|
|
UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs |
IRAQ: Bringing the former regime to justice
BAGHDAD, 4 November 2003 (IRIN) - Whenever someone was killed under the regime of former President Saddam Hussein, a corresponding execution order was written up to document the death. When a dissident was jailed, his name would be recorded in the prison files. If someone had to go to hospital after being tortured, there were records of that, too.
Now, US-led administrators and newly formed Iraqi rights groups are working to create a tribunal to investigate the crimes of the former regime, which, they hope, will punish the killers and bring some measure of justice to families of the victims.
But probing crimes and human rights violations by the former regime in Iraq is going to be difficult and dangerous. On Monday, Iraqi insurgents kept up the pressure on occupying forces and their perceived collaborators, killing the judge behind the creation of a judicial commission to bring officials of Saddam Hussein's ousted regime to justice, news agencies reported.
Muhan Jabr Al-Shuwaili, the top judge in the central governorate of Najaf, was kidnapped along with Najaf prosecutor general Aref Aziz, from the judge's house in the city, Aziz said. The two were taken in cars to a deserted area eight kilometers (five miles) north of Najaf. "One of the assailants said 'Saddam has ordered your prosecution.' Then they fired two shots into his head," Aziz said. "As for me, they told me 'this does not concern you'. They released me," he added.
Shuwaili had signed onto the decision to create the Baath Investigative Commission, made up of four attorneys who probe complaints before raising them with an investigative judge. Another Iraqi judge was killed in US crossfire on Monday night in the northern city of Kirkuk, his cousin, who was injured in the incident, said on Tuesday. Judge Hussein Ahmed Shehab, 38, was killed by two bullets in the head and Khalaf was injured in the stomach and shoulders, according to Nawzat Mahmud, head surgeon at Kirkuk's general hospital.
Led by members of Human Rights and Transitional Justice, a rights group working in Iraq, other fledgling human rights campaigners and international experts are getting together to figure out how to assemble documentation providing evidence of crimes commited under Saddam's regime.
Once documents are collected, a war crimes tribunal can be established, according to Jeremy Greenstock, the British special representative in Iraq. The US administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, was expected soon to sign a statute on setting up such a tribunal, Greenstock said.
"Justice needs to be observed for crimes against humanity," Greenstock told IRIN in Baghdad. "This will be enshrined in a new tribunal assisting in this process." Victims' families, rights groups, even the media, had collected many relevant documents during the recent war as US-led troops advanced into the country. Other documents had been gathered by coalition troops, he added.
Now, those documents can be used to start up the judicial process. A newly formed lawyers' group in Al-Hillah is not waiting for the establishment of an official court: already, its members have starting to meet victims' families to find out if they have evidence of Saddam's crimes, such as death certificates, detention orders, notices from the former government, and the like. They are also meeting US officials in Al-Hillah and members of the Free Prisoners Association, a newly formed rights group in the region.
About 20,000 people were killed in the Al-Hillah region south of Baghdad after an insurrection against Saddam Hussein following the 1991 Gulf War. "I think everyone knows Iraqi people are very organised, so when the regime fell, we started our work," 36-year-old Haydar Hamzah Ibrahim, a lawyer, told IRIN. "For 35 years these ideas were with us, even though we couldn't speak," he added.
International experts from places like the Cambodia Document Project and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia will work with such groups to create a database to put on record all the relevant documents, according to Sandy Hodgkinson, an organiser at Human Rights and Transitional Justice.
"From instruments of torture found in secret detention centres to the number of mass graves around Iraq, the scene here is too brutal to let the world forget what happened under Saddam's dictatorship," Hodgkinson told IRIN. "We must make the Iraqi people and the world aware of what happened in Iraq, so such a regime can never come to power again," she stressed.
War crimes can also be dealt with through memorials for the victims, museums and other kinds of historical records. "These documents contain many answers, and that's the beginning of the process we have here today," Hodgkinson maintained.
Judge Dara Nur al-Din, a member of the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, said the Council's help would be key in helping Iraqi citizens engage in a healing process. "When Saddam Hussein gassed a whole village [Halabja] in 1988, no one in the outside world was paying attention," Nur al-Din told IRIN. "The world also ignored massacres and forced ethnic relocation," he added. "In the south, villages were bombed and the marshes were dried by Saddam," he said. "The world ignored this tragedy."
Greenstock said Britain would pay for many of the things needed to enable a war crimes tribunal to operate, such as forensic investigators, lawyers, support staff and security teams. The British prime minister had named a special envoy to follow up on the issue, he explained, noting that the crimes perpetrated against Iraqis were as grave as any war crimes in the past century, such as the atrocities committed before and during World War II in Nazi Germany.
"This country can't move on to reconciliation and stability without justice being observed to be done in certain crucial cases, most notably justice in respect to those responsible for crimes against humanity and gross abuses of human rights," Greenstock warned.
Themes: (IRIN) Conflict, (IRIN) Human Rights
[ENDS]
This material comes to you via IRIN, a UN humanitarian information unit, but may not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations or its agencies. If you re-print, copy, archive or re-post this item, please retain this credit and disclaimer. Quotations or extracts should include attribution to the original sources. All materials copyright © UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs 2003
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
