Highlights from the trial of "Chemical Ali" you probably didn't even realize was going on
Such has been the extent the media has ignored this trial. But thanks to John Burns, we now have this dispatch in today's New York Times:
When the man Iraqis know as Chemical Ali made a final plea of innocence to the Iraqi High Tribunal last week, the court’s public galleries were all but empty, and there was not a single Iraqi or foreign reporter on hand.
Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam Hussein’s cousin, was once the most feared man in Iraq after Mr. Hussein himself. Mr. Majid earned his grim sobriquet for his role as the overseer of the so-called Anfal campaign of the late 1980s, in which tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds were killed, many of them in poison gas attacks.
As Burns continues:
[Mr. Majid and his five co-defendants] pleaded innocent of any involvement in atrocities in the Anfal offensives, which took their name, at Mr. Hussein’s direction, from an Arabic word meaning “spoils of war.” In closing pleas, they said they had nothing to do with the chemical attacks, village demolitions, deportations, torture and mass executions of men, women and children that Kurdish survivors described in excruciating detail in 59 days of testimony.
Chemical Ali as Burns went on to report, testified that he "never issued an order for the use of these weapons" or "heard of them being used." According to prosecutors, at least 50,000 Kurds died in these poison gas attacks which occurred in 1987 and 1988.
As the Times continues:
Court officials have said that they envision several more trials, including a series of cases that will center on the Shiite uprising against Mr. Hussein after Iraqi forces were driven from Kuwait in 1991. Shiite leaders say as many as 150,000 people were killed during the uprising, many of them lined up at mass graves in the desert and shot.
But as Burns continues:
Color me skeptical, but somehow I doubt these "many Iraqis" in whose minds "the horrors of the Hussein era. . .have receded" are neither Kurdish nor Shiite.With Mr. Hussein dead, interest in the process among Iraqis, and beyond Iraq, has dwindled.
With tens of thousands of dead since the American invasion, and almost every day punctuated by the mass killings caused by roadside bombs and suicide attacks, the horrors of the Hussein era, in the minds of many Iraqis, have receded before the chaos that has ensued.
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