The trial of Saddam Hussein
Anti-war movement must reject colonial ‘justice’
By
Sara Flounders
Published Dec 8, 2005 10:55 PM
The trial of Saddam Hussein, which has opened
with much international publicity, is a desperate attempt to justify and convey
some legitimacy on the criminal U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. It is an
effort to demoralize and divide the resistance to the occupation. It has nothing
to do with justice or truth.
All the political forces internationally that
have opposed the 15-year-long U.S. war on Iraq—which has included
starvation sanctions, bombing and invasion—should also oppose all the
efforts to justify the continued occupation, including the present trial of the
former Iraqi leader and seven members of his government.
Regardless of the
wide spectrum of political views on the character of Saddam Hussein’s
government, it is essential to oppose this U.S. justification for the war. To be
silent on this issue is to give credibility to a U.S.-created phony court at the
giant U.S. command center called the Green Zone.
The U.S. government has
no right to have even one soldier in Iraq. It has no right to bomb, sanction or
starve the Iraqi people. It has no right to impose a colonial government or to
establish courts in Iraq. It has no more right to decide the fate of Saddam
Hussein than it does to control the oil and resources of Iraq.
The
detention of Saddam Hussein and his co-defendants, along with tens of thousands
of other Iraqis, is all based on a criminal, illegal war of
aggression.
The Iraqi Special Tribunal and the trial of Saddam Hussein are
also a violation of international law. The Geneva Convention, to which
Washington is a signatory, explicitly forbids an occupying power from creating
courts. In addition, the trial itself, along with the total isolation of the
defendants and denial of all visitation and legal rights violates the
International Convention on Civil and Political Rights.
The defense
lawyers who have stepped forward have been threatened and intimidated. Two
lawyers on the defense team have been assassinated.
Today in Iraq there is
no judicial system. There are no codes, no laws, no courts. There still is no
agreement on a constitution. The entire structure of the Iraqi state was
destroyed. In its place is only the most brutal form of outright military
domination.
The Iraqi Special Tribunal has been illegitimate since its
very formation. It is a creation of L. Paul Bremer III of the U.S., former head
of the Coalition Provisional Authority—the illegal, occupying power.
Bremer initially appointed Salem Chalabi, the nephew of Iraqi Deputy Prime
Minister Ahmad Chalabi, to organize and lead the court.
Chalabi had
returned to Iraq from exile with the aid of U.S. tanks in April 2003. He opened
a law office to draft the new laws that have reopened Iraq to foreign capital,
in collaboration with the law firm of former Defense Undersecretary Dou glas
Feith, a war profiteer, an ideologue of the Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld cabal and a
principal architect of the war.
Bremer also appointed the tribunal
judges. The funding and the personnel are totally controlled by U.S. forces. The
U.S. Congress has appropriated $128 million to fund the court. Of course, the
court has no jurisdiction over crimes committed by U.S. forces in the invasion
and occupation!
Role of demonization
The trial underway now
is part of the sustained U.S. effort to totally demonize Saddam Hussein. This
has been an essential part of the 15-year war on Iraq.
U.S. propaganda has
relentlessly des crib ed Hussein as an evil madman, a brutal dictator and a
threat to the entire planet who was poised to strike with nuclear, chemical or
biological weapons within min utes. He was charged with having a role in 9/11
and being in league with al-Qaeda.
Both Republicans and Democrats knew
this was a fraud. U.S. bombs had destroyed Iraq’s entire industrial
capacity. But no politician was willing to challenge the
demonization.
Every U.S. war against oppressed peoples and nations has
begun with saturating the entire civilian population with war propaganda that so
demonized the leader of the targeted population that any crime was treated as
acceptable and beyond question. This has been true since the wars against Native
populations and the demonization of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Geronimo and
many, many other Indigenous leaders, up to the leaders of every progressive or
revolutionary struggle over the past 50 years.
It doesn’t matter how
mild or committed to non-violence the leader is. Consider the case of the
kidnapped former priest, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti, who was
charged with corruption, drug running and gang violence. Today President Hugo
Chávez of Venezuela and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran are
increasingly portrayed as madmen, dictators and evil incarnate.
