The Whole Range of Saddam Hussein's War Crimes

Abstract

Middle east RepoRt 239 ■ SUMMER 2006 On October 19, 2005, in a former presidential palace that had been hastily refurbished to resemble a respectable courtroom, Saddam Hussein went on trial. The case brought against Hussein and his seven co-defendants was based on events in the town of al-Dujayl in 1982, where Hussein’s regime countered an assassination attempt on its leader with the execution of 148 people. But these will not be the last charges filed against top figures in the old regime. The Supreme Iraqi Criminal Tribunal has jurisdiction to try crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes committed during the period of Ba‘thist rule between 1968 and 2003, which include the chemical attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja in 1988, the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the repression of the Shi‘i uprising in southern Iraq in 1991. It is still unclear how many of the crimes of which the old regime is accused will actually be prosecuted. On April 4, 2006, however, the prosecution team announced that charges related to the Anfal genocide against the Kurds in 1987–1988, a campaign that included the Halabja attack, will be brought after the al-Dujayl verdict, which is expected in August. The progress of the trial so far has left a pertinent question unanswered. Why is Hussein not standing trial for biological and chemical weapons attacks on Iranian soldiers and civilians during the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq war? That these gross violations of international norms will probably not be taken up by the tribunal reveals the international and domestic politics involved in the trial. To be more precise: Saddam Hussein’s war crimes can only be fully addressed if the court uncovers the collusion of Western firms and governments with Hussein’s illicit weapons programs during the 1980s. Let us hope, given that intrusive political context, that at the end of the trial we are not shocked by what we partly suspect: that an opportunity for regional reconciliation in the wider Persian Gulf area has been lost, that the trial has reproduced Iraq as a place of imperial competition, and that history has denied the Iraqi people the opportunity to engage the past to lend speech to those voices which would constitute the new, post-Ba‘thist civil society. Let us hope, in short, that the trial does not create yet another discontinuity in the history of the country.