter…Pakistan is supporting USA right now…Where ever USA goes ,Pakistan would go…
Re: Saddam Hussein… should he go free or executed???
Ya & US lost 55,000 Soldiers in Vietnam war…Should Lynda B johnson,JFK & Richard Nixon be executed for that???
Re: Saddam Hussein… should he go free or executed???
For those of you who have missed many posts regarding Saddam. After the first Gulf War, there was an unusual opportunity to collect evidence against Saddam. The Kurdish Peshmerga captured a number of police stations and security installations, and 18 tons of documentation was smuggled out of Iraq. Human Rights Watch estimates that the “Anfal” campaigns killed between 50,000 and 100,000 Kurds. The Kurds have documented over 184,000 “disappeared”. For those of you who are not familiar, I have posted some of the executive summary of this extraordinary documentation of Saddams’ Kurdish Genocide. The Baathists, much like the Nazi’s were sticklers for documantion, yet Saddam was never indicted.
Preface & Acknowledgements
Occasionally, opportunity can grow out of tragedy. For Middle East Watch, the opportunity to carry out human rights research in northern Iraq for the first time opened up unexpectedly, in the wake of the tumultuous, heart-wrenching events of early 1991 familiar to most readers from their television sets. As Iraqi government troops fell back in the face of advancing allied troops and Kurdish peshmerga fighters, returning along with civilian refugees from the Turkish and Iranian borders, it became evident that Baghdad’s long-standing ban on access to the Kurdish region by independent investigators had been broken – by force majeure. How long the window of opportunity would stay open no one could predict.
The debilitating uncertainty remains. For the Iraqi Kurds, their future as an often-threatened minority as well as their lives are at risk. As of this writing, a severe economic squeeze, resulting from a combination of UN sanctions against Iraq and an internal blockade imposed by government forces, threatens to produce mass starvation among the 3.5 million inhabitants of the Kurdish rebel-controlled enclave. Government troops massed along a ceasefire line could easily reconquer the region before the West had a chance to come to the Kurds’ aid.
For Middle East Watch, a driving consideration over the past two years has been whether time would permit adequate research to be conducted to obtain reliable information that could both convince international public opinion and, later, satisfy a court of law. Although interim reports have previously been released about the Anfal1, with thepublication of this book, the first objective has been accomplished. Although there is persuasive evidence that virtually all are dead, whether the fate of the many tens of thousands of Kurdish civilians “disappeared” by government forces during 1988 can be definitively settled anytime soon remains to be seen. Much depends on the future course of internal Iraqi politics.
Allegations about enormous abuses against the Kurds by government security forces had been circulating in the West for years before the events of 1991; Kurdish rebels had spoken of 4,000 destroyed villages and an estimated 182,000 disappeared persons during 1988 alone. The phenomenon of the Anfal, the official military codename used by the government in its public pronouncements and internal memoranda, was well known inside Iraq, especially in the Kurdish region. As all the horrific details have emerged, this name has seared itself into popular consciousness – much as the Nazi German Holocaust did with its survivors. The parallels are apt, and often chillingly close.
Fragmented by their mountainous geography, their own political fractiousness, and the divide-and-rule policies of regional governments, at the time, few Kurds appreciated the highly organized and comprehensive nature of the Anfal. And for obvious reasons, prior to October 1991, when Kurdish rebel leaders unexpectedly found themselves temporary masters of much of their traditional lands, there were few hard facts for external organizations to rely upon.
In its February 1990 report, Human Rights in Iraq, Middle East Watch reconstructed what took place from exile sources, with what in retrospect turned out to be a high degree of accuracy. Even so, some of the larger claims made by the Kurds seemed too fantastic to credit. As it transpires, this has been a humbling, learning process for all those foreigners who followed Kurdish affairs from abroad. Western reporters, relief workers, human rights organizations and other visitors to Iraqi Kurdistan have come to realize that the overall scale of the suffering inflicted on the Kurds by their government was by no means exaggerated.
With this latest report, painstakingly compiled over eighteen months, Middle East Watch believes it can now demonstrate convincingly a deliberate intent on the part of the government of President Saddam Hussein to destroy, through mass murder, part of Iraq’s Kurdishminority. The Kurds are indisputably a distinct ethnic group2, separate from the majority Arab population of Iraq, and they were targeted during the Anfal as Kurds. Two government instruments – the October 1987 national census and the declaration of “prohibited areas”, covering more and more of the Kurdish countryside like a crazy-patterned quilt – were institutional foundations of this policy. These instruments were implemented against the background of nearly two decades of government-directed “Arabization”, in which mixed-race districts, or else lands that Baghdad regarded as desirable or strategically important, saw their Kurdish population diluted by Arab migrant farmers provided with ample incentives to relocate, and guarded by government troops.
