We all know by now that the trials of the leading Baathists are about to begin in Iraq, with ‘Chemical Ali‘ the first in the dock. But in the holiday madness many of us may have missed (I certainly did) this disturbing report by USMA law instructor Michael A. Newton about European and UN assistance–or rather lack thereof–in helping to bring Saddam and his henchman to justice.
Last month I spent a week in London working with the group of judges and prosecutors who form the core of the [Iraqi] special tribunal. They are a distinguished group of patriots who know more than any outsider how critical the rule of law will be for the future of their country. Yes, just like other inexperienced judges on previous tribunals elsewhere in the developing world, they have much to learn about conducting complex trials in accordance with the most modern nuances of international law. But they are dedicated to doing so. As one Iraqi told me, “My job is to judge, not to murder.”
Unfortunately, their pleas for assistance are going unanswered. For example, some of the most experienced practitioners from the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia had initially agreed to participate in the London sessions. At the last minute, however, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan lamely insisted that these experts were all too busy in The Hague to help the Iraqis, and he ordered them to stay home.
Not him? Not that “great progressive” Kofi Annan, always on the side of the downtrodden (as long as they’re not Rwandans, Sudanese or, alas, Iraqis). Oh, well, he’s probably a little busy with Oil-for-Food investigations. Surely the world’s great human rights organizations will help the Iraqis. After all, Saddam Hussein murdered over 300,000 of his fellow citizens, lopped off limbs of thousands of others, sent his enemies through paper shredders, etc. But wait…
Similarly, Amnesty International has issued a press release insisting that the “trial of Saddam Hussein must draw on international expertise,” but has failed to provide any such help. Human Rights Watch took testimony from Iraqi victims who thought they were helping develop cases against Iraqis suspected of crimes. But according to American officials, the organization, without consulting the witnesses, refused to provide all the statements or to give all the victims’ identities to the special tribunal. Human Rights Watch has even taken issue with the statute’s ban on former Baath Party members sitting in judgment of the accused. Would the group have wanted Nazis passing judgment at Nuremberg?
Okay, I give up. The world is upside down. Call in the Mad Hatter. Maybe he can assist in the trials. (hat tip: Judith Weiss)
UPDATE: And if the above doesn’t get enough steam coming out of your ears, take a look at further skullduggery Don Kofi is up to. Now it’s getting personal–it’s our Internet he’s after.
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25 Comments
1. Barbara Skolaut:Well, yeah.
Haven’t you been paying attention lately, Roger?
Dec 15, 2004 - 6:16 pm 2. Dishman:Wow! Kofi’s an honest politician!
Saddam bought him, and he’s staying bought.
Dec 15, 2004 - 6:23 pm 3. jedrury:Not doubting the report, but why would the
UN have appointive jurisdiction over the war crimes tribunals in the Hague? Can anyone provide an answer on this one?
Further, the possessive actions of the Human Rights Watch, a private organization, re: victim statements is outrageous.
Dec 15, 2004 - 6:26 pm 4. mudmarine:It is very dispiriting at times. The world being upside down that is.
Roger, though I get your point on the lack of assistance from erstwhile paragons of virtue. I truly fail to see why these trials are anything other than a completely Iraqi matter. Or, at the most, limited assistance from the countries that participated in the actions to end Saddam’s rule. What dog does Amnesty International have in this fight? And, for that matter, the International Criminal Tribunal. I suppose there may be some justification for UN participation in the sense that we acted under UN resolutions. But the UN certainly did nothing to help. Also, call me cold, but just exactly whose rights is Human Rights Watch looking out for, where in the hell were they when those 300,000 bodies were being placed in the mass graves. It’s a red/blue world anymore.
Dec 15, 2004 - 6:35 pm 5. nikita:just slightly OT:
Iraqi President Charges Syrian Security Services with Involvement in Insurgency
Iraq’s interim President Ghazi al-Yawer said Monday he believed elements of the Syrian security services were harboring insurgents. “(Syria) is a country that is run by security…and definitely they cannot operate from Syria unless there is somebody who is condoning what they are doing,” he said. (AP/Guardian-UK)
via Daily Alert
Dec 15, 2004 - 6:57 pm 6. Robert Crawford:Okay, I give up. The world is upside down.
Um, are you sure? From where I’m standing, it hasn’t changed; these groups have always acted like this.
