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Under "Iraqi law*," Saddam Hussein must hang before January 27 for ordering the deaths of 148 people in the town of Dujail in 1982. CBS reports that the execution will be recorded, but it's not clear if the tape will be broadcast.
As I've written before (here, here, here and here), the trial was a joke -- an utter sham. And while Saddam Hussein, the decrepit old man, doesn't deserve much in the way of sympathy, the fact that the Bushies -- in order to score domestic political points -- threw away an opportunity to bring to justice Saddam Hussein, the former president of Iraq who ordered the gassing of as many as 30,000 Kurds, will go down as one of the great tragedies in a war that's been replete with them.
Saddam couldn't have hoped for a better end than a swift death after an illegitimate trial by Western occupiers, or a better legacy than that which will result from it.
Saddam might have been tried for genocide in proceedings that conformed to at least the minimal standards of due process. And he would have been found guilty, sending a loud message to future dictators. Instead, his death will be perceived by much of the world as a textbook case of victor's justice -- the final act in a decades-long dance with the West in which Saddam ended up martyred on the altar of Pan-Arabism after an illegal invasion by the U.S. and Britain.
It may not be a very accurate portrait of his reign, but it'll gain traction as Iraq continues to fester and the Sunni-Arab world continues to sweat the emergence of a "Shiite Crescent" in the ME. And it'll gain more currency if Iraq's Sunni insurgents follow through on their promise to react to the execution by canceling ongoing peace talks with the Iraqi government and the U.S. and launching a new wave of violence.
Let's put the opportunity that we passed up into context. Since 1951, when the Genocide Convention came into effect, there have been 9 genocidal campaigns, including the gassing of the Kurds in Halabja**. To date, no head of state has ever been held accountable for any of them -- Saddam might have been the first in history (see note about Rwanda, below).
Consider what's happened to the other heads-of-state accused of the crime:
* Pakistan's Bangladesh War, 1971: Pakistani president Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan wiped out between 300,000 and 3 million people while fighting Bengali nationalists in then East Pakistan. Tried for other crimes -- not genocide -- he was placed under house arrest for five years, and died a free man in 1980. He was buried with honors. A case against the Pakistani armed forces was filed in the Federal Court of Australia this year-- twenty-six years after Khan's death -- for genocide and war crimes.
* Burundi Genocide 1972: between 100,000 and 150,000 Burundian Hutus were massacred. Former Burundian president Michel Micombero, under whose regime the bloodshed took place, died of a heart attack in exile in Somalia in 1983. * Cambodia, 1975-1979: Under Pol Pot, nearly a quarter of the population died in Cambodia's "killing fields." After years of exile in Thailand and a few years under house arrest, the Khmer Rouge announced in 1998 that they'd hand Pol Pot over to an international tribunal (one opposed by the U.S.). Pot died the night that the decision was announced, either from a heart attack or suicide, depending on whom you ask. * Indonesian-occupied East Timor, 1975-1999: Under Haji Mohammad Suharto, about a quarter of the East Timorese population were killed by Indonesian security forces. Suharto, who came to power in what historian Peter Scott called "a three-phase right-wing coup -- one which had been both publicly encouraged and secretly assisted by U.S. spokesmen and officials" -- lives in seclusion today. Attempts to bring him to justice have failed due to his "poor health."
* Ethiopia, the "Red Terror" of 1977-78: under Mengistu Haile Mariam, as many as 1.5 million Ethiopian opponents killed in one of the worst acts of genocide in history. This month, after a 12-year trial, Mariam was found guilty of genocide. But he's lived in exile in Zimbabwe under the protection of Robert Mugabe since 1995, and attempts to extradite him have so far failed.
* Balkans, 1990s: several mass killings including the Srebrenica Massacre. Former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic died soon before his trial at the Hague for crimes that included genocide concluded; former Bosnian president Radovan Karadiic was indicted for genocide and is currently a wanted fugitive, whereabouts unknown.
* Rwandan genocide, 1994: 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus killed. One could argue that Jean Kambanda, who pled guilty to charges of genocide in 1998, was, technically, the first head of state to be found guilty of the ultimate crime (he later appealed, saying he wasn't aware of the charges to which he admitted guilt, but the verdict was upheld). But the Rwandan genocide started after the country's internationally-recognized president, Juvénal Habyarimana, was assassinated, and Kambanda was the "interim prime minister" of the caretaker government that perpetrated the crimes during its 100-day rule, not a legitimate national leader.
* Darfur, present: So far, the international community has been hobbled in its reaction to the genocide in Darfur by institutional limitations and tensions remaining from the Iraq war. Although it's universally recognized that the militias that have slaughtered tens of thousands in Darfur are backed by Sudan's government, they nevertheless provide a legal cut-out between the bloodshed in Darfur and the government in Khartoum that will make the future prosecution of Sudan's leaders, including president Omar al-Bashir, difficult.
After the Holocaust, the world said "never again." 55 years after that promise was codified under international law, Saddam Hussein could have been the first leader to ever pay a price for the crime. Instead, he'll hang for a far, far lesser offense -- a run-of-the-mill bit of savagery like any of a hundred others committed by dozens of other dictators. It may be something that few care about right now, but over the long run I think history will record it as a shameful abrogation of responsibility on the part of the U.S.-led coalition and the fledgling Iraqi government.