The Kurds bear arms as a matter of course, and have regularly resorted to them when thwarted in their demands for greater political and cultural autonomy. Indeed, the Anfal cannot be understood without an awareness of the half century of Kurdish armed struggle against the central government of Iraq, through various political regimes. In the early 1970s, the Ba’athists, still uncertain about their hold on power, went much further than their predecessors in recognizing those demands --offering a substantial degree of self-government and recognizing the Kurds’ separate identity in a new Provisional Constitution. That constitution is still in force, and Baghdad still maintains the fiction that “its” autonomous region, with its own Kurdish administration, is in force. This puppet administration sits in government-controlled Kirkuk, and regularly denounces the “foreign-backed usurpers” in the Kurdish rebel-run territory.
The logic of the Anfal, however, cannot be divorced either from the Iran-Iraq War. After 1986, both the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), the two major parties, received support from the Iranian government and sometimes took part in joint military raids against Iraqi government positions; the KDP also had a rear base inside Iran. That Baghdad was entitled to engage in counterinsurgency action, to wrest control over Iraq’s northeast border region and much of the mountainous interior from rebels, is undisputed. What Middle East Watch contends is that, in doing so, the central government went much further than was required to restore its authoritythrough legitimate military action. In the process, Saddam Hussein’s regime committed a panoply of war crimes, together with crimes against humanity and genocide.
While many readers will be familiar with the attack on Halabja, in March 1988, in which up to 5,000 Kurdish civilians died – the incident caused a brief international furor – they may be surprised to learn that the first use of poison gas against the Kurds by the central government occurred eleven months earlier. All told, Middle East Watch has recorded forty separate attacks on Kurdish targets, some of them involving multiple sorties over several days, between April 1987 and August 1988. Each of these attacks were war crimes, involving the use of a banned weapon; the fact that noncombatants were often the victims added to the offence.
**By our estimate, in Anfal at least 50,000 and possibly as many as 100,000 persons, many of them women and children, were killed out of hand between February and September 1988. Their deaths did not come in the heat of battle – “collateral damage” in the military euphemism. Nor were they acts of aberration by individual commanders whose excesses passed unnoticed, or unpunished, by their superiors. Rather, these Kurds were systematically put to death in large numbers on the orders of the central government in Baghdad – days, sometimes weeks, after being rounded-up in villages marked for destruction or else while fleeing from army assaults in “prohibited areas”. **
While a minority had been combatants, or else served as a “backing force” for the rebel parties, the vast majority of the dead were noncombatants whose death resulted from the fact that they inhabited districts declared off-limits by the Iraqi government. Underlining the deliberate, preplanned nature of the Anfal, those responsible for their murder by firing squad were usually members of élite security units unconnected to the forces responsible for the Kurds’ capture; in other words, while one hand would sweep, the other would dispose of what the regime considered to be the “garbage”.
http://hrw.org/reports/1993/iraqanfal/ANFALPRE.htm
Re: Saddam Hussein… should he go free or executed???
There is no comparison between the two wars for the following reasons
1-It is not just about the number of lives lost it is about the justification of war saddam had no right to attack a country in the midst of a revolution when he had agreed to the settlement at algiers about shattularab.Intervention in vietnam was crucial to US strategy in SEAsia during the 60s
2-Saddam openly violated the rules of warfare in the 8yr long war including use of CW you could argue that the US used defoliants like agent orange in V too but nerve gas is far more lethal and also the US was not fighting a regular army but VC irregulars and the NVA never followed the rules of geneva convention either.
3-If the US disregarded rules of warfare in V the commies were even worse check out the barbaric treatment they meted out to the germans,french and US soldiers in Indochina.
Re: Saddam Hussein... should he go free or executed???
^^ i don't see any weight in your arguements above.....you can't count iran-iraq war under Saddams crimes.......
Re: Saddam Hussein... should he go free or executed???
Was Hitlers decision to invade Poland a crime? Saddam, and the Baathist party wanted to form a Pan-Arab nation, by force if necessary, from Egypt to Iran, and south to Saudi Arabia. Screw the minorities involved. Saddam thought he was the second coming of Saladin.
Re: Saddam Hussein… should he go free or executed???
Why not? it was purely a war of aggression,isnt that a crime?
what do think about the 1990 war? another of his glittering achivement 
and why were you comparing vietnam war to iran-iraq war it makes no sense
Re: Saddam Hussein… should he go free or executed???
1990 Kuwait invasion was a blunder,an act that Saddam & his affiliates committed…It was such a mistake that endangered even the very existence of Iraq…I didn’t compared Iraq-Iran,US-Vietnam war…I compared the people who staged these wars…& in my opinion none of these should be charged for these…as these are the wars where another /country/partner is involved(Iran in Iran-Iraq’s war case & USSR in US-Vietnam war)…if you are going to try one for these wars…the others should be tried too…
Re: Saddam Hussein… should he go free or executed???
okay so Iran should be held responsible for defending itself against saddam?
and the casulties caused in this war are not saddam’s crime alone is that what you are saying?
Any crime committed by saddam is simply a “blunder”