BAGHDAD, 5 October 2003 — Much still needs to be done to rebuild a functioning legal system in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the months of lawlessness that followed, Iraq’s justice minister said yesterday. “In any country where such a major political collapse takes place, the legal system cannot restore its activity and stability in such a short period,” Hashem Al-Shibli told Reuters.
“We are in an exceptional situation and only a few months have passed since the formation of the new state.” But he said judges who persevered despite the former government’s efforts to undermine judicial impartiality were helping Iraq’s courts to get back to work — gradually.
Shibli said the authorities in Iraq were working on laws governing the jurisdiction of a special court set up to rule on crimes and human rights by members of Saddam’s regime. “It will specify these crimes ... and will also set up special investigative courts to hear crimes committed by the old regime,” he said.
Shibli was speaking after the first postwar meeting of Iraq’s Judicial Council, the country’s top judicial body which was disbanded in 1977 during the rule of Saddam’s Baath Party. The council is made up of top judges and prosecutors, many of whom also served under Saddam. Ministry of Justice sources said most of the senior judges in civil courts who served during Saddam’s rule have been reinstated back in their jobs.
“We thank ambassador (Paul) Bremer for his enthusiasm in reconstituting this judicial council in a record period,” said Midhat Al-Mahmoud, the new head of the council. “This is a great victory for justice ... and a bright spot in the history of Iraqi judiciary that suffered from the old regime’s suspension of many of its laws.”
Iraq’s legal system is slowly recovering from the chaos that ensued after Saddam was toppled in April. Most prewar case files have been retrieved despite large-scale looting of the main Justice Ministry complex.
Although many courts have resumed work, many ordinary people complain about slowness in delivering justice. Some Iraqis also complain that US troops working alongside Iraqi police are often too lenient with criminals. Detainees held by the US military for attacks on their troops were outside the jurisdiction of Iraqi law, Shibli said.
Meanwhile, the first soldiers of Iraq’s new army graduated from training yesterday, parading round the harsh desert camp where they trained and promising to be part of a force that will serve its people, not oppress them.
As angry former soldiers from Saddam Hussein’s disbanded army rioted in Baghdad and Basra, clashing with occupying forces while collecting redundancy payments, politicians applauded the first battalion of the army that will replace them.
“Our army will be for the defense of our nation and all of our citizens,” Iyad Allawi, current president of the Governing Council, said at the ceremony in Kirkush, near the Iranian border northeast of Baghdad.
“It will be an army for Iraq and for the protection of Iraq. An army for peace and reconstruction,” he said. The vast army which Saddam used to support his regime, thought to number as many as 400,000, collapsed in the weeks after the US-led invasion of Iraq in March. Some fought and died, most turned and fled.
The new army is largely made up of former soldiers — about 75 percent of the new graduates served under Saddam. The rest are either Kurdish Peshmerga fighters — who fought Saddam’s troops — or former civilians.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” said Lt. Col. Salman Asi Talabani, who spent 13 years with the Peshmerga.
Iraqi police arrested yesterday two members of the former Iraqi intelligence services suspected of “plotting” to attack a police station in this northern oil center, a police official in Kirkuk told AFP. Maj. Adnan Mahmoud Saleh said two men in a car “drove past Al-Mikdad police station more than four times and were acting suspicious,” in the morning prompting his men to open fire at the vehicle.
The pair shot back and sped away but the police pursued them and were able to arrest them outside the city, he said. They found two handguns in the car, he added. The arrests came a day after Al-Mikdad police station in Kirkuk was attacked when gunmen pulled up in a car and sprayed gunfire, igniting a 10-minute shootout, and then sped away without leaving casualties.
Saleh identified the arrested men as Shiraz Zeidan, 32, and his brother Ahmad Zeidan, 27, and said they were “members of the former Iraqi intelligence services” who had come to Kirkuk to carry out attacks. The police questioned the men and they admitted they carried out “many attacks” in Kirkuk over the past few days, Saleh said, but he did not provide further details.