* I put "Iraqi law" in quotes for a reason. Human Rights Watch said that Iraqi jurists and lawyers lacked "an understanding of international criminal law," and Scott Horton, an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Law School who monitored the trial, said: "In my experience, everything that comes out of Baghdad is very carefully prepared for U.S. domestic consumption .... There is a team of American lawyers working as special legal advisers out of the U.S. embassy, who drive the tribunal."
** What does or does not qualify as an act of genocide is hotly contested. An old professor of mine argued that a literal reading of the Genocide Convention reveals dozens of acts since its passage that would qualify as genocides. The nine I listed are those where something approaching a consensus exists. Feel free to debate my choices or ommissions in the comments (here's the legal definition).
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In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." --Voltaire
The definitional article included in the 1948 convention stipulates:
Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
The critical element is the presence of an "intent to destroy", which can be either "in whole or in part", groups defined in terms of nationality, ethnicity, race or religion. Thus, the imposition of restrictions during the nineteen-sixties and seventies on reproduction in India, through forced sterilization in many instances, or the continuing restrictions in China, do not constitute genocidal policies as the intent is to restrict the size of groups, not to destroy existing groups in whole or in part. Policies implemented during the Third Reich respecting Jewish, Roma and Sinti groups, on the other hand, were quite clearly genocidal in terms of this article as there was a clearly stated policy indicating the presence of an intent to destroy them.. Members of all these groups were processed in extermination camps, were subjected to serious bodily and mental harm, and had conditions inflicted upon them intended to bring about their physical destruction, including starvation in ghettoes, and had measures applied to them intended to prevent births within the group (sterilization).
Many experts, legal and academic, consider these criteria deficient in various respects. Some consider that the criteria are insufficiently broad. For instance, it excludes the physical destruction of certain sub-groups that have regularly been the victims of extensive killing programs. Usually mentioned in this context are members of political or social classes, such as the bourgeoisie, the middle classes, the Kulaks and the intelligentsia. Also, the definition focuses on the physical destruction of the group. There have been many instances in which the group has physically survived but its cultural distinctiveness has been eradicated. A contemporary example is the destruction of Tibetan culture by the Chinese, or that of indigenous tribes in certain countries in South America, Paraguay and Brazil, for instance.
These and other deficiencies need to be understood in the context of the background to the passage of this convention. The term genocide is of recent derivation; etymologically, it combines the Greek for group, tribe-genos, with the Latin for killing-cide. In 1933, at a time when neither the extensiveness nor character of the barbarous practices subsequently carried out under the auspices of the Third Reich could have been foreseen, the jurist Raphael Lemkin submitted to the International Conference for Unification of Criminal Law a proposal to declare the destruction of racial, religious or social collectivities a crime in international law. In 1944 he published a monograph, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, in which he detailed the exterminatory and other practices and policies pursued by the Third Reich and its allies. He went on to argue the case for the international regulation of the "practice of extermination of nations and ethnic groups," a practice which he referred to now as genocide. Lemkin was also instrumental in lobbying United Nations officials and representatives to secure the passage of a resolution by the General Assembly affirming that "genocide is a crime under international law which the civilized world condemns, and for the commission of which principals and accomplices are punishable." The matter was referred for consideration to the UN Economic and Social Council, their deliberations culminating with the signing of the 1948 United Nations Convention on Genocide (UNCG).
There are considerable disagreements among experts concerning whether a specific complex of behaviours merits the designation genocide, even leaving aside clear-cut instances of attempts at moral appropriation of the concept. There are various reasons for this. First, like any other legal instrument, it was the outcome of negotiations between parties that held conflicting views as to the proper scope of its constituent parts. On this, see the analysis by Leo Kuper in his Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981, Chapter 2. Although Article IX allows for disputes between parties to be adjudicated by the International Court of Justice, because accusations of genocide are invariable made by one state against another, this has never occurred. Consequently, there is no body of international law to clarify the parameters of the convention.
A second reason for uncertainty as to how the concept can be fitted to particular complexes of behaviour derives from the fact that the "ideal-typical" genocidal complex that Lemkin had in mind was the destruction of European Jewry. This instance of genocide was quite clearly also uppermost in the minds of those who drafted and negotiated the UNCG. Precisely because this particular instance was so central to the genesis of the UNCG, its application to other situations has been problematic. It is quite clear that the programs devised by the Nazi regime for the Final Solution of the Jewish Question lie at the extreme of any continuum of types of mass violence aimed at inflicting significant loss on members of particular groups, whether these be religious, national, ethnical or racial. Although the massacre of Armenians by the Turks during World War I, the destruction of the intelligentsia and others by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia during 1975-1978, and the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s share some elements with the Nazi genocidal program, there are also important differences that call into question whether they meet the criteria specified by Article II of the UNCG.
[Source: S D Stein. "Genocide." In E Cashmore (ed.). Dictionary of Race and Ethnic Relations. Fourth Edition. London: Routledge, 1996]
Document compiled by Dr S D Stein
Last update 24/06/02 16:47:20
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In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." --Voltaire
About half of that article discusses how hard it is to apply those rules to cases besides the Nazi genocide of WWII.
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We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to try to make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered it.
In the grand scheme of things it's like a guy stealing you blind, being aquitted and then he gets run over by a bus.
Long strange road, same destination.
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At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
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We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to try to make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered it.
It simply means he got what was comming to him, I don't feel sorry for the guy even though how it happened wasn't legit IMO.
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At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
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