|
by Barry Lando
On June 24th in Baghdad the Special Iraqi Tribunal is due to hand down a verdict against several of Saddam Hussein's officials charged with the slaughter of some 180,000 Kurds during the Al Anfal campaign in 1988.
The tribunal was established to prosecute those guilty of crimes against humanity during Saddam's reign. Much as the Nuremburg Tribunal did with the Nazis, It was also supposedly meant to educate Iraqis and the world about Saddam and his barbarous regime and, at the same time, to bring a kind of closure to that nightmarish epoch. That at least was the fiction. The fact is that many of those complicit in Saddam's crimes--some of the world's most prominent leaders and businessmen, past and present--are missing from the dock. The full story of Saddam's crimes will never be told.
Which is just as planned. From the start, the tribunal was established, financed and advised by the United States, the same power that once helped arm Saddam, encouraged him and stymied attempts of others to rein him in. Even most of the forensic investigations--the excavation of mass graves and the examination of mountains of documents--were carried out under the supervision of U.S. investigators. To make the rules of the game perfectly clear, one of the tribunal's regulations, constantly overlooked by the media, is that only Iraqi citizens and residents can be charged with crimes before that court.
It is thus understandable that there has been no mention in the Baghdad courtroom of foreign complicity with Saddam's crimes, such as the genocide of the Kurds. What is surprising, though, is how thoroughly the American media have played along with that charade.
Take the dramatic account by John Burns in The New York Times of an event this past January when prosecutors presented damning recorded evidence of Saddam and his officials coldbloodedly discussing the use of chemical weapons against the Kurds.
One of the voices was identified by prosecutors as that of Saddam's cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, who came to be known as Chemical Ali, scornfully dismissing concern that foreign powers might react to Saddam's using chemical weapons against the Kurds.
"I will strike them [the Kurds] with chemical weapons and kill them all," he was heard saying. "Who is going to say anything? The international community? A curse on the international community!"
Some reporter might have pointed out that Chemical Ali had good reason for such assurances: Beginning in 1983--five years before the attacks on the Kurds--the U.S. had willfully ignored the fact that Iraqis were using chemical weapons against the Iranians. But more than just ignore the fact, for years the administration continued to block all attempts by the United Nations and later the U.S. Congress to condemn Saddam or impose sanctions against Iraq. Indeed, American satellite intelligence was used by the Iraqis to target Iranian troops. The U.S. continued to furnish that intelligence in 1988, even after it realized Saddam was also using chemicals against his own Kurds.
American officials also refused to meet with Kurdish leaders who had evidence of the atrocities. Saddam, after all, was America's de facto ally at the time in the war against Khomeini's Iran. And even after the end of that war, until just weeks prior to Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, George H.W. Bush and James Baker were still intent on wooing the tyrant with trade and credits. They saw Iraq as a major market for U.S. exports, not to mention as a prize for American oil companies. Both West and East, of course, had supplied Saddam with billions of dollars worth of weapons--of all kinds.
Indeed, while the Al Anfal trial was going on in Baghdad, Dutch prosecutors in The Hague presented a document from Saddam Hussein's secret service praising a Dutch businessman, Frans van Anraat, for "rendering outstanding
|
|
