By Alan Elsner
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Saddam Hussein could use a war crimes trial as an
opportunity to send an anti-American message to the Arab world and to embarrass
the United States by bringing up its past support for his government, legal
experts said on Tuesday.
Michael Scharf, who heads an office of war crimes research at Case Western
Reserve University in Cleveland, said Saddam was likely to copy the strategy of
former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, whose war crimes trial in The Hague
has already lasted for almost two years.
"Saddam could represent himself and spend years blasting anti-American
rhetoric to the Middle East," said Scharf, author of a book on the Milosevic
trial.
"He could also try to ensure that the trial turns into a big embarrassment
for the United States. He'd try and call all kinds of dignitaries as witnesses,
including people like Donald Rumsfeld," Scharf said.
Rumsfeld, now U.S. defense secretary, visited Iraq and met with Saddam 20
years ago as a special envoy from then-President Ronald Reagan, promoting a
close military and commercial relationship that only ended when Iraq invaded
Kuwait in 1990.
Washington helped Saddam obtain intelligence and military equipment and,
according to a U.S. Centers for Disease Control Document placed in the Senate
record last year, Iraq also obtained from the United States biological agents
that could have been turned into weapons.
The United States at the time was supporting Iraq in its war against the old
U.S. nemesis Iran, and Washington stood mutely by when Saddam used chemical
weapons both against Iranian forces and against Kurdish people inside Iraq.
EMBARRASS WORLD LEADERS
Saddam could also embarrass other world leaders. French President Jacques
Chirac established a close relationship with Saddam dating back to 1974 and
helped negotiate the sale of nuclear reactors to Iraq.
Britain, Germany, Italy and especially the former Soviet Union also supplied
Iraq with much equipment, expertise and funding over the years.
The format of any trial is still far from clear but Saddam could face
broad-ranging charges of crimes against the Iraqi people, war crimes and crimes
against humanity. President George W. Bush said on Monday it should be fair and
public and be organized jointly by the United States and Iraqis.
According to Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal
think-tank, the trial offered an opportunity not just to hold Saddam accountable
but to examine the broader record of the past 40 years of Iraqi history.
Bennis suggested that any trial of Saddam should go beyond just the issue of
Saddam's behavior and "ask who were the enablers, who funded those weapons of
mass destruction, who provided the support and the intelligence?"
That's precisely the kind of process that Bush, facing an election campaign
next year, would be anxious to avoid, and Bennis said she expected Washington to
maintain tight control over the process and lay down procedures that minimize
Saddam's opportunities to grandstand.
Some believe expectations of what such a trial may achieve in terms of
providing Iraq with a national catharsis are already exaggerated.
"History has shown that all the big war crimes trials from Nuremberg on are
so complicated and so drawn out that the public very quickly loses interest,"
said David Cesarani, a British historian and biographer of Adolf Eichmann, the
Nazi who was tried in Jerusalem for crimes against humanity in 1961 and 1962.
"The way things are done in court is not conducive to telling a complete
story from beginning to end," he said.
The
Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Uganda is in anarchy" Groupe de communication Mulindwas "avec Yoweri Museveni, l'Ouganda est dans l'anarchie" |
