WELCOME TO IWPR'S IRAQI CRISIS REPORT, No. 11, April 7, 2003

NOT WITH A BANG, BUT A WHIMPER? Although fighting continues, Saddam
Hussein may fall from power without invoking his long-standing threat of a
final disaster. By Julie Flint in Beirut.

JUSTICE THE DAY AFTER Long-standing efforts to bring the Iraqi leadership
to justice have failed, leaving the strategy for dealing with any deposed
rulers unclear. By Chibli Mallat in Beirut.

SYRIA FEELS THE HEAT US pressure on Iraq's neighbour has strengthened
hardliners and set-back the nascent movement for political opening. By
Alan George in London.

TURKEY LOOKING BACKWARD While Turkey fails to take up the key role it
could play in the region's future, the West fails to understand its
historic sensitivities. By Ahmet Altan in Istanbul.

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NOT WITH A BANG, BUT A WHIMPER?

Although fighting continues, Saddam Hussein may fall from power without
invoking his long-standing threat of a final disaster.

By Julie Flint in Beirut

Those who knew him best always predicted that he would not go quietly. If
his regime was ever seriously threatened, they said, Saddam Hussein would
bring the temple down upon his head. He would use chemical weapons, attack
Israel, wreak revenge upon the Gulf sheikhdoms he feels betrayed him.
Saddam himself warned that anyone trying to take Iraq from him would
inherit "an empty land".

But as American tanks squat in the centre of Iraq's capital, and British
troops control its second city, Basra, Iraqis are daring to believe that
Saddam, one of the most vicious rulers of the past 100 years, will go not
with a bang - but, incredibly, a whimper.

"We all thought that there was some strategy," says Ali Allawi, a
London-based banker and independent opposition figure. "We thought Saddam
was drawing the coalition forces into a closed ring of defence in Baghdad.
But there was no strategy - just strategy on the hoof. It was the bluster
of a cheap dictator who has been terrorising people for years. It now
seems that the back of his regime was broken on the first day, but we
didn't realise that when we saw the resistance at Um Qasr," the port on
the Fao Peninsular where Iraqi forces resisted artillery shelling and
intense air strikes for almost a week.

Part of Saddam's bluster was his claim that he had raised a
six-million-strong army - called the Jerusalem Army - to defend his
regime. But although the elite Republican Guards and the Fedayeen of
Saddam, a militia composed largely of criminals and brainwashed youths,
have put up fierce resistance, the Jerusalem Army, like the regular army,
has been conspicuous largely by its absence.

"The big question is: where is the army?" says Dr. Sahib Hakim, head of
the London-based Organisation of Human Rights in Iraq. "We haven't even
seen an army barracks in Basra. And where was the army in Najaf? There are
rumours that Saddam took guns away from the army and gave them to the
Republican Guard and the Fedayeen because he didn't trust the army. In
Najaf, the coalition got tribes from the areas around the city to talk
over loudspeakers to the troops holed up in the holy shrines, and they
just gave themselves up. This suggests the army is collapsing."

As the Iraqi regime crumbles, with no major missiles launched in the last
several days and with surprisingly little resistance in Baghdad itself,
the question on everyone's lips is whether Saddam will, in extremis, use
the weapons of mass destruction that were the pretext for the
Anglo-American war against him. Most Iraqis believe Saddam still possesses
WMD - including the chemical weapons he used against his own Kurdish
citizens - even if not in the quantities claimed by Washington and London.
But they say possession has almost certainly become academic.

"Saddam would have liked to use chemical weapons, but he can't," says Dr.
Hassan Chalabi, a Beirut-based law professor who once taught the young
Saddam in Baghdad. "He laid a trap for himself when he told the whole
world he doesn't have them. If he uses them now, all the countries that
supported him will turn against him and call him a liar. Saddam is in the
realm of the unknown now. He's confused and he doesn't know where he's
going."

