In My View - Thursday-Wednesday

Law as an Ass: More Saddams in the offing

Pinaki Bhattacharya

Defending Mr Saddam Hussain is a difficult task. Here is a former dictator of a country who ruled with an iron fist. If the Western media machines are to be believed, albeit with skepticism, he has waged chemical warfare on sections of his own population; his secret police Mukhbarat made a reputation for itself in torture, debasement and disappearance of its own people. So much of a reputation they had that the Anglo-US combine in the country are reported to be looking for their former operatives to provide them fresh appointments in the coalition.

But Saddam Hussain has to be defended. And India should defend him with a clean conscience not just for being handed down a “victors’ justice” but because the legal process of the Iraqi Special Tribunal (IST) was deeply vitiated. India’s national interest lies in upholding the basic principles of international jurisprudence and universal declaration of human rights.

New Delhi’s new Minister for External Affairs got the second part of the message right while making a grave error in the first. Mr Pranab Mukherjee assumed that the US and its British allies have won a victory in Iraq. Every day the pictures emanating from the country tell a different story. In October, 113 American soldiers have lost their lives even as they stay mostly in their barracks as the US seeks to replace its own army with the Iraqi police and army. Demands in the USA are rising and may prove a reality soon when these forces will have to return to their home bases. Even the US President, Mr George W. Bush claims everyday that the ‘War on Terror’ (WOT), of which Iraq is a key battleground, is not over.

So Mr Mukherjee may have to do better than express rather distant reservations about the “judicial process” and declaring that Anglo-American coalition victors in this war. For as the point man of the country, he is entrusted with the task of upholding and ensuring the interests of the country in the existing international system. And that international system has found the detention of the former Iraqi president “illegal” in the eye of international law.

“Deprivation of liberty of Mr Saddam Hussein is arbitrary, being in contravention of article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political rights to which Iraq and the United States are parties," was how the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, under the United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHCR) reported in September, 2006. The UN Special Rapporteaur on Independence of Judges and Lawyers, reported to the newly created Council for Human Rights in March, 2006, “[the Special Rapporteaur] express[es] his reservations regarding the legitimacy of the tribunal, its limited competence in terms of people and time and the breach of international human rights principles and standards to which it gives rise.”
But that is not all. Consider these,
· “The U.S. created Iraqi Special Tribunal which assessed the death sentences is not legal, independent, or impartial as required by international law and simple justice.
· The case was tried in the midst of raging violence across Iraq which has taken hundreds of thousands of lives. Three defense counsel were assassinated in the first trial and a fourth has been assassinated in the second trial, to date.
· Two Chief Judges were removed from the IST in the midst of the trial by political pressure. A third has been removed in the second trial, to date.
· The IST limited the defense to five weeks of testimony then cut off its witnesses. The Chief Judge said "if you cannot prove your innocence with 34 witnesses, 100 will not help." The Court delayed and rescheduled its decision in the case from mid June for nearly five months to influence the U.S. elections.
· The US lawyers involved in creating and directing the IST, unable to restrain their desire that their role be known, announced the length of the final judgment in the first trial, over 300 pages, presumably in English, more than a month ago. The planned "November surprise" should surprise no one.”
None of the above came from communist provocateaurs of the Indian Left parties, seeking to cosy up to the Muslim voters. It came from Mr Ramsey Clark, the American defence lawyer of Mr Hussain’s who was thrown out of the court on 5 November by the IST chief judge. Mr Clark is a pillar of American establishment. He had been the US Attorney General between 1967and 1969, even as his employer the former US president, the late Lyndon B. Johnson chose bombing targets amongst Vietnamese villages.
Many may say that his recent briefs do not exude great confidence in his sense of judgment of human character. He defended recently Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic (in absentia) of Serbia.
But some would say that his services might be needed again if a Democratic regime in the USA decided to send in the Marines and whisk away, say, Mr Narendra Modi from Gujarat and put him on trial in Pakistan at a ‘Pakistan Special Tribunal’ and charged him with ‘genocide’ against Muslims. What would the external affairs minister of the day do, for there would be precedents? And what would the Indian elite – secular and communal – say then? Would they then remember that the Left told them so?

Pinaki Bhattacharya is a Special Correspondent of the Mathrubhumi, Kerala. He writes on Strategic Security issues. And he can be contacted at pinaki63@dataone.in.