REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Judicial Colonialism
Don't impose Europe-style justice on Iraq.
URL:http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110004457
Saturday, December 20, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST
With Saddam's capture, we are now hearing that Iraqis should be able to govern themselves in all ways except holding a trial. The same people who didn't want to depose the dictator are saying he deserves to be tried only by an "international tribunal."
United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan is a member of this neocolonial judicial school, as are the European Union and most international human rights organizations. Clinton-era Secretary of State Madeleine Albright also supports an international court, telling the Washington Post that "there is a lot of experience out there on war crimes tribunals."
The fear seems to be that Saddam might not be able to get a fair trial in Iraq, as if there's some global suspense about his guilt. Worse, Iraqis might be so barbaric as to impose the same death penalty on Saddam that he imposed on so many thousands of his own people. "There are no circumstances that can justify the death penalty," a spokesman for the European Union said this week. Ah, the white man's moral burden.
We are glad to say this does not seem to be the view either inside Iraq or within the current Coalition government. Iraq's Governing Council announced Wednesday that Saddam will be tried in public by an Iraqi court. "All stages of the trial will be public," Council member Adnan Pachachi said. Another member promised earlier this week that a trial would be televised, and we can only hope so.
Along with President Bush and Tony Blair, these Iraqis understand that an Iraqi trial of Saddam and his Baathist cohort is an essential part of nation-building. In a public trial that includes fulsome testimony, they have the chance to educate the people of Iraq about the scope and detail of Saddam's reign of terror. The act of seeing that justice can be done will also be a demonstration that those evil days won't return.
Iraqis also have a chance to show they can bring despots to justice far better then the broader "international" community has. Nuremberg may have been a model of an international court, but the more recent versions haven't been pretty--Ms. Albright notwithstanding.
Exhibit No. 1 is the trial of former Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, currently going on at The Hague. The Milosevic follies have been playing for 22 months and are still going strong.
Proceedings are being broadcast back home, and Milosevic, who is representing himself, is making the most of it. He is using his platform to campaign for a seat in the Serbian parliament, to which he hopes to be elected on December 28. This week he inserted himself into the U.S. elections, trying to discredit Wesley Clark, who was appearing as a witness. But at least the Milosevic trial is mostly a sideshow in Yugoslavia, which has largely moved on from the war.
Giving Saddam a similar platform could be a disaster to Iraq's reconstruction, emboldening the Baathist remnants and suggesting to ordinary Iraqis that Saddam still might return to power, like some Mafia don running criminal operations from his jail cell.
Another failed model is the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The U.N. court, which was established in 1995 to try perpetrators of the Rwanda genocide, has convicted only 17 people in eight years. And that's with the help of 16 judges and a staff of 800. At this rate, a trial of Saddam, who filled 270 mass graves during his 24 years as president, could take decades.
Certainly the world needs to learn the extent of Saddam's crimes. And any trial needs to be transparent and open, as Iraq's current Governing Council members now promise. Mr. Pachachi said that the tribunal would welcome "foreign judges if we feel it's necessary." As long as Iraqis have ownership of the process, some international contribution might well make sense.
As for the death penalty, why isn't that also a matter for Iraqis to decide? The practice is widespread in the Islamic world, and at least Saddam will have a trial. That's more due process than Ceausescu received in Romania or Mussolini in Italy. Many Nazis were also executed after their trials by the allies after World War II.
There is a peculiar condescension to the view that only Europeans or the U.N. can properly try and punish Saddam, as if Iraqis are too uncivilized to run a trial. This is the same mentality that says Arab cultures aren't yet "ready" for democracy and need to be governed by strongmen like Saddam. Newly free Iraqis deserve to see that justice is dispensed to Saddam by a jury of his countrymen. |
