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Killers call the shots in ‘justice’ system

Nour al-Houda al-Maliki woke one night in March to the cracks of the bullets that killed her father as he lay sleeping, two metres from her. She saw four masked men. One she knew as a member of the Mahdi army, the feared clan that ruthlessly calls the shots throughout her south Baghdad neighbourhood. Overcome by fear, the 21-year-old still managed to take her mother to the nearby Rashid police station the next day to report her father’s murder and identify at least one killer.

“They said to me, ‘You mention the Mahdi army one more time and we will beat you, then jail you,’” Nour, 21, recalled at the weekend. They were true to their word. She left prison 15 days ago and has been on the run since. “I’m scared,” she said. “So scared, but who can I turn to?” Nour is among tens of thousands of Iraqis for whom justice is a delusory buzz-word of a departing occupation. As the U.S. prepares to withdraw its combat troops from most towns and villages by the middle of next year, the rule of law remains unenforceable throughout all layers of the nascent state it will leave behind. Even the judiciary cowers in fear from the criminals, or militants, who have held the country to ransom for at least three years. Many of the gunmen are filling the ranks of the so-called Sons of Iraq, the steadily growing movement credited with steadying Iraqi security.

Among the Sons of Iraq rank and file are former Al-Qaeda insurgents who once used to be the U.S. military’s targets. At a Sons of Iraq pay day at the Hamani police station, north of Baghdad, Captain James Polak from the 2/14 Stryker Brigades was supervising the handover of responsibilities from his troops to local Iraqis. Asked how they decided which former insurgents were jailed and which were given salaries, he replied: “We have been told that anything that happened longer than four months ago is the cut-off.” The upshot is that among Iraq’s judges and victims, there is a growing sense that justice will never be served. “As judges, we are under the most critical of threats,” said one Iraqi supreme court judge, who refused to be identified because of a terrorist attack on his home during the summer. On June 30, six senior members of the judiciary were targeted by insurgents, who planted explosives in their driveways or shot them on the way to court.

The chief justice was assassinated at the steering wheel of his car and three other judges were wounded. The judge who was attacked at home keeps a loaded pistol in his chambers these days and rarely dons the black robe that marks him as an arbiter of law.

“We are always stressed and some of us are depressed,” he said, sipping bitter coffee in his chambers inside a fortified compound in downtown Baghdad. “We are consulting psychologists, who tell us to go often to wide open places, like lakes,” he said, with incredulity. “We are working beyond our capabilities as human beings.”

At another safe compound downtown, one of Iraq’s best-known lawyers also lamented the lack of his ability to do his job. “The justice system will have no role in the rebuilding of Iraq,” he said. “The law system is supposed to be independent, but this is not true.

“Many practitioners are afraid and have been influenced by different groups in many different ways. A judge simply cannot use his skills to do what he is trained to do. He knows he is likely to pay with his life for trying.” Avenging a wrong is a key tenet of social life in the Arab world, and reconciling the past is seen by the vast majority of Iraqi citizens as a prerequisite to moving forward.

“But we are not looking like we are going to be able to do that,” said a second senior judge, who was also unwilling to be identified. “If we don’t have the past we don’t have the future.” As for the growing resentment towards the clean slates being thrown the way of some Sons of Iraq members, the U.S. military on Saturday said in a statement: “The prime minister’s direction is that members of the Sons of Iraq will not be arrested until the warrant is reviewed by an independent joint legal advisory committee.” This committee has been ordered to be formed by the country’s national reconciliation committee.

The committee, along with the subject matter, is a work in progress. But that is no comfort to Nour. “I don’t know what my future is,” she sobbed. “But if I go back to my neighbourhood, or to the court, or to the police, they will kill me.”

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