Although there is no conclusive evidence that Saddam is alive, most Iraqis
believe he is. Keeping even his own people guessing is, they say, one of
the few weapons left in his possession. If he were not alive, surely some
in his regime would have known and would have risen against his regime.
Saddam is hated not only by his people, but by many in his innermost
circle. He has killed not only close associates, but members of his own
family.

"His end is coming for sure," says Dr. Chalabi, "but even now he is
playing his hand to scare his people, to keep them unsure whether he is
alive or dead."

Iraqis are divided over how Saddam will play his end game. Some believe he
might yet seek asylum abroad. Already there are rumours that he left Iraq
on the plane that evacuated Russian embassy staff on Sunday. But the
majority think he will seek to go down in history as a fighter, the
defender of Iraq and Arabism - although with both of them betrayed and
corrupted by his years of absolute, bloodstained rule.

"Saddam is now seeing himself as a martyr, a symbol of the Arab nation,"
says Ghassan Atiyeh, another London-based opposition figure. "He'll be
thinking that the right way to die is defending Baghdad from the enemy. He
has got no options left. The morale of the army is going down and the
coalition has encircled Baghdad. It is a Greek tragedy which will end in
bloodshed."

Julie Flint is Iraqi Crisis Report co-ordinating editor and a former IWPR
trustee.


JUSTICE THE DAY AFTER

Long-standing efforts to bring the Iraqi leadership to justice have
failed, leaving the strategy for dealing with any deposed rulers unclear.

By Chibli Mallat in Beirut

One of the many missing pieces in American strategy in Iraq is how to deal
with the leaders of Iraq if and when they are caught. While "decapitation"
is an integral part of the effort towards regime change, the policy is
legally questionable in the absence of any indictment of those being
targeted.

Morally, of course, it is unacceptable to bomb rank-and-file Iraqis while
leaving those at the head of the hierarchy under some form of protection.
But international law lags behind moral sensibility and the fate of Iraqi
leaders who might be arrested is uncertain. Will they be sent to America?
Tried in Iraq? Submitted to an international tribunal like Slobodan
Milosevic and other Balkan leaders? Already the legitimacy of the whole
war is under question and the arrest of any Iraqi officials will compound
the conundrum.

As American tanks push into the heart of the Iraqi capital, reality has
caught up with policy over what to do with Saddam Hussein and his aides.
The reverse point is academic: while much can be heard in Baghdad about
President George W. Bush as "war criminal", no serious international forum
is available to judge any alleged violations by the coalition of the laws
of war.

In a normal situation, any Iraqi leader should benefit from the same POW
status as the soldiers who have already been arrested. But "the war for
Iraq", as the conflict is called in Washington, is anything but usual:
witness the request made to some of the surrendering soldiers to put on
their civilian clothes and go home. A similarly approximative legal
position will obtain should any of the top leaders, or local Ba'ath
operatives, fall in the custody of British or American forces.

Why has nothing been done to anticipate this problem? It is not for
failing to try in the 12 years since the clause on the responsibility for
the war was dropped from UN ceasefire Resolution 687 which ended the
Kuwait war on April 3, 1991. Everything would have been different if that
clause, which put the responsibility for the invasion of Kuwait squarely
on Saddam Hussein, had remained in the resolution. But there had been no
model of an international tribunal since Nuremberg and British Foreign
Office lawyers were worried about prosecuting high Iraqi officials whom
they could not bring before a judge. This mistake still haunts
international policy.

Germany suggested a tribunal for Iraq, but the call was drowned in
Euro-Atlantic bombast about a war allegedly won even though those
responsible for it remained in power. On April 5, 1991, Resolution 688
requested "that the Iraqi government cease the repression of its own
population", which had risen up against the regime the previous month and
was being brutally suppressed in the Kurdish north and Shia south. But
more than a decade later, 688 has not been put in effect.

