Iraqis seek justice for political killings

Hollywood Halfwits ^ | April 19, 2003, 11:37PM | By JOHN OTIS

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Copyright 2003 Houston Chronicle RESOURCES

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BAGHDAD, Iraq -- A mud-stained document on the floor of the burned-out Justice Ministry building explains the fate of two Iraqi soldiers who deserted 16 years ago.

"President Saddam Hussein consents to the execution of Mahmood Nader and Jabar Abdula Mahmood by hanging," says the 1987 death warrant, one of about 40 signed by the Iraqi leader and tucked into a three-ring binder.

Now that American troops have ousted Saddam's regime, many Iraqis are frantically searching prisons, intelligence centers and other government installations here for clues about their missing relatives. They also hope that surviving members of Saddam's regime who killed or tortured thousands of their countrymen over the past 24 years will be prosecuted.

But barriers have arisen to speedy prosecutions. Reams of documents with information about political prisoners may have been lost when Iraqis burned and looted government buildings after Baghdad fell to the Americans.

It's also unclear who will run the inquiry. The Bush administration favors putting Iraqis in charge of any probe. But many independent legal experts warn that it will take years for Iraq to develop an impartial judicial system. They are demanding that the administration allow the establishment of an international tribunal, like the U.N. war crimes courts judging cases in The Hague, Netherlands.

"The Iraqi justice system is in a shambles. Just finding law books and stenographers -- never mind judges and attorneys -- will be hard enough," said Ken Hurwitz, a senior associate for the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights in New York. "It is very important to have international involvement."

For the moment, however, average Iraqis have taken matters into their own hands.

The scene in Baghdad last week resembled Moscow or East Berlin just after the fall of communism. Iraqis, anxious for information about friends or family members who disappeared after they were arrested, were lining up outside government installations that were once off-limits.

At the sprawling military intelligence center in Baghdad's Kadhimiya district, dozens of Iraqis pled with the American GIs who now occupy the site to let them inside the front gate. Their relatives, they said, were taken here and held in underground cells.

"We want to check this building," said Abed al Kadar, an electrical engineer whose brother was arrested in 1982. "The first day after the war, people came here and heard voices coming from the ground. I think my brother is still alive."

Lt. Col. J.R. Sanderson, commander of Task Force 2-69, Third Brigade of the Army's Third Infantry Division, secured blueprints to the site, toured the area with former guards and even fired explosive charges into the concrete floors to check for subterranean tunnels and cells. He came up empty, yet the Iraqis would not go away.

"They look at me like I have the ability to raise the dead," Sanderson said as he toured the intelligence complex in a Humvee. "But I can't make someone who has been dead since 1982 come alive again. It's heartbreaking."

Sanderson is more concerned with retrieving sensitive government documents. When his troops arrived here shortly after the fall of Baghdad, he said, thousands of Iraqis were ransacking the intelligence center. They made off with cabinets full of files although they later returned some of the archives.

Even before U.S. troops entered the capital, Human Rights Watch sent a letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld urging that allied forces secure Iraqi government offices because state documents could provide key evidence in future war crimes trials.

"These government documents are critical evidence of 25 years of atrocities," Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, said in a statement last month. "Countless families in Iraq will need access to these archives to establish what happened to their missing relatives."

Roth pointed out that after a Kurdish uprising in northern Iraq in 1991, Kurdish officials secured 18 tons of Iraqi documents that helped Human Rights Watch identify government officials responsible for the so-called Anfal genocide. In 1988, Iraqi soldiers rounded up and executed an estimated 100,000 Kurdish men and boys while Kurdish villages were attacked with chemical weapons.

All told, between 225,000 and 290,000 Iraqis are believed to have disappeared during the rule of Saddam's Baath Party. Some may have perished in the waning days of Saddam's regime.

Some Iraqis are now coming forward with documents looted over the past two weeks. One of the collection points is a house on the Tigris River in Baghdad where families of the disappeared recently founded the Committee to Free Political Prisoners.

During a visit, volunteers pored over ledgers and binders containing information on people missing since the early 1980s. Scanning a list of political prisoners, one man read aloud their purported crimes followed by their sentences.

"Communist: executed. Communist: executed. Communist: executed," he said.

Outside, the newly confirmed names of the dead were hand-written on red construction paper and taped to the wall of the house.

But it remains unclear who will judge the perpetrators.

The Bush administration, which opposes the concept of an international court -- such as the tribunal run by the United Nations in The Hague that hear war crime cases from the former Yugoslavia -- has proposed an all-Iraqi tribunal. The panel would be made up of Iraqi exiles as well as people inside the country who were not associated with the Baath Party.

"For the past crimes, it's an Iraqi-led process. They're going to be out front," said State Department official Pierre-Richard Prosper.

But some critics fear that Washington may have other motives. They contend that the administration wants its own hand-picked panel in order to control the scope of the investigations and to ward off any attempt to examine American military actions in the war -- such as airstrikes with cluster bombs or the use of lethal force in urban areas.

Tom Malinowsky, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, argues that an all-Iraqi tribunal would lack legitimacy. Many Iraqis distrust the exile community, he says, while legal experts inside the country may try to settle old scores against members of the former ruling party rather than seek justice.

Hurwitz of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights and others are pressing for an international commission of inquiry. The panel, they suggest, could be comprised of a mix of international judges and local jurists.

Either way, they say, the process must start soon.

"Evidence is a wasting asset," Hurwitz said. "Evidence disappears. Memories fade. Witnesses die off."