Saddam’s Trial

ed:

Amnesty International is deeply concerned at the absence of defence lawyers and the apparent censorship during yesterday’s first court appearance by Saddam Hussein and 11 senior members of the former president’s government.

“The beginning of legal proceedings to determine responsibility for a series of crimes considered as war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide committed over the last three decades, is to be welcomed. However, in order to bring justice to the thousands of victims, the proceedings must be fair, impartial and transparent,” Amnesty International said.

The organisation was particularly alarmed that defence counsel was not made available to the accused at yesterday’s hearing. Although the judge said that Saddam Hussein would be allowed legal defence in future, he and the other accused should have been given access to defence representation right from the beginning of the process.

But, as Jan at Secular Blasphemy argues, all this concern is surely misplaced. Why must the trial be seen to be fair? What does that mean in this context? That there are two versions of the truth? – one where the Baathist regime under Saddam terrorised the Iraqi people, gassed the Kurds, tortured and murdered political opponents, invaded Iran and Kuwait, etc. etc. – and another where none of this happened? So the evidence is presented to the jury, and they have to decide which history is true? It’s clearly nonsense. We know what happened.

A trial like this is never going to be like a normal trial, with the accused given the opportunity to cross-examine and question the motives of the prosecution, and nor should it be. The outcome is pre-ordained: Saddam must be found guilty. Any other outcome would be to deny history. The trial should be an occasion for the scale of his crimes to be documented, for those Iraqis whom Saddam terrorised for so long to be given the opportunity to confront him at last, for the country to finally purge itself of the horrors of the past – not for a grandstanding effort by Saddam and his defence to team to denounce his accusers and use every legalistic nicety to turn the whole thing into a farce, which would surely be the case should all the concerns of Western human rights organisations be met.

The idea of a war crimes tribunal as a trial under international law is not meeting with marked success in the case of Milosevic in the Hague. Let the Iraqis do what they want, and ignore the misplaced concerns of Amnesty and Human Rights Watch.