As the exile opposition in the West slowly regrouped, the largest
opposition coalition, the Iraqi National Congress, began an effort to
establish an international ad hoc tribunal to deal with the Iraqi
leadership. A special committee compiled a list of 12 notorious
characters, including the two sons of Saddam Hussein, his two sons-in-law
and well-known figures like Ali Hassan al-Majid ("Chemical Ali") and Tariq
Aziz, Iraq's peripatetic envoy. (American officials and Iraqi opposition
leaders have since augmented the list, citing variously from a dozen to
2,000 high-ranking officials.) The INC study was published in May 1993, on
the very day the Security Council unanimously established the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Despite that obvious precedent, a similar tribunal could not be
established for Iraqi leaders with a far heavier criminal record - in
large part because of Middle Eastern diffidence towards a precedent which
could threaten other Arab leaders, but also because of a lack of follow-up
by the US administration and the Iraqi opposition.

In the summer of 1996, the issue surfaced again in London with the
formation of an organisation - Indict - that sought to establish a special
tribunal like those for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Although
endorsed by a large coalition, and funded by various governments and
parties including the US Congress, Indict's initial success was blunted by
poor chairmanship and divide-and-rule policies in the State Department and
Central Intelligence Agency. The Clinton administration refused to do
anything serious about Iraq for the full eight years of its mandate, and
Indict's initial momentum was lost.

But as Indict's efforts were running into the sand, the Pinochet precedent
in London opened another avenue for international justice: national
tribunals. The most promising national route was Belgium, which in 1993
had passed a law allowing Belgian courts to try those accused of "serious
violations of international humanitarian law" even if they were not in
Belgium. Using this legislation, four Rwandans were tried, convicted and
sentenced to long-term imprisonment.

In 2001 a number of Iraqis, mostly Kurds, filed a case against Saddam
Hussein, Ali Hassan al-Majid and others. The case was significantly
strengthened in February 2003 when the Belgian Supreme Court, in a
judgement on a case brought against Ariel Sharon over the Sabra and
Shatila massacre in Beirut's Palestinian camps, ruled that Belgian courts
are indeed competent to try massive violations of international
humanitarian law such as those committed by Iraq's leadership over three
decades.

Ariel Sharon has been indicted, despite the fact that he is formally
immune until he leaves office, and Brig. Gen. Amos Yaron, commander of the
troops that surrounded the Beirut camps, also faces prosecution.

Today Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, and Iraq's president, Saddam
Hussein, find themselves on the same side to prevent international justice
from obtaining. The indictment of Iraq's top leaders could now offer a
serious basis for addressing their criminal record - said by a UN
Rapporteur to be the heaviest since the Second World War.

Chibli Mallat, EU Jean Monnet chair in European law at Saint Joseph's
University in Lebanon, founded Indict in 1996 and brought the case against
Ariel Sharon in Belgium in June 2001. (See www.mallat.com) This article is
the first in a two-part series.


SYRIA FEELS THE HEAT

US pressure on Iraq's neighbour has strengthened hardliners and set-back
the nascent movement for political opening.

By Alan George in London

In the second week of the war against Iraq, US Defence Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld accused Syria of supplying Iraq with military equipment including
night-vision goggles and warned it would be held accountable for its
"hostile acts". The following day, Secretary of State Colin Powell warned
that Syria would bear the responsibility for its choices - "and for the
consequences" of those choices - if it continued "direct support for
terrorist groups and the dying regime of Saddam Hussein".

A senior Israeli intelligence officer, Gen. Yossi Kupperwasser, suggested,
bizarrely, that the American and British invaders of Iraq had failed to
find any weapons of mass destruction because they had been moved into
Syria. On April 1, after it emerged that Syria had provided passports to
Arab volunteers wishing to fight in Iraq, Israeli Defence Minister Shaul
Mofaz described Syria's action as "very grave".

No wonder Syrians fear that they may be next in line for "liberation" and
"humanitarian aid". No wonder, too, that the invasion of Iraq should be
viewed in Damascus as fitting the agenda of an Israel that has always
sought to divide and weaken the Arab world.

