🚀 go-pugleaf

"The first weapon of mass destruction was Saddam Hussein," writes
Bernard Kouchner, who has been observing atrocities in Iraq since he
led the first Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders)
mission there in 1974."



" Le Livre Noir de Saddam Hussein (The Black Book of Saddam Hussein)
is a robust denunciation of Saddam's regime that does not fall into
the trap of viewing everything in Iraq through a US-centric prism. The
writers - Arabs, Americans, Germans, French and Iranian - have
produced the most comprehensive work to date on the former Iraqi
president's war crimes, assembling a mass of evidence that makes the
anti-intervention arguments redundant."




More proof that the left is on the wrong side of history...........

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,17439165%5E2703,00.html

The big black book of horrors
Rebecca Weisser
03dec05

WITH the trial of Saddam Hussein under way, those in the
God-damn-America camp find themselves uncomfortably wedged. Should
they justify their opposition to the war by downplaying Saddam's
crimes while sheeting home blame for the present turmoil to the US and
its allies? Or do they opt for the defence of moral equivalence,
conceding that Saddam was indeed a monster but those US presidents who
once backed his regime, including George H.W. Bush, are the real
monsters.

The best riposte to this warped analysis is a scholarly and sober
700-page volume recently published in France, of all places. Le Livre
Noir de Saddam Hussein (The Black Book of Saddam Hussein) is a robust
denunciation of Saddam's regime that does not fall into the trap of
viewing everything in Iraq through a US-centric prism. The writers -
Arabs, Americans, Germans, French and Iranian - have produced the most
comprehensive work to date on the former Iraqi president's war crimes,
assembling a mass of evidence that makes the anti-intervention
arguments redundant. 
"The first weapon of mass destruction was Saddam Hussein," writes
Bernard Kouchner, who has been observing atrocities in Iraq since he
led the first Medecins Sans Frontieres mission there in 1974.
"Preserving the memory of the arbitrary arrests that Saddam's police
conducted every morning, the horrible and humiliating torture, the
organised rapes, the arbitrary executions and the prisons full of
innocent people is not just a duty. Without that one cannot understand
either what Saddam's dictatorship was or the urgent necessity to
remove him." 

The obsession of many journalists and commentators with the fruitless
hunt for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons has meant much of
the evidence of Saddam's atrocities in liberated Iraq has been
under-reported. Sinje Caren Stoyke, a German archeologist and
president of Archeologists for Human Rights, catalogues 288 mass
graves, a list that is already out of date with the discovery of fresh
sites every week. 

"There is no secret about these mass graves," Stoyke writes. "Military
convoys crossed towns, full of civilian prisoners, and returned empty.
People living near execution sites heard the cries of men, women and
children. They heard shots followed by silence." 

Stoyke estimates one million people are missing in Iraq, presumed
dead, leaving families with the dreadful task of finding and
identifying the remains of their loved ones. 

Abdullah Mohammed Hussein was a soldier fighting in the mountains when
Iraqi troops took the Kurdish village of Sedar and deported
three-quarters of the inhabitants, including his mother, his wife and
their seven children. They were taken to a concentration camp at
Topzawa and from there some were taken to an execution ground near the
archeological site of Hatra, south of Mosul. The remains of 192 people
have been found, 123 women and children and 69 men, among them
Abdullah's wife and three of their children. There is no trace of his
mother and the other four children. They were victims of the genocidal
Anfal campaign, which sought to exterminate the Kurds. 

Between February and September 1988, 100,000 to 180,000 Kurds died or
disappeared. The bombing of the Kurdish village of Halabja with
chemical weapons including mustard gas, tabun, sarin and VX on March
16, 1988, which killed 3000 to 5000 civilians, was the most publicised
of these atrocities because it occurred near the Iranian border and
Iranian troops were able to penetrate with the assistance of Kurds,
filming and photographing the victims. 

Halabja was not an isolated case however. Saddam used chemical weapons
at least 60 times against Kurdish villages during Anfal. 

And Kurds were not the only victims of Saddam, who ordered the arrest
of numerous Shi'ites. Saadoun Kassab, an engineer who helped build Abu
Ghraib in 1957, a prison that was designed to hold 4000 prisoners, was
later to be held there for a year. He told Chris Kutschera, the book's
editor: "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. I was sometimes in there for a fortnight without going
outside. I wanted to be interrogated to get outside, to see daylight
and human beings. All that because I said hello to Saad Saleh Jaber
[son of a former Shi'ite prime minister from the time of the
monarchy]. I saw people die." 

Abdoul Hadi al-Hakim, a Shi'ite, was arrested with 90 members of his
family on May 10, 1983, and was detained for eight years without being
charged or tried. The youngest Hakim detained was only 14. His father
and two brothers, together with 13 other relatives, were executed
within the first weeks of detention. He and the rest were held in Abu
Ghraib, 22 in a cell that measured 4mx6m. There was no running water
and a hole in the corner served as a toilet. Recounting his detention
in the book, Abdoul al-Hakim says: "The worst moments? It was all
terrible, but the worst was the fear of being executed. Each time we
heard the lock turn we were silent; it could be the moment to leave,
for me, for another. I am angry with those who mix the crimes of the
Americans with those of Saddam when they are not comparable." 

