The capture in Iraq on Thursday of Ali Hassan al-Majid offers an extraordinary opportunity for Iraqis to bring some measure of justice to tens of thousands of victims of Baath Party rule. But this can only happen if he is put on trial before a tribunal that is fair, impartial and independent. And for that to happen, the United States will have to reconsider its perverse aversion to an accountability process that involves the international community.
Ali Hassan earned the sobriquet “Chemical Ali” following Iraq´s murderous chemical weapons attacks “special bombardments” was the term he used in his directives against at least 60 Kurdish villages between April 1987 and August 1988, including the attack on the town of Halabja that alone killed some 5,000 people. But that was not all. As head of the Baath Party´s Northern Bureau at the time, he was the architect of the notorious Anfal campaign of 1988, in which more than 100,000 Kurds were killed or “disappeared.”
Subsequently Ali Hassan al-Majid was in charge of suppressing the mass anti-government uprising in the largely Shiite south in March 1991. In retaking the southern cities, loyalist forces under his overall command fired indiscriminately into residential areas, executed people on the streets and arrested and made “disappear” thousands. Taha Yassin Ramadan, the former vice-president who was taken into custody earlier this week, also played a leading role in that campaign.
Iraqis now know what they long suspected: that almost all of those Kurds and Shiites who disappeared ended up in mass graves, a good number of which have been uncovered in recent months. One survivor from a 1991 massacre near the southern city of Al-Hilla, Nasser Khadi Hashim al-Husseini, was 12 years old at the time. He told my colleagues at Human Rights Watch this May how security forces rounded up people, held them for several days, then loaded them onto buses and drove them to a remote abandoned canal. They pulled the people off the buses, threw them into a specially dug pit, machine-gunned them and buried them with a bulldozer. Nasir al-Husseini survived the shooting and managed to crawl to a spot where he could breathe through some bamboo covering until night fell and he could escape.
Another witness, Hassan Muhsin al-Ardawi, described a month of daily executions near the Al-Mahawil military base in the Al-Hilla area, the site of another mass grave from 1991. “They used to take them from the cars and push them in the holes, their hands tied and eyes covered,” he said. “They used to hit them, they had no mercy … they would just start to shoot them. After they were killed they buried them using the bulldozer shovels.”
The capture of Chemical Ali highlights the failure of the US-led occupation to adequately prepare for bringing to justice those Iraqi leaders responsible for these atrocities. The Iraqi governing council appointed by US civil administrator Paul Bremer has a role to play, but the “Iraqi-led process” that the Bush administration invokes does not yet exist, and any tribunal established solely under US auspices will smack of vengeful “victor´s justice.”
That´s why a tribunal should be established in Iraq using Arabic and Kurdish as official languages, and be presided over by Iraqi judges and judges from other countries not just the United States. Few if any Iraqi judges, prosecutors and investigators have participated in cases as complex as those involving war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. Technical expertise is needed for conducting focused investigations, analyzing documentary and forensic evidence, deposing witnesses, and so forth.
All this will require tapping into the experience of the international ad hoc tribunals prosecuting similar crimes in Rwanda, Sierra Leone and the former Yugoslavia. Veterans of these efforts should be invited to help set up, along with Iraqis, a “group of experts” who can coordinate evidence collection and preservation and recommend the most appropriate mechanisms to bring former officials to account for these serious crimes.
Ali Hassan al-Majid issued the world a challenge in 1988. On an audiotape of a meeting of leading Iraqi officials held to discuss the Anfal campaign, he is heard shouting, “I will kill them all with chemical weapons. Who is going to say anything?” The time has come for Iraqis and the international community together to provide the answer to his question.
