Irak 114

Jim Nolan, mensenrechten advocaat uit Sidney, schrijft in The Australian:

'Bye bye, butcher.

Good riddance to one of the most bloodthirsty tyrants of the modern era


SADDAM Hussein's conviction for the massacre of 148 Shi'ites in 1982 in the Iraqi village of Dujail was the first in an expected series of such trials. It was also only one small episode from the former Iraqi tyrant's blood-soaked years.
In his 1989 book Republic of Fear, the Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya told anyone prepared to listen about the depraved regime of the Iraqi Baath party under Saddam. Makiya's Iraq Memory Foundation documents the multiple crimes and personal stories of Saddam's victims, their relatives and friends (http://www.iraqmemory.org/).
Iraq's democratically elected President Jalal Talabani recently reminded us that Saddam's Baathist Iraq was the longest lived fascist regime in history. It has rightly been described by Christopher Hitchens as a "charnel house above ground and mass grave below".
The most comprehensive work on Saddam's crimes, the French Le Livre Noir de Saddam Hussein (The Black Book of Saddam Hussein), has yet to be translated into English. But those with the desire to know have had the means, through Makiya and others, to appreciate if not comprehend the scale of Saddam's atrocities.
Just last month, two Kurdish witnesses at Saddam's trial for the massacre at Anfal, in Iraqi Kurdistan, gave harrowing accounts of surviving killing fields where guards executed hundreds of detainees at a time.
Saddam's henchman and cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid - the gruesome "Chemical Ali" - was asked in 1998 how he would deal with the Kurds. He said: "I will kill them all with chemical weapons. Who is going to say anything? The international community? F-- them!" He did as he threatened, and the international community did nothing.
Saddam and his genocidal family had it nailed. The odds were well and truly on their side. Just ask the people of Darfur.
From February to September 1988, 100,000 to 180,000 Iraqi Kurds died or disappeared. Saddam's Baathist tyranny used chemical weapons at least 60 times against Kurdish villages during the Anfal campaign.
Of course, the Kurds were not Saddam's only victims. Saadoun Kassab, a Shi'ite engineer who in 1957 helped build Abu Ghraib (designed to hold 4000 prisoners), himself became an inmate. Kassab told the editor of The Black Book: "When I was imprisoned in Abu Ghraib in 1985, there were 48,500 prisoners. I was imprisoned for eight months in a space 1mx1.5m, a box. All that because I said hello to (the son of a former Shi'ite prime minister from the time of the monarchy)."
Because of periodic overcrowding, Saddam and his sons decided to execute a proportion of the inmates at random, just to cull the population. Next the warders visited the families of the prisoners, asking how much it would be worth to keep their loved ones off the list.
The English novelist Ian McEwan observed that there were, in relation to Iraq, two kinds of people: those who recognised the words Abu Ghraib before 2004 and those who only did so afterwards.'

Lees verder: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20711860-7583,00.html

Nogmaals: dit gebeurde allemaal nog in de tijd dat Saddam Hoessein onze bondgenoot was in de strijd tegen Iran. Al die stijd steunde de VS zijn regime militair, economisch en politiek, inclusief de oorlogsmisdaden. Nederland protesteerde hier niet tegen, net zomin als het uit de Israelische oorlogsmisdaden politieke consequenties trekt. Handel gaat voor.