The Time for Justice

There are plenty of complications involved in trying Saddam Hussein and others from his regime for crimes committed against the Iraqi people, but none that argues for further delay. Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi was right to announce that some of the war crimes trials would start next week, including that of Ali Hassan Majid, known as “Chemical Ali,” a cousin of Hussein’s believed to have used poison gas to murder thousands of Kurds.

If the trials don’t get underway, Hussein and his henchmen may never face justice. It’s true that Allawi’s every move in the run-up to the Jan. 30 elections is politically motivated, especially now that he has declared his own candidacy. But it could be a long wait before a democratic government with more legitimacy could initiate these proceedings, and the mostly Sunni defendants would still accuse the majority Shiites of unfairness. Indeed, the legal safeguards afforded the defendants, combined with the weight of the evidence, will determine whether these trials are deemed credible. For that reason, the government should televise the proceedings.

There is also a matter of basic fairness and due process. Keeping Hussein’s lieutenants indefinitely locked up without charging them is hardly the way to launch a new democracy, even if Washington has set a poor example at Guantanamo Bay.

It’s almost unavoidable, as the Nuremberg war crimes trials showed, that these trials will be seen to some extent as “victor’s justice.” In 1945, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone called the prosecution being led by his colleague Robert Jackson a “high-grade lynching party.”

It’s a foregone conclusion that Hussein and his cohorts, like the Nazis, are guilty of heinous crimes. The accomplishment of Nuremberg was to shock and reeducate the German people by creating a documentary record of the Nazi regime’s crimes and atrocities. In a traumatized Iraq, trials could have a similarly cathartic effect.

The real question is whether Iraq’s judges are capable of carrying out the trials. The prosecutors need to work their way through mounds of documents and carefully prepare for belligerent defendants, especially the canny Hussein, who will attempt, as much as possible, to disrupt the proceedings and turn them into a circus.

The Bush administration, which has refused to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the permanent International Criminal Court in The Hague, has asked for the help of the United Nations in assisting prosecutors and judges. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has disgracefully refused to help, claiming that Iraq’s death penalty prevents the U.N. from participating. But that hasn’t prevented the U.N. from helping to carry out judicial reform in Rwanda and Afghanistan, which have the death penalty.

Those seeking to postpone justice can always point to some logistical or political reason for putting off these trials. But given their length -- the main Nuremberg war crimes trial dragged on for more than a year, and former Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic continues to tie up the proceedings in his trial at The Hague -- Allawi is right to want to get started.