Saddam trial could embarrass US

WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein could use a war crimes trial as an opportunity to send an anti-American message to the Arab world and to embarrass the United States by bringing up its past support for his Government, legal experts said yesterday.

Michael Scharf, who heads an office of war crimes research at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, said Saddam was likely to copy the strategy of former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, whose war crimes trial in The Hague has already lasted for almost two years.

"Saddam could represent himself and spend years blasting anti-American rhetoric to the Middle East," said Scharf, author of a book on the Milosevic trial.

"He could also try to ensure that the trial turns into a big embarrassment for the US.

"He'd try and call all kinds of dignitaries as witnesses, including people like Donald Rumsfeld," Scharf said.

Rumsfeld, now US Defence Secretary, visited Iraq and met Saddam 20 years ago as a special envoy from then-President Ronald Reagan, promoting a close military and commercial relationship that ended only when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.

Washington helped Saddam obtain intelligence and military equipment and, according to a US Centres for Disease Control Document, Iraq also obtained from the US biological agents that could have been turned into weapons.

The US at the time was supporting Iraq in its war against the old US nemesis Iran, and Washington stood mutely by when Saddam used chemical weapons against Iranian forces and Kurdish people inside Iraq.

Saddam could also embarrass other world leaders. French President Jacques Chirac established a close relationship with Saddam dating back to 1974 and helped negotiate the sale of nuclear reactors to Iraq.

Britain, Germany, Italy and especially the former Soviet Union also supplied Iraq with much equipment, expertise and funding.

The format of any trial is still far from clear but Saddam could face broad-ranging charges of crimes against the Iraqi people, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

President George W. Bush said it should be fair and public and be organised jointly by the US and Iraqis.

According to Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal think-tank, the trial offered an opportunity not just to hold Saddam accountable but to examine the broader record of the past 40 years of Iraqi history.

Bennis suggested that any trial of Saddam should go beyond just the issue of Saddam's behaviour and "ask who were the enablers, who funded those weapons of mass destruction, who provided the support and the intelligence"?

That's precisely the kind of process that Bush, facing an election campaign next year, would be anxious to avoid, and Bennis said she expected Washington to maintain tight control over the process and lay down procedures that minimise Saddam's opportunities to grandstand.

The US yesterday denied it had infringed the Geneva Convention by allowing images of a dishevelled Saddam Hussein to be beamed around the world - but declined to designate the captured Iraqi leader as a prisoner of war.

Rumsfeld defended the use of film of the former dictator just after he was snared, saying Iraqis now knew "the regime of Saddam Hussein is truly finished".

The deposed Iraqi leader had been "handled in a professional way".

"He has not been held up as a public curiosity in any demeaning way, by reasonable definitions by the Geneva Convention."

The Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war prohibits any detainee from facing "humiliating and degrading treatment" as well as mandating their protection from "insults and public curiosity".

During the early days of the Iraq war, Rumsfeld warned Baghdad that its move in broadcasting images of captured US soldiers was a violation of the convention, basing his argument on those same articles.

Yesterday, he said the pictures of a bearded and apparently confused Saddam undergoing a medical check after his capture did not violate the convention, could be justified and even save lives.

Geneva Convention


* The convention came into force in 1950.

* The convention states that prisoners of war must be treated humanely at all times.

* No form of coercion, physical or mental, may be used to obtain information.

* The International Committee of the Red Cross must be allowed access to the prisoner and under no restrictions. Article 100 states: "Prisoners of war ... shall be informed as soon as possible of the offences which are punishable by the death sentence under the laws of the detaining power."

* Prisoners must be protected from public curiosity.

- AGENCIES

Herald Feature: Iraq