Watching Chemical Ali Get the Death Penalty
Filed under: News, Personal/Private
Ali Hassan al Majid, aka Chemical Ali
Darko Vojinovic-Pool/Getty ImagesAfter months of delay, there is news today that the Iraqi government finally gave the go ahead for the execution of the man known as Chemical Ali.
He is Saddam Hussein's cousin and he was one of his most trusted advisers. His real name is Ali Hassan al Majid and he got his nickname because of the role he played in the Kurdish genocide of the 1980s. At Saddam's order, al Majid spearheaded a campaign against Iraqi Kurds, killing 200,000 civilians and militants. Last summer, al Majid and two others were convicted of crimes against humanity.
I was in Baghdad last summer reporting for NPR and I covered that case. I was in the courtroom the day that al Majid was sentenced. Today's news provoked me to go back and dig up what I wrote about that day. I'll post it after the jump.
Sunday, June 24, 2007
The Anfal Genocide
Yesterday I got to watch history happen. Hassan al Majid better known as Chemical Ali, was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity for gassing the Kurdish population in the late 1980s and sentenced to death by hanging. I was in the courtroom, watching the proceedings from behind a glass wall from the media gallery. There were only nine other reporters there -- four other western press and five Iraqi -- a remarkably small press corps considering the severity of the crime and the significance of the proceedings.
So a little background first -- this was the last trial session in the case of the Anfal campaign. This was the name (in Arabic Anfal means "spoils") that Sadaam gave to his plan to wipe out the Kurdish population in the north of the country. It's an oil rich region near Iran and in the last stage of the Iran-Iraq war some Kurdish guerillas were shouldering up with Iran and making things quite difficult for Sadaam. His solution was to kill them all and their women and children. So he ordered his cousin, Hassan al Majid, who had installed as a kind of defacto dictator in the north, to implement his offensive against the Kurds. Majid ordered a series of massive attacks that spanned from roughly 1986 and culminated in 1988. Ground forces attacked villages, paramilitary groups kidnapped Kurdish fathers and sons. People would disappear and their bodies would be discovered in mass Kurdish graves years later. There were artillery attacks and "relocation" programs and there were the gassings. Chemical Ali ordered the Iraqi air force to drop mustard and nerve gas on thousands of Kurdish villages. It's hard to know how many people died. Kurdish sources say 180,000. Human Rights Watch puts the number between 50,000-100,000.
It was genocide and yesterday Chemical Ali and five other former Baath party members were called to account for their role in the Anfal campaign. It was the same courtroom where Sadaam Hussein was convicted in the Dujeil case last year and it was eerie to be there. I remember, like a lot of people, watching that whole drama unfold on tv. Now I was there in the same room and it was bizarre.
It was a very nice room as courtrooms go. I keep measuring this place up against Afghanistan which is ridiculous considering Iraq has (or had) a ton of money and Afghanistan is dirt poor. The only trial I covered in Kabul was in a miserably hot, stuff, dusty old courtroom. The Iraqi High Tribunal was held in the former headquarters of the Baath party. The media room where we hung out before the trial used to be some party room. It was crazy -- they had set up computers on one side of the room for us to work on and across the room was a dancefloor and a massive crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling that reflected light like a disco ball. Surreal.
The courtroom itself had a marble floor, plenty of air conditioning (I was freezing actually) and what looked to be gold scales of justice hanging on the wall behind the judge. The lawyers representing the Kurds stood on one side of the room. Some had to use the translation headphones because they don't speak Arabic. One by one, each defendant was called up to here his fate. The happiest among them was the former governor of Mosul who was actually let go because they didn't have enough evidence against him. Two others besides al Majid were given the death sentence and two more were issued life sentences.
Now an interesting sidenote here. One of the men ordered to hang was the former Minister of Defense. Now apparently this pretty controversial because this guy actually turned himself in when it became clear to him that the Sadaam regime was going to fall. At the time, the leader of US forces in the north was General Petraeus, (now in charge of the whole operation in Iraq). So the former minister of defense, so the story goes, turned himself into Petraeus and in exchange, the general told him that he would be protected -- i.e. not be de sentenced to death by hanging. Well, that didn't happen. And he wasn't too pleased about it. When the judge read his sentence he shook his head and said to the judge, "I leave you to God," which I translated to mean, "You have made a big mistake and you'll pay for it later."
What was really most remarkable about this whole thing was the lack of interest. I mean only ten reporters?! I mean genocide doesn't happen every day, thank god. But it's literally the Holocaust, Rwanda, Bosnia, Armenia and Anfal. That's it. Granted, all this was televised and most of the reporters I know here just opted to stay home, tape it, and cover the event that way. But even so, Iraqis didn't seem to be invested much in this trial. My translator Abdullah told me that people here are just tired. They're tired of thinking about these horrible people who waged such atrocities. And they've got more immediate concerns, like how to live their lives in the middle of a civil war.
And of course, the big name in this trial, Sadaam Hussein is already gone. He was the seventh defendant in the Anfal trial. He was executed last year in the Dujeil case. Kurdish leaders here say they wanted him kept alive so he could stand and account for what he did to the Kurds. But you can't kill him twice.
12:20 PM ET | 02-29-2008 | permalink
