Human Rights
Day after day and week after week, we hear reports coming out of Iraq about how one mass grave after another are uncovered. Hundreds, no thousands, no tens of thousands, suspected at individual sites all over Iraq.
The indignities suffered by those who were hunted down and executed by the Ba'athist regime must not go unpunished. Those who ordered those individuals, whether they were political opponents, Shi'ites, or Kurds, must be tried for crimes against humanity for their misdeeds.
Now is the time to prepare cases against those leaders. We know that the mass graves were part of an organized and systematic effort to eliminate opposition to the Ba'athist regime and Saddam Hussein in particular. Many of the tactics used by Hussein are eerily reminiscent of those used by Hitler and the Nazis.
That is part of the reason why I am outraged over the silence of the international community over the gross human rights violations by Iraq and other ongoing atrocities, such as that found in the Congo or Sudan. (See the discussion on the Congo here.)
The bodies of 200 Kurdish children found in mass grave. Reports of possibly tens of thousands of bodies of political prisoners buried outside Baghdad and that upwards of 3,000 have been exhumed so far are the tip of the iceberg.
It is believed that over a million were killed by this regime. This was organized and premeditated. Nothing this regime did was without orders from above. Anyone who followed those orders must be held accountable. Anyone who gave those orders must be held accountable.
As for who should hold the accounting, I think it is up to both the Iraqi people and the US to jointly run a war crimes tribunal. The US can assist with the legal and historical effort to prepare the cases, while the Iraqis can actually manage the efforts as part of the continuing de-Ba'athification.
One of the reasons I try to write about human rights in articles, discussions, or elsewhere on the Internet is that I cannot permit such horrors to go on without bearing witness. Never again is a motto of many who swear that the Holocaust can never happen again.
A society such as found in the US or Europe, which believes that human rights are paramount, sit and watch religious or ethnic differences settled through genocide, ethnic cleansing, or barbarism.
Yet, that is precisely what has happened, both in Iraq and in Africa because strategic needs of the respective countries did not overwhelm the human rights needs to preserve life. In some ways it is instructive to know that the US did the right thing in Iraq after all, even if the motives were questionable by some.
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