The repression of the Shi'ites included the forced deportation of
Iraqi Shi'ites into Iran, which started when the Baathists seized
power. At least 40,000 were deported in a first wave in 1969-71 and a
second wave of at least 60,000 were deported nine years later.
Deportations continued throughout the 1980s. At the time of the fall
of Saddam, 200,000 Iraqis were living in Iran, one-quarter Kurds and
three-quarters Arab Shi'ites. Of these exiles, 50,000 were living in
refugee camps in great poverty. 

The extermination of the Marsh Arabs, an ancient population that had
been living in the marshlands of Mesopotamia, took place between 1991
and 2003. Of a population of 400,000 Arabs living in the marshes of
southern Iraq 30 years ago, there are today only 83,000; 11,000 fled
to Baghdad and are living there in great poverty and 80,000 have fled
to Iran. Thousands were murdered by Iraqi soldiers and the marshes
were drained, bringing famine and illness to those that remained. 

The brutal repression of the Shi'ite uprising after the 1991 Gulf War
resulted in another 300,000 deaths, most of them civilians. 

In Saddam's Iraq no one, not even the dictator's closest relatives and
collaborators, was safe. Tariq Ali Saleh, a former Iraqi judge and the
president of the Iraqi Jurists Association, writes that during the
reign of the Baath party from 1968 to 2003, the security services
arrested and imprisoned people without charging them, with no access
to a lawyer or contact with their family. Everyone was targeted,
including women and children. Torture was systematically used to
secure confessions including beating, burning, ripping out finger
nails, rape, electric shocks, acid baths and deprivation of sleep,
food or water. 

Then there were the victims of Saddam's three devastating wars. It is
estimated that more than one million people in both countries died
during the Iran-Iraq conflict which has been compared by Kutschera to
World WarI with its trench warfare and colossal loss of human life.
The enormous cost of the Iran-Iraq war inspired Saddam to invade
Kuwait to seize its assets and Saddam's refusal to comply with the UN
resolutions obliging him to disarm finally led to Iraq's invasion and
his downfall. 

For Kouchner, these murders need to be set out one by one, in all
their horror, describing their nature and affirming that which is too
often forgotten: Saddam was one of the worst tyrants in history and it
was urgent to rid the Iraqi people of him. 

Kouchner, who was France's health minister until he was picked by UN
secretary-general Kofi Annan as his special representative for Kosovo,
had hoped that a united international community might be able to bring
down Saddam in the way that resolute action by the international
community liberated that country. He felt bitterly ashamed when the
French veto in the Security Council divided the international
community and made it impossible to bring about a united front to
bring down the dictator. "Was there a worse way of duping those who
hoped for so much from us?" he writes. 

It seems surprising that such a robust denunciation of Saddam should
come from France and even more so that many of the contributors of
this scholarly work would be considered to be left of centre. 

While Australian anti-war protesters have lauded France's obdurate
opposition to the war, Le Livre Noir de Saddam Hussein charts the
sorry history of France's slavish support for Saddam, from Right and
Left, for 30 years, a relationship that was fundamentally based on the
trade of Iraqi oil for French missiles, fighter jets and nuclear
technology. 

French President Jacques Chirac's friendship with Saddam goes back to
the '70s when he was prime minister under president Valery Giscard
d'Estaing. When Saddam came to France, he spent a private weekend with
Chirac in Provence, and on another visit Chirac went to the airport to
meet his "personal friend" for whom he felt respect and affection. 

The only rupture in this idyll was the invasion of Kuwait, when France
joined the UN coalition to restore Kuwaiti sovereignty. But in the 15
years after the Iran-Iraq war, France worked energetically to lift
sanctions and normalise relations with Iraq and with Saddam to restore
a lucrative trading partner. 

Determined to keep Saddam in power, the French never once denounced
the dictator. Yet far from preventing war, the French veto in the
Security Council facilitated it. In the absence of a UN resolution
authorising force against Saddam, the only possibility was a US-led
coalition. 

The French, like all those who opposed the war, have implicitly or
explicitly argued that although Saddam had his unsavoury side, he was
no worse than the leaders in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran,
Syria and Egypt, or farther afield in Zimbabwe, Burma, North Korea and
China. 

For the French and for many opponents of the war, the argument
proffered was that without Saddam there would be chaos in Iraq. One
French diplomat is cited as saying: "The opposition doesn't exist. The
situation in Iraq won't change for a certain amount of time. If Saddam
Hussein disappears, it's the regime that will be swept away and there
will be federal anarchy." 

People who took this view feel vindicated by every setback the new
regime in Iraq confronts and the attacks of suicide bombers. 

Far from glossing over the difficulties in rebuilding Iraq, the book
documents the extent to which this was inevitable after 35 years of a
brutal dictatorship in which Saddam ruthlessly eliminated civil
structures, political opponents and those within his party he viewed
as a threat. 

The repressive system put in place by Saddam was impregnable from
within. There was no democratic solution to Saddam's dictatorship.: no
popular movement, no insurrection could have overthrown him, as the
Kurds and Shi'ites found out through bloody experience. 

"The American war was perhaps not a good solution for getting rid of
the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. But, as this book shows, after 35
years of a dictatorship of exceptional violence, which has destroyed
Iraqi civil society and created millions of victims, there wasn't a
good solution," Kutschera writes. 

Saddam and seven co-defendants are charged with ordering the killing
of more than 140 people from the mainly Shi'ite Muslim town of Dujail,
north of Baghdad, after an attempt on Saddam's life there in 1982.