When he appeared at a preliminary judicial hearing last July, to be advised of his legal rights, Saddam Hussein asked the presiding judge by what law he was being tried. When the judge, the double-chinned, bald-headed, paunchy Salem Chalabi, nephew of the now disgraced Ahmad Chalabi, replied that he was being tried by Iraqi law, the ex-president of Iraq replied disdainfully, as if to invoke Louis XIV’s claim that “L’etat, cet moi”: “Then you are trying me by the law that I have enacted.”
Mr. Hussein, it is now established, admired Joseph Stalin and marveled at how the Russian tyrant, despite the many atrocities he had committed while he ruled the Soviet Union, managed to die in his bed.
Well, if it’s up to the Americans, who will continue to call the shots in the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates for many years to come, the former Iraqi leader will not do the same. What they have in store for him is a spectacular trial, under UN cover, followed by a firing squad.
But the UN is not having any of it, and will not lend its cover to any court that is empowered to impose the death penalty.
Last week, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan refused a US request to assist Iraqi judges and prosecutors seeking to try the former Iraqi leader and his lieutenants for war crimes, since the new Iraqi special tribunal includes a capital punishment provision opposed by the UN. Moreover, Annan said the tribunal, established in December 2003 by the US-appointed Governing Council, fails to meet minimum standards of justice.
The secretary-general refused a Bush administration appeal for the UN to send some judges from its war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia to a weeklong training conference in London to train members of the Iraqi tribunal.
The conference, attended by the 42 judges and examining magistrates appointed by Iraq, and secretly flown to the British capital under security, ended on Oct. 20, mostly on a flat note, since most Europeans abhor capital punishment and never deigned to lend the conferees any support.
International legal experts have questioned the competence of the Iraqi tribunal since its inception, as they questioned the skills of Iraqi lawyers, who clearly have little experience in handling complex war crimes cases, to conduct a fair trial.
And Saddam Hussein, despite the heinous crimes he is accused of having committed, is entitled to a fair trial. But the Iraqi court’s founding statute, according to UN lawyers and independent human rights advocates, denies the accused access to an attorney during interrogations and court appearances, and permits the admission (in the same manner as do Israeli courts that try Palestinian prisoners) of testimony obtained through coercion.
We should all have a problem with a statute that contradicts UN fair trial standards, a problem that, we now learn, could have been settled last year had the US allowed the UN to participate in the statute’s drafting.
According to Richard Dicker, an expert on international law at Human Rights Watch who has been following the case from the outset, the Americans refused to do that. “Now they’re looking to bring in the UN at the second-to-the-last scene in the play,” he said, “when everything has been decided.”
I for one have another problem with this trial — projected not to start till 2006 — a problem that stems from my opposition to the death penalty. Saddam Hussein may be accused, and finally found guilty, of acts so vile and so destructive that they resulted in the killing, by the lowest serious estimate, of at least 280,000 Iraqis during his miserable 24 years in power, but to kill a man who kills is still to kill, to entrust the quick of the human spirit to the inflated currency, the cheap thrill, as it were, of revenge.
It is not, obviously, my aim here to engage readers of this column in a debate about why capital punishment goes against the grain of rationality and decency. But I want to say that the more humanizing forces our culture is animated by, the more these forces are likely to be transferable to our social and human conduct — and the less we are driven by the barbarous need to put a man in an electric chair, to hang him by a rope, to stand him up against a wall before a firing squad, and to chop his head off by a guillotine.
The most suitable punishment for Saddam Hussein — a punishment with an ancillary edifying experience for the people of Iraq — is the holding of a trial that calm, methodical and astute prosecutors will use to highlight the banality of the man’s evil, to narrate the ravaged history of modern Iraq, to explain how Baathist tyranny sprung from historical realities and habits of vision alien to Iraqis, to assure ordinary folk that the midnight knock on innumerable doors — when men were dragged off to torture chambers and to mass graves — are gone for ever, and that if it were to return, they will be entitled, even obligated, to grab those oppressors by the scruff of the neck and rub their noses in the vomit of whatever evil they perpetrate.
Perhaps the lessons of the trial will be that Iraqis will be enjoined in the future against bellowing at a dictator, as they had bellowed in unison at Saddam: “With our spirit, with our blood, we support you, Oh, (fill in here the name of the dictator-de-jour.”)
Saddam should be made to stand in the dock, with cameras zoomed in on his now grizzled visage, his scawny neck, his matted beard and hunched back, and broadcast the images into every living room in Iraq, indeed the entire Arab world.
This was the man who, while leading Iraqis from one disaster to another, projected himself as a titan, a heroic Arab figure, while he from time to time theatrically dressed as a Bedouin tribal chief, as a warrior prince, as a latter-day Saladin, as a modern reincarnation of the King of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, as the mythical Arab leader who stood up to the American empire and, in a puerile fashion statement, as the supercool dude in a Runyonesque hat and a Humphry Bogart cigar dangling from the corner of his mouth.
Iraqis will then realize that evil, like buffoonery, is indeed banal.
If the trial of Saddam Hussein is conducted with the utmost regard for legal scruple — and trust me on this one, it will remain for a long while to come a big if — it will do more for Iraqis than discredit the notion that Saddam Hussein was the personification of their nation; it will force them to hear the whole truth about the regime’s savageries and put an end to the dreams of Baathist revanchists — should there be any of these lost souls still floating around — and legitimize instead the dreams of folk who want to see a new Iraq defined by a social contract between ruler and ruled, by social justice and freedom, by checks and balances, and by the rule of law.
Last week, the Economist, reporting on Saddam’s incarceration at Camp Cropper, the American compound ten miles outside Baghdad, wrote: “He spends most his time tending plants and reading the Qur’an and books of past Arab glories. Under interrogation, he still insists he is Iraq’s lawful leader — and has done no wrong.”
Well, at a fair trial, if fair trial it’s going to be, he should have ample opportunity to prove that.