Dec 15, 2004 - 6:59 pm 7. Jim Rockford:The reason that all these organizations and Kofi are opposed to helping the Tribunals is ideological.
Saddam and his cronies are eligible for the death penalty. Any assistance to a trial that could put Saddam and Co. to death is just politically unacceptable.
Dec 15, 2004 - 7:00 pm 8. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):A truly sad thing is that many or most in the world give more legitimacy to these corrupt or biased international organizations and NGOs than sovereign countries with duly elected governments.
And our left is right with them. I read their blogs and editorials lambasting our efforts, while never providing the slightest useful idea. They are nihilist.
It would appear that freedom, in the sense of having a representative, law abiding government, is now supported by only about half of America, and hardly anyone else in the world.
I’m not sure how we dig out of this mess. Ideas are very powerful, and some very enticing and contagious ones have taken root, whether Islamofascism among young in the Muslim world to nihilism, foolish internationalism, and the idea of rule by unelected experts (i.e. EU organizations).
I sometimes wonder why Bush doesn’t just stops support for internationalist organizations of all kinds unless they behave themselves. Too many NGOs, which live off of public contributes and LOTS of government money, have been taken over by leftists and internationalists (O’Sullivan’s law). The UN, which arrogates authority over all sorts of things, is in many of its functions a strongly negative force. It doesn’t stop wars. It doesn’t protect human rights. It abuses its power. It is corrupt.
I remember when only the looney right wanted to push the UN into the ocean. I think that this sentiment is much more widespread.
Too few understand the wisdom of our founding fathers (and other thinkers at the time) who understood both the need for and the dangers of using government to solve problems. Europeans want to hand everything to the government, and many others are the same way.
None of this should be surprising. The UN is a body answerable to nobody. NGOs are the same way – as long as they can keep up their image, people will donate, and of course they are very good at getting governments to do so. Many organizations – governments, UN, some NGO’s are huge bureaucracies, with all of the predictable pathologies.
But nobody seems to give a damn.
Let the UN solve it. Don’t let in the Americans, they might scare somebody. Have blue helmets watch massacres – hey, it feels good to know they are there, even if they can’t do anything (except sometimes commit their own crimes). Spend millions of man hours producing useless documents, protocols, standards, treaties, and go to posh resorts to spend weeks working out the minor details. Let the worst human rights offenders control the human rights organizations. Let the most corrupt control the money.
Ugh.
Dec 15, 2004 - 7:13 pm 9. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):And I forget to mention, my favorite villains, the MSM, are enablers of all of this because they don’t do their watchdog job except on conservative governments.
Dec 15, 2004 - 7:15 pm 10. Wallace:The Saudi Internet Services Unit (ISU) maintains the Internet censorship system, offering an e-mail address abuse@isu.net.sa for Internet users who would like to report sites they think should be blocked
Thank you Saudi’s. I’ve reconfigured my mail server to have all the spam gathered there rerouted to the above address.
Dec 15, 2004 - 7:31 pm 11. lindenen:More people should do what Wallace did.
Dec 15, 2004 - 7:39 pm 12. richard mcenroe:You know, we could bypass all this nonsense very simply:
Kurdish prison guards and bailiffs.
I’m just saying…
Dec 15, 2004 - 7:52 pm 13. Doug:Roger,
I know just how you feel. Blogs like yours have helped me keep my sanity. Sometimes it seems as if we really are living in the Bizarro universe. But everytime I begin to doubt the justice and righteousness of our cause, these scumbags (for that’s what they are) give me another reason to believe. I am coming to the belief that the UN itself will have to go. That it is beyond redemption and that we must not continue to fund an organization dedicated to the destruction of all we hold dear.
Dec 15, 2004 - 7:55 pm 14. SDN:Heinlein, with his usual foresight, called these the Crazy Years…. I wish he was wrong. I fully understand why many of my fellow Christians think we are in the End Times.
Dec 15, 2004 - 8:11 pm 15. charlotte:Everything IS crazy these days where liberals are reactionaries and conservatives are liberals and the UN loves illiberality and illiberal regimes are democratizing… Who can know improbable fact from plausible fiction these days?
Is it true that some Vatican priests are helping to arrange for legal counsel to aid Tariq Aziz in his defense against war crime charges?
