Tariq Aziz, whose trial began yesterday in Baghdad was always the acceptable face of Saddam’s dictatorship. As Iraq’s long-serving foreign minister and former deputy premier, he moved easily through Western capitals, first securing covert US backing for Saddam’s disastrous war on Iran and later seeking to fend off George Bush’s determination to avenge his father’s post-First Gulf War humiliation and destroy Saddam once and for all.
Aziz is a man who knows many secrets, some of them extremely awkward for the Americans. Maybe he will use his trial for the murder of 40 Baghdadi merchants to reveal them. In his own way, Aziz has proved himself a man of some principles. In the wake of Saddam’s capture, the US offered him a pardon if he would testify against his old chief. He refused repeatedly. It could be argued that he is therefore now being tried as much for that loyalty as for the crimes of which he is accused.
This case, however, ought to be a turning point for Iraq as a whole. One of his seven co-defendants is Ali Hassan Al-Majid — “Chemical Ali” who is already on death row after being convicted last year of the massacre of thousands of Kurdish civilians with poison gas at Halabja. All the men are accused of being involved in the execution of a group of merchants who had disobeyed the regime’s orders not to hike food prices. It was a typical example of the way Saddam’s Baathist dictatorship used terror to cow Iraqis into submission.
There is much for which Saddam and his henchmen should answer, but it must now be wondered what purpose will be served by this and future trials. Chemical Ali has been kept alive, purely to answer these serious but albeit lesser charges, perhaps because the Americans believe that Aziz’s name will be blackened by association with one of the undoubted ogres of Saddam’s regime. Yet it might have been wiser to have sent Al-Majiid to the gallows straight away rather than keep him alive for this trial. And Aziz himself is likely to cut a sympathetic figure in the dock. He is 72 years old and has suffered a series of strokes since he gave himself up to the Americans in 2003. Even Iraqis, who once saw him as a key member of a hated regime, may wonder what good will come out of his trial.
The reality is that the country needs to move on. Since the Al-Maliki government this January finally reversed Washington’s disastrous expulsion of Baathists from government and the security forces, former servants of the old regime are beginning to play a part in building the new Iraq. Many of them may have been directly or indirectly implicated in crimes, but there is rightly little appetite to bring them to justice.
The most important thing is any such trial conducted under occupation will always lack legitimacy or credibility, especially when the post-Saddam Iraq continues to be blighted by the death and destruction of the worst kind.
