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Monday, Dec 20, 2004

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

Democracy in the dock

By Mary Riddell

Even as the Western law is sought to be imposed on Iraq, the British Government continues to flout its tenets.

CHEMICAL ALI appeared in court on December 18. Ali Hassan al-Majid, who is said to have overseen the gassing of 5,000 Kurds in a single day at Halabja, is appearing before an investigative judge in Baghdad, along with other Saddam Hussein men. A year after their leader was removed from his foxhole, the case against Saddam Hussein is also progressing.

Last week, he had his first visit from his defence lawyer at Camp Cropper, the U.S. base where, according to some reports, he has been passing the months tending plants and playing board games. Public impatience and national elections in January mean that Ayad Allawi, the interim Prime Minister, is keen on beginning trying the symbols of the former regime.

Announcing charges, including genocide and torture, against Saddam Hussein's lieutenants is a political manoeuvre. The slippery evidence for war crimes bedevils prosecutions in even the most mature jurisdictions, and it will probably be many months before full hearings are conceivable. Dr. Allawi hopes that making a start will mollify those complaining about the slowness of the justice system and focus the political debate on democratic solution.

Back in July, before settling down to his solo snakes-and-ladders tourney, Mr. Hussein was brought before a tribunal for the first time. The censored pictures and U.S. attempts to suppress a full broadcast of the proceedings appeared to prefigure a George W. Bush show trial rather than democratic rebirth.

Since then, the rule of law has proved increasingly elusive in Iraq. Last week's death toll included 13 people blown up by a suicide bomber in Baghdad on the anniversary of Saddam's capture. Qassim Mehawi, the deputy communications minister, was murdered as he drove to his office. The dumped body of an Italian charity worker was found, while the head of the British Red Cross warned that the international movement's neutrality is rapidly becoming a casualty of the war on terror.

This familiar snapshot of Iraq provided the backdrop to the start of official election campaigning. Democracy starts here, if only the violence can be stemmed, the tiny taskforce of international U.N. staff can help assure fair play at polling stations, and the Sunnis, who make up about a fifth of the electorate, can be persuaded not to boycott the whole thing.

Since the U.S. and Britain invaded Iraq with the express aim of securing liberty and justice, it is incumbent on them to practise the virtues they hoped to impose through an illegal war. The contradictions implicit in that mission have surfaced in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and the case of Baha Mousa. Mousa, a hotel receptionist, died in September 2003 of injuries apparently incurred while he was in the custody of British troops at a detention centre south of Basra. His two boys, Hassan, five, and Hussein, three, are now orphans. Their mother died of cancer, aged 22, six months before their father's demise. The Mousa family's demand for a proper inquiry was rebuffed by the British Ministry of Defence (MoD), which claimed, disgracefully, that the Iraqis could not claim access to British justice. Last week, the High Court in London declared that view wrong and said the inquiry should go ahead.

In the second test case of last week, the Law Lords, the highest court in the U.K., ruled that holding foreign terror suspects indefinitely without trial was unlawful under the European human rights convention. As the new Home Secretary (Interior Minister), Charles Clarke, appeared to play tough, Ministers talked piously about the security of the nation being their chief priority.

No matter that Britain is the only country in Europe to have derogated from article five of the European Convention on Human Rights, enshrining liberty, in the wake of 9/11. No matter, either, that there is no state of public emergency. True, Osama bin Laden has delivered his Christmas broadcast, and only a fool would rule out a terror strike on the U.K.

But an intangible threat has led the British Government to devise a real assault. Fear, abhorring a vacuum, has contaminated a nervous and confused society that grows brutal in assorted ways. I do not think that, prior to the war on terror, there would have been such enthusiasm for householders being legally sanctioned to kill burglars or for naming and shaming small and often deprived children. Al-Qaeda may or may not have London in its sights. The certain threat, as two of the law lords suggested, comes not from terrorists but from an abuse of the law that takes a democracy based on human rights back down the road towards totalitarianism.

We shall see, come January, whether there is the faintest chance that Iraq's elections offer a doorway to a better future. We shall also see, as Saddam's men face the law, whether a country ruled by fear and edict can demonstrate the due process supposedly exemplified by the enviable democracies of the West.

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