Memories of Iraq in Kuwait and Iran

The start of trial proceedings against Saddam Hussein has sparked reactions in Kuwait and Iran, both direct victims of the toppled Baathist regime's aggression.
Kuwait stands apart for its relatively pluralistic press, and Ar Raï Al Aam (Public Opinion) is perhaps one of the best daily newspapers. It publishes hardline opinions from those who see the tribunal as a model of its kind and a precedent for Iraq. «The losers who are still weeping for the old regime see the tribunal as unjust. How can they be misguided to such an extent, and forget that Iraq has not had a single fair trial since the Baath party took power?» asks the Kuwaiti writer Qassem Hussein Awad.

However, as it appears in Joseph Samaha's editorial published in the Lebanese daily As Safir (and translated in Courrier International, 8-14 July 2004), Salem Chalabi, the Court's president, has been subject to considerable criticism for his strong links to American neo-conservatives and the Israeli extreme. «The best thing that could happen to Saddam and his band of assassins,» writes Yasser Al Saleh in Ar Raï Al Aam, «is for this court to appear like a play staged by the Americans and acted by Iraqis, linked to the occupation and Zionism. Then his execution will not appear to have come directly from the will of ordinary Iraqi people.»

Potential Iranian complaints

The Iranian side abounds with a string of initiatives to lodge a complaint in the Iraqi court over Saddam Hussein's role in crimes committed against the Iranian people between 1980 and 1988. The Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs has already set up a committee charged with drafting an Iranian complaint against Saddam Hussein. Other initiatives come from the judiciary, deputies in the Madjlis (parliament), or even from private lawyers.

In the reformist Iranian daily Shargh, the lawyer Massoud Haeri rails against the cacophony created by this surfeit of initiatives, and explains the legal problems posed by an Iranian complaint before an Iraqi court. «War crimes, the category describing the crimes committed by Saddam Hussein in his eight-year war on Iran, are covered by international law and should therefore be dealt with by international courts,» he writes. «It is thus not within the jurisdiction of a court in a country that stands accused as the aggressor.» What's more, concludes the Iranian lawyer, the unstable conditions in Iraq undermine the legitimacy and capacities of this tribunal. Yet this fact does not seem to have prevented three Iranian lawyers, supported by the Martyr's Foundation, from contacting the Iraqi Embassy in Teheran with a view to lodging a complaint by private Iranian citizens, victims of the war «imposed» by Saddam Hussein on Iran.

Domestic politics at stake in Iran

For his part, Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a religious Shi'ite and close advisor to President Khatemi, caricatures the coverage given to the start of the Saddam trial by Iranian (pro-conservative) state television. He argues in his personal web log that it has goes no further than echoing Saddam Hussein's anti-Bush declarations, he argues: «By falsifying reality in this way, the Iranian state television is taking the side of a tyrant who forced Iran to a war in which hundreds of thousands of Iranian soldiers died, many of whose corpses are only just returning today.» The Saddam Hussein trial thus appears to have become an important issues within Iranian domestic politics in the battle between conservatives and reformers.