Since the
days of the Roman Empire, victor’s justice has meant humiliation,
degradation and placing the defeated leader in the dock in order to establish a
new order. It hides the brutality of overwhelming force and gives legitimacy to
the new rulers.
The trials of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner in the
antebellum South were the slaveowners’ way of cloaking the violence and
degrading brutality of slavery in “god-given” property rights. The
kidnapping and trial of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic after the 78-day
U.S/NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, in which hundreds of civilians died, was a
similar case of victor’s justice.
U.S. and WMDs
While
the U.S. demonizes Saddam Hussein, it should be remembered that the Pentagon has
used weapons of mass destruction not only in Iraq but against countless other
defenseless populations, from Korea and the Philippines to Viet nam, Laos,
Cambodia, Nicaragua, Gren ada, Libya, Lebanon and Yugoslavia.
It is the
U.S. military machine that should be put on trial for having used the most
horrendous weapons, from nuclear bombs to napalm, white phosphorus,
anti-personnel weapons, so-called bunker busters and radioactive
depleted-uranium weapons.
In Iraq intentional civilian destruction was
calculated, photographed and studied. The infrastructure was consciously
targeted. Reservoirs, sanitation and sew age plants, chlorine and water pumping
stations were bombed. The electrical and communications grids were destroyed.
Food production was targeted, from irrigation, fertilizers and pesticides to
processing, refrigeration and storage. In the 1991 bombing more than 150,000
Iraqis died. There were 156 U.S. soldiers killed.
Year after year
international delegations that had been to Iraq, including many organized by the
International Action Center (IAC) and led by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey
Clark, reported on the impact of the 1991 bombing and the years of U.S.-imposed
UN sanctions. The sanctions created an artificial famine. Imports of food,
medicine and civilian necessities were withheld.
By the UN’s own
estimates, over 1.5 million Iraqis died of preventable diseases. Half a million
children under the age of 5 years died between 1991 and 1996. Both the sanctions
and the bombing, begun under George H.W. Bush, continued through the eight years
of the Clinton administration. U.S. bombing continued at an average of 25 raids
a day for 12 years.
Clark, founder of the IAC, has courageously challenged
the legitimacy and legality of the Iraqi Special Tribunal as a legal adviser to
Saddam Hussein.
As an international human rights lawyer, his position is
entirely consistent with his 15 years of opposition to the U.S. war in
Iraq—from his visit to Iraq in 1991 when the U.S. bombed every 30 seconds
for 42 days, through the 12 years of starvation sanctions, to his opposition to
the 2003 invasion. It is consistent with his principled opposition to other U.S.
wars and interventions in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Grenada, Iran, Libya, Lebanon,
Panama and Yugoslavia.
Standing up to demonization is part of standing up
to the U.S. war and its propaganda machine.
Target is Iraqi
sovereignty
The agents of U.S. imperialism have established corrupt
and brutal dictatorships and trained and funded military rule from one corner of
the globe to the other—from Indonesia to Chile to Congo.
Their
problem with Saddam Hussein was not that he was a dictator. It was that he
refused to surrender the sovereignty of Iraq. He refused to give U.S.
corporations control over Iraqi oil, nationalized beginning in the 1960s. His
worst crime in their eyes was that he refused to bow down to the New World
Order.
It is Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Blair who should be on trial for
war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The global movement that opposes
the U.S. occupation in Iraq must seriously consider its responsibility to oppose
every aspect of the U.S. war—especially the phony courts and staged
elections that seek to legitimize and legalize this piracy.
Implicit in
the call to bring the troops home now is the demand to stop the whole brutal
process of recolonization. This means cancellation of the U.S. corporate
contracts that have privatized and looted Iraqi resources, closing the hundreds
of U.S. bases and the thousands of U.S. checkpoints, canceling the “search
and destroy” missions and closing the secret prisons where tens of
thousands of Iraqis are tortured and humiliated.
And closing the illegal,
U.S.-created courts.
Sara Flounders is co-director of the International
Action Center. She has edited five books on Iraq and coordinated several
delegations, headed by Ramsey Clark, that visited Iraq to challenge
the U.S. bombing and the sanctions.
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
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