Aziz' death penalty attempt to cover U.S. failure in Iraq - Russian lawmaker
15:23 02/11/2010
MOSCOW, November 2 (RIA Novosti) - The death penalty of former Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz is an attempt by the United States to distract the world from failure under the flag of democracy, a senior Russian lawmaker said on Tuesday.
The Iraqi Tribunal has sentenced Aziz, as well as former Interior Minister and Intelligence Chief Sadun Shakir and Saddam Hussein's former secretary, Abd Hammud, to death. The court ruled that the three men took part in the persecution of Shiite Muslim dissidents in 1982 that followed a foiled assassination of the Iraqi dictator.
The statement by Konstantin Kosachev, who heads the Russian lower house of parliament's committee in charge of international affairs, came during a committee meeting dedicated to a draft declaration on Aziz' sentence.
Kosachev said that the death sentence had been announced on September 25, just two days after the whistleblower website WikiLeaks published 400,000 documents related to the U.S. military operation.
"These documents reflect a very discharming picture of what the U.S. occupation troops did under the flag of democratization," Kosachev said.
The release of military reports by U.S. officers unveiled that the United States played ignorant to torturing by Iraqi security forces of their detainees, as well as cases of killings of civilians and insurgents who were trying to surrender to U.S. soldiers.
He described the publishing of the documents, which was strongly condemned by Washington, as a "real scandal" which required investigation.
"The coincidence of the time when the materials dishonoring the United States and its allies appeared with the announcement of Aziz' death sentence is an attempt to draw the attention of the international community away from the information that was published on the Internet," the lawmaker said, adding that Aziz' death penalty was apparently a result of external pressure.
The situation remains strained in Iraq where up to 400,000 people have been killed and more than 2 million have left the country since the beginning of the U.S. invasion in March 2003, he said.
Communist lawmaker Leonid Kalashnikov said Aziz' death sentence was the result of him knowing "too much about the period preceding the U.S. interfering in Iraqi affairs."
After the sentence was announced, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Moscow was expecting the Iraqi Presidential Council to cancel the court's ruling.
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