Is Dan Rather really slated to give a talk at that Tunisian conference on UN control of the Internet called “The Growing Menace of Modem Cowboys to the World Order and Why Free Speech Needs to be Licensed, Regulated and Left to Professionals Like Me”?
Dec 15, 2004 - 9:08 pm 16. Rick Ballard:Iraqis have the right to dispense justice in conformity with the applicable criminal code in effect during the period in question. I believe that conspiracy to commit murder is a capital offense under the extant Iraqi code. I will be quietly applauding as the Iraqis administer justice through trial in a public tribunal. I would hope that the hangings are closed to the public but if not, that’s their business too.
I’d really like to see them get their hand on Sevan. His corruption caused more than a few deaths and hanging him might be a signal lesson to other UN kleptocrats.
Here’s to short trials followed by short drops.
Dec 15, 2004 - 9:10 pm 17. Morgan:Well, I lost my anti-UN/NGO/thugocracy/etc. alliance rant to computer problems. I’ll be happy I did in the morning.
I did want to say, however, that I though John Moore’s (07:13 PM) post above was terrific. Granted, that was hours ago, but it was a long rant.
Dec 15, 2004 - 9:21 pm 18. foreign devil:The ‘Net’ and in particular, the ‘blogs’ have proven to be a frightening threat to people who have something to hide and a penchant for forgetting which lies they’ve told. G*d help us all, if they and Kofi ever figure out a way to censor us or worse!
Dec 15, 2004 - 9:34 pm 19. chuck:Look,
If it were *your* job to save the world and suddenly some uncredentialed nobody from Texas showed up and took it over, wouldn’t *you* be pissed? And if he took away your victims? Lord, what would *you* do? I’d bitch too.
Actually, I think most of these things are just attempts to hobble the US. It’s a power struggle. To these folks the US is bad and US power is worse. Everything else pales by comparison. They sure aren’t helping themselves with me, though. Now I’m a damned Republican
Dec 15, 2004 - 9:54 pm 20. Salt Lick:I graduated college in the 70s’s and went into the Peace Corps with a naive faith in international NGOs. Two years of international service and study of these organizations showed me they were mostly feeding troughs for people who wanted to mask an “cosmopolitan, affluent lifestyle with the pretense of “doing good.” Not that some of the people in these organization aren’t truly virtuous, self-sacrificing people, but they aren’t the ones who run things.
Roger, it seems to me intrigue we now watch vis a vis the UN is begging to be further extrapolated into fiction by a good writer. Big-time Good vs. Evil. There’s a big, Ayn Randian/James Bondian, story here.
Dec 16, 2004 - 8:28 am 21. ahem:I’ve got my own opinion about Kofi.
Dec 16, 2004 - 9:22 am 22. PeterUK:This was foreshadowed by european forensic experts declining to work on the mass graves of Saddam Husseins victims,it is, as was said by Jim Rockford above,all about the death penalty.
We have now got to the stage where one principle overrides another.It is also about the EU Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights http://www.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts1998/19980042.htm
Europe is binding itself into legislative paralysis,which in the epoch we are entering amounts to the longest suicide note in history.
Dec 16, 2004 - 10:48 am 23. PeterUK:Roger,this looks like this is personal.
“At a Geneva meeting in November, WSIS members outlined an ambitious task that includes “definition of the Internet and Internet governance” and identifying “the main [Internet] players and their functions” as well as “current Internet governance mechanisms.”
“First they came for the bloggers,but I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a blogger” with apologies to Pastor Martin Niemˆller.
Annan is not only incompetent, he is dangerous.
Dec 16, 2004 - 10:58 am 24. Terrye:Considering the amount of time and energy Europeans and UN officiates spend talking about human rights they might actually want to be a part of bringing the Butcher of Baghdad to justice. Guess not.
I agree that the death penalty is a larger part of this.
I have a solution. The Iraqis need to put Saddam and his henchmen in a public place like a pizzaria and then send a fellow crazy into the place with a bomb strapped into him and let nature takes its course.
What problem could they have with that?
Dec 16, 2004 - 2:33 pm 25. Curtis:Odd, isn’t it, how some so abhor the death penalty for murderers yet say little or nothing about those who strap children with bombs? And these people would “regulate” the Internet to boot? I don’t even for a moment believe their motives are pure.
Dec 16, 2004 - 9:00 pm