Glad to see we are doing the stuff that counts. "New York Times."
April 27, 2003
U.S. Seeks Solid Core to Fix Iraq's Broken Legal System
By BERNARD WEINRAUB
BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 26 In a marble government building resembling an oversize mausoleum near downtown Baghdad, Maj. Charlotte R. Herring, an Army lawyer, sat at the corner of a conference table on Thursday facing a nervous Iraqi lawyer, Fatima Suaad Ibrahim. A translator sat between them.
Ms. Ibrahim, who is 36 and wore a black shawl that partly sheathed her face, told Major Herring that she lived with her parents, three brothers and their families in a small house in Baghdad.
Major Herring, who has served in the Army for 13 years, told Ms. Ibrahim that Americans in Baghdad were urgently seeking to meet Iraqi lawyers and jurists. The Americans want both to help rebuild the nation's shattered legal system and to understand the basic structure of a court and prison system.
For nearly 45 minutes, Major Herring, a lawyer with the staff judge advocate's office of the Third Infantry Division, gently questioned Ms. Ibrahim. Timid at first, Ms. Ibrahim slowly began confiding in the American. She said one of her brothers, an engineer, had heard that the Americans wanted to speak to lawyers and possibly to hire them one day.
Ms. Ibrahim, blinking hard and fingering her shawl, described an Iraqi system in which bribery and corruption were common. She said her brothers were "obliged, forced" to join the governing Baath Party. She said judges had sometimes insulted her because she was a woman. She also said she had adored her job as a lawyer because it gave her a sense of freedom.
Mr. Ibrahim was asked what kinds of courts were in Baghdad. "In each district there are different courts in one complex," she said. "Matrimonial courts, civil courts, criminal courts."
Major Herring asked how judges were selected, and Ms. Ibrahim responded that lawyers attended two-year institutes to become judges in criminal and civil courts. Serious crimes like murder were handled by three-judge panels called the Court of Sessions. Political crimes were tried by the Revolutionary Courts, tribunals directly under the former Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein.
The lawyers in this first group to speak to the Americans all said they had worked on civil, matrimonial or lower court cases.
American military and civilian teams are traveling in armed convoys around the dilapidated, garbage-strewn capital to cope with myriad urgent short-term and long-term issues ? from restoring water and electricity to overhauling the corrupt and politicized bureaucracy.
But rebuilding the legal and justice apparatus that had brutalized the nation for decades remains one of the most challenging and complex tasks, partly because lawyers and judges operated in a shadowy world where loyalty to Mr. Hussein was often a question of survival.
Separating those who brutalized the populace from those who felt compelled to join the Baath Party to stay alive makes the United States military's job extremely complicated. Col. Marc L. Warren, the staff judge advocate for V Corps, which oversees the Army here, said the hope was "to find a core group of individuals to initiate this new judicial system." Speaking to several Iraqi lawyers in the government reception room on Thursday, he spoke carefully about the need to "help us appreciate the state of the legal system and how to potentially proceed to try to get the court system and the public record system operational."
Moments later, teams of American lawyers sat down with the Iraqis.
"Do people think the courts are honest?" Major Herring asked.
"Most courts are not honest," Ms. Ibrahim said. "Money and personal relationships are important."
She spoke excitedly when asked about discrimination against women. Some judges, she said, mistreated female lawyers. But she added: "I have a sense of freedom. I am a lawyer. I sit among the men."
The meetings took place in the garish building ? replete with French imitation furniture slathered with fake gold leaf ? that was once used as a guest house by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Among the lawyers were two Iraqi brothers in their 60's who spoke openly, if uneasily, to the American military lawyers about their personal and professional lives. One of them, Abdul Ameer Mohsin, 65, said that he had been suspected of being a dissident and was imprisoned twice during the 1990's.
He said that paying bribes to clerks and judges was endemic to the legal system. "The law had no value," he said intensely. "Saddam Hussein insulted the law. He defined the law as whatever he wanted himself."
The American lawyers were plainly encouraged by the meetings, and more are planned. "It's a start," Major Herring said later as she was driven in a convoy of Humvees to a looted and still smoldering court complex near the central train station.
"We're just trying to find a core group of individuals to take Iraqi law and make it viable, valid and fair," she said. "We're trying to find people of integrity." She shrugged. "I would say we're starting from scratch."
As the lawyers arrived at the court complex, they seemed perplexed at the destruction. One part was sealed by a sign that said, in Arabic, unexploded ordnance. The rest of the still smoky buildings were scenes of chaos: papers, garbage, pipes and legal case files littered the floors. In one room, a color photograph of a boy and girl at what appeared to be a birthday party lay among the papers. The boy was wearing a Florida Marlins sweatshirt.
Their next stop was a police academy now used as a prison for 34 Iraqis, 9 of them accused of serious crimes. As the prisoners, in a filthy cell that faced outdoors, saw the Americans approaching, they shouted in Arabic, "We did nothing."
Colonel Warren said that within two days the Americans would review the cases of prisoners held on minor charges. The cases of those facing more serious charges will be reviewed within three weeks.
As she drove back to her base at Baghdad International Airport, Major Herring said the meeting with Ms. Ibrahim had been personally satisfying. "While I was talking to her I began to think that here we are, two female lawyers of similar age, but look how different things are," she said quietly. "I own my own house. I'm a single mom ? my daughter is with her father at Fort Benning. I have a certain amount of authority. I can say what I want. I'm paid reasonably well. People like Fatima have it so much harder.
"It really makes me proud to be here and really makes me proud to be an American." |
