Saddam faces many questions that will need to be answered
gulf-news.com
Saddam has countless questions to answer. Some are of special interest to the people of Iraq. Most urgently, he must provide information on the fate of some 13,000 Iraqis classified as "missing" after being arrested by his secret police.
Then he must provide his narrative of 35 years of criminal rule that led to four foreign wars, two civil wars and countless smaller conflicts in which some 1.5 million people, including many Iranians and Kuwaitis, died. So far the United Nations has discovered some 300,000 corpses in mass graves throughout Iraq.
But many more corpses are still missing, including victims of chemical weapons. He is also responsible for driving some 4.5 million Iraqis, almost a fifth of the nation's population, out of their homes. In the Kurdish areas alone he presided over the destruction of over 400 villages in the 1980s.
Saddam must also tell the Iraqis what he did with their money. During the Baath Party's 35-years rule, Iraq earned nearly $300 billion from oil exports. It also received some $50 billion in the form of gifts from rich Arab countries. And, yet, when Saddam fell Iraq had a foreign debt of over $120 billion. Bearing in mind that he built virtually no infrastructure apart from his 25 palaces, he will have a lot of explaining to do.
The outside world would be interested in what Saddam would have to say on other issues as well.
* Saddam must provide answers to the 29 questions asked by Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons' inspector in his last report on March 7, 2003, about Iraq's missing weapons of mass destruction. Saddam should tell the world where those weapons are and, if they did not exist, why had he refused to answer Blix's questions, thus pretending that they did exist.
* Saddam should tell the world which western governments and corporations helped him build his death machine. He must also tell the world which European, and Arab, politicians, businessmen, bankers, media people, and so-called "peace activists" he bribed over the years.
* He should tell all he knows about the two dozen or so terrorist organisations that he trained, financed, and sheltered for decades. Initially, Saddam may not have had a direct link with Al Qaida, but several of the groups that he supported and allowed headquarters in Baghdad, certainly did. And it is almost certain that, after 2000, he allowed at least one Al Qaida affiliated group, the Ansar al-Islam, to set up two bases in Iraq. |
