Saddam Should Be Tried, Not Killed: New British Envoy
Saddam Hussein should be brought to trial for his crimes, not killed like his sons Uday and Qusay
LONDON, July 27 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein should be brought to trial for his crimes, not killed like his sons Uday and Qusay, the veteran diplomat appointed as Britain's new envoy to Iraq said Sunday, July 27.
The call from Jeremy Greenstock, who quits his role as Britain's U.N ambassador this week to take up the Baghdad posting in September 2003, was backed by a member of the U.S-backed new Iraqi Governing Council, Ahmed Chalabi, Agence France-Presse (AFP) said.
Greenstock said the deaths of Uday and Qusay -- killed five days ago in a firefight with U.S. forces at a villa where they were hiding in Mosul, Iraq -- were a "genuine success" for the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq.
"We have now got to get the father," he said on BBC television's "Breakfast with Frost" interview program.
"I would like to see him brought before a court, but that is in the hands of the military team looking for him," he said. "I would say it is quite important to do that."
Greenstock, 59, an Arabic speaker, was appointed in June to be Britain's top envoy in Iraq and number two to the chief U.S. administrator in the country, Paul Bremer.
Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, told the "Frost" program: "I think it is much better for the Iraqi people and for the world for Saddam to be caught alive and put on trial."
"He has to account for the mass graves of hundreds of thousands of people and for the wars he waged against Iran, Kuwait and the people of Kurdistan," he said.
"I Don't Know. I Don't Know What The Story Is"
Asked if he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq, Greenstock -- a key player during seven months of intense U.N. Security Council debates on Iraq in the run-up to war -- said: "I don't know. I don't know what the story is."
"I personally believe that Saddam was certainly running programs," he said. "But he decided to destroy and conceal many of his weapons when he knew (U.N.) inspectors were coming (in the period prior to the war), in order not to be caught on the wrong side of the political line."
Meanwhile, Iraq's transitional Governing Council has called for the bodies of Saddam Hussein's two sons Uday and Qusay to be given to their family, council member Samir Shaker Mahmud al-Sudayii said Sunday.
Interviewed at a meeting of Baghdad's municipal council, al-Sudayii, a Sunni Muslim entrepreneur, told AFP without elaborating that, if no one claimed the corpses, "other measures will be taken".
However, he added that he expected the U.S.-led occupation troops to follow the executive body's recommendation.
Earlier in the day, Sheikh Mahmud al-Nada, leader of the Bunasser tribe allied to Saddam, told the Qatar-based satellite television network Al-Jazeera that he "had asked for the bodies, but the coalition refused".
"I put in the request for family and religious reasons, not political ones," he underlined in the interview.
For its part, several newspapers published Sunday photos of Uday and Qusay.
The daily, Azzaman, splashed the photos, taken Friday, July25, by journalists at the U.S. military morgue at Baghdad airport, on its front page, with the non-descript headline "photos of Uday and Qusay, the sons of the deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein shown to reporters at the airport after the facial reconstruction operation."
El-Aswaq carried pictures of the bullet-riddled bodies and gave a detailed account of the four-hour gun battle in Mosul.
The mangled bodies of the two slain sons of Saddam were shown to journalists by U.S. officials Friday, revealing in gruesome detail the fatal wounds suffered by the two in their last stand against U.S. forces.
Anxious to convince a skeptical Iraqi public that Uday and Qusay indeed died in Mosul, the U.S. military escorted about 15 reporters, photographers and cameramen to an air-conditioned morgue.
The military had performed facial reconstruction on the slain brothers, disguised after more than three months on the run, to prove it was truly Uday and Qusay.
U.S. Double Standards
In Cairo, an Egyptian government newspaper on Sunday accused Washington of double standards by releasing photographs of Saddam Hussein's dead sons after denouncing the Iraqis for showing pictures of dead U.S. soldiers.
"The United States and the Western media moved heaven and earth when Iraqi television broadcast (images) of the dead bodies and of U.S. prisoners, in the first days of the U.S.-British aggression against Iraq," Al-Ahram daily said.
The newspaper said such actions were a "violation of the Geneva Convention, but the United States did the same thing, but in a worse way, by publishing the photographs of the corpses of Uday and Qusay", the daily said.
"The official American and Western position on the publication of the photos of the American dead (in Iraq), then the publication of the photos of the bodies of Uday and Qusay (...) is an example of double standards," it said.
The United States had denounced the broadcast of images of dead Americans and captured soldiers on Iraqi and Arab television during the first few days of the war in Iraq in March.
On Friday, the White House defended its decision to release pictures showing the corpses of Saddam Hussein's two sons, rejecting comparisons with Iraq's wartime photos of slain U.S. soldiers and prisoners of war.
"I think there is a big difference. It is "consistent" with the Geneva Convention," spokesman Scott McClellan said.
U.S. officials have said that they released the gory pictures, which claim to show the corpses of Hussein's sons Uday and Qusay, to prove to the Iraqi people that the two men really were killed in a firefight in northern Iraq. |
