One of the most deplorable manoeuvres conducted by the United States among its countless acts of venality and illegality in Iraq was the rigging of several crucial future legal arrangements in the country in such a way that they would become very nearly, if not fully, irreversible. Some of these would be hard to roll back even after the U.S. occupation of Iraq—itself the consequence of an unjust and illegal war—ends.

Among the worst of these manoeuvres were the privatisation of some of Iraq’s precious economic assets, the award of “sweetheart” contracts to American multinational corporations like Halliburton and Bechtel, the imposition of a constitution upon a country under occupation, and the setting up of the Supreme Iraqi Criminal Tribunal (SICT), which tried former President Saddam Hussein and his officials.

The first two actions have resulted in the outright looting of Iraq, and reduced its once-prosperous middle-level human development society to penury, and disease and starvation among significant sections of the population. Economically and socially, Iraq is much worse off today than before its invasion in 2003.

The last action, namely the creation of the SICT, has led to the sentencing of Hussein, his half-brother and a former judge to death by hanging for the massacre of 148 people in 1982.

Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who committed any number of atrocities and grave human rights violations, including mass murder. For all his pretences to be anti-imperialist, he collaborated for long years with the U.S., which covertly encouraged him during the 1980-88 war with Iran, and passed on classified military intelligence to him so as to tilt the strategic balance in his favour. Saddam Hussein fully exploited Washington’s aversion and hostility to Iran’s Islamic Revolution.

Saddam Hussein represented a perverse, militarised form of nationalism and was an evil force so far as his own people’s political and civil rights were concerned. He deserves to be tried on the basis of irrefutable evidence and punished.

Yet, it is equally incontestable that his trial was a cynically manipulated farce, which violated all norms of fairness. It has produced a grotesque outcome, which will inflame Iraq’s already seriously troubled situation, and further discredit the occupying powers, led by the U.S. and Britain.

If the purpose of the whole process was to bring Hussein to justice, then it stands squarely defeated, indeed brutally mauled. Consider the following:

• The U.S. explicitly rejected the wholly legitimate and reasonable demand for an international tribunal, similar to that set up for trying Slobadan Milosevik at The Hague, or the tribunal on the Rwanda genocide.
• The SICT was set up by the occupying powers, which rigged its rules of procedure in favour of the prosecution.
• The tribunal cannot be even remotely considered a sovereign, independent, impartial or legitimate entity. This is not the subjective opinion of an individual, but that of the United Nations’ Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD), established by the UN Commission on Human Rights in 1991. The WGAD received its mandate from the UN General Assembly and the UN Human Rights Council.
• Most of the judges of the SICT were imparted special legal “training” in Britain, one of the occupying powers.
• The WGAD in its final opinion delivered in September determined that “the deprivation of liberty of Saddam Hussein is arbitrary, being in contravention of Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which Iraq and the U.S. are parties.”
• The accused were denied the elementary right to defend themselves. Saddam Hussein did not have unimpeded access to his lawyers, nor was given adequate time or facilities to prepare his defence. The WGAD says that “the severe restriction on access to top lawyers of his own choosing and the presence of U.S. officials at such meetings violated his right to communicate with counsel,” which is mandated by Article 14(3) of the ICCPR.
• Two of Hussein’s lawyers were assassinated during the course of the trial, in October 2005 and in June 2006. This, says the WGAD, “seriously undermined his right to defend himself through counsel of his own choosing.”
• The first chief judge of SICT, Rizgar Mohammed Amin, resigned because of political pressure directed at preventing a fair trial. A judge was appointed to replace him, but did not take up the assignment.
• The presiding judge, Raouf Rasheed Abdel-Rahman, who sentenced Saddam Hussein, was shamelessly biased against the accused and abruptly and arbitrarily terminated the trial in June 2006. He is “reported to have made statements incompatible with impartiality and the presumption of innocence enshrined in Article 14(2) of the ICCPR,” according to WGAD.
• According to the WGAD, Hussein could not “obtain the attendance and examination of witnesses on his behalf under the same condition as witnesses against him.” His right to do so, guaranteed by the ICCPR, was “undermined by the failure to adequately disclose prosecution evidence to the defendants, the reading into the record of affidavits without an adequate possibility for the defence to challenge them and the sudden decision of the presiding judge to cut short the defence case …”
• The WGAD also says: “Neither the defendants nor the public are in a position to verify whether [the concerned] judges meet the requirements for judicial office, whether they are affiliated with political office, whether their impartiality and independence is otherwise undermined.”
• Amnesty International too says that Hussein’s trial was “a shabby affair marred by serious flaws that call into question the capacity of the tribunal, as currently established, to administer justice fairly, in conformity with international standards.”
• One of Saddam Hussein’s defence lawyers, Ramsey Clark, a former U.S. Attorney General and respected human rights defender, was physically ejected from the courtroom for saying that the trial failed to meet international legal standards and was a travesty of justice.
• Even before the trial ended, Prime Minister Nur Al Maliki demanded that Hussein be hanged. The sentence seemed like a foregone conclusion.
• Under the SICT’s rules, Saddam Hussein has no right of appeal beyond a special Cassation Panel; his death sentence must be executed within 30 days of his appeal’s disposal by the Panel.

As if all this were not bad enough, the presiding judge of the SICT chose—if that’s the right word—to pronounce the sentence on Saddam Hussein to coincide with the recent U.S. Congressional elections.

This was a clear case of the victor of a war of aggression imposing his own “justice” upon a vanquished people, and further, of probably influencing the timing of the pronouncement of the sentence with a view to making short-term domestic political gains from it. It is another matter that even this super-cynical move did not help Bush and the Republicans avert an ignominious defeat in the Congressional elections of November 7.

The death penalty pronounced on Saddam Hussein will exacerbate the situation in Iraq by further alienating the Sunni community and worsening the ethnic rifts. It will also convince large numbers of people throughout the world—and not just Muslims—that the U.S. is a mighty military power which is incapable of being fair, just or compassionate.

Not only did Washington achieve its goal of “regime change” by invading Iraq while citing a tissue of lies about its “weapons of mass destruction”. It has further brutalised its entire society, imposed collective punishment on its people, carried out terrible atrocities in Abu Ghraib and Fallujah, and conspired to subvert justice and due process of law.

Liberals who oppose the death penalty in principle, as well as large numbers of people who are ambiguous on capital punishment, will be appalled by this terrible travesty of justice, which is part of the United States’ historic March of Folly through war and devastation.

The supreme irony is that while Saddam Hussein has been unfairly sentenced to death for killing 148 people, the leaders of the United States and its allies will not even be put on trial for killing half-a-million civilian Iraqi children through sanctions imposed after 1991, nor for the avoidable death of as many as 655,000 Iraqi civilians since the invasion of March 2003 and the occupation that has followed.

That’s “justice” in a world dominated by a hegemonic power which insists on behaving like an international brigand!

This article was specially written for the Urdu language magazine Bazm-e-Sahara’