Damascus enjoys cordial, if at times uneasy, relations with Washington,
and relations with Britain have been strengthening, with President Bashar
al-Assad visiting London in December. Yet Damascus did all it could as a
non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council to block
British and American efforts to win UN backing for military action. Deeply
sceptical of claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Damascus felt
this issue could best be resolved without resorting to war.

Once war was under way, Damascus at first tried to keep a relatively low
profile. But quite apart from its own misgivings about the conflict, it
could not ignore the mounting fury of Syrians. Spontaneous street
demonstrations are rare in Syria but since the outbreak of hostilities
they have been frequent. Many of the protestors are active in Syria's
civil society movement, which has been demanding the introduction of
democracy and the rule of law and which contrasts the regime's nationalist
rhetoric with its inaction. To give popular anger a vent, the government
has sponsored anti-war demonstrations in which tens of thousands have
marched.

The American and Israeli threats added to the rising popular anger and
hardened Syria's stance. On March 31 the foreign ministry issued a
statement condemning the "illegal invasion" of Iraq. While refraining from
mentioning Saddam Hussein, it expressed support for "the fraternal Iraqi
people . . . against whom are being committed all sorts of crimes against
humanity".

Many Syrians view their regime with deep cynicism. Whatever the ideals of
the Ba'athist officers who seized power in 1963, the system they
established quickly degenerated into an unprincipled, corrupt and brutal
dictatorship. In the last months of President Hafez al-Assad's life, and
much more after his son Bashar succeeded him in mid-2000, Syrians hoped
that liberalisation was at hand. The second half of 2000 saw a "Damascus
Spring" in which political discussion groups mushroomed, the state-run
media opened up and hundreds of political prisoners were freed.

In early 2001, however, regime hardliners struck back. Bashar, still
dependent on them and keen to maintain unity, had no option but to
acquiesce. The discussion groups were shut and civil society activists -
including two members of parliament, Riad Seif and Ma'moun Honsi - were
jailed. Citing external threats, conservatives claimed it was the wrong
time for reforms that might upset domestic unity and stability.

The hardliners were not short of political ammunition. In February 2001
the militarist Ariel Sharon became Israel's prime minister and soon after
Israeli warplanes attacked twice Syrian radar stations in Lebanon.
Following suicide bombings in Israel, Sharon bloodily reoccupied much of
the West Bank in April 2002. The invasion was undertaken with the approval
of a United States preoccupied with its global "war on terrorism" and
already planning its Iraqi adventure.

Angered by illicit Syrian imports of Iraqi oil and spurred by the powerful
pro-Israeli lobby in Washington, the United States early last year started
leaning on Syria directly.

On 27 January, even though Syria had been providing Washington with useful
information about terrorist groups, the Sixth Fleet intercepted two Syrian
cargo ships north of Cyprus as part of the "war on terrorism". Nothing
suspicious was found. On May 6, John Bolton, US Under-Secretary of State
for Arms Control and International Security, attacked Syria, Libya and
Cuba as "rogue states" which were developing weapons of mass destruction
and were only one step removed from the President Bush's "axis of evil"
states - Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

On May 22, the State Department named Syria for the eighth year running as
a state sponsor of terrorism and barred it, in consequence, from receiving
US aid.

Bashar al-Assad's credentials as a liberalising democrat and free marketer
should not be overstated. But by spring 2002 he was back-tracking even
from such measures as he had . Through its support for an aggressive
Israel and its blundering threats against Iraq and Syria, a Western world
proclaiming its commitment to democracy, human rights and the rule of law
had created conditions in which the most conservative and anti-democratic
wing of the Syrian regime had prevailed.

Squeezed between Israel, which remains in occupation of the Syrian Golan
Heights, and an emergent pro-American Iraq, Syria today feels more
vulnerable than ever. Even if Syria is not invaded in the short-term, it
will almost certainly face further pressures that will make it
increasingly difficult for it to stay above the fray - and that will
ensure that hardliners remain in the ascendant.

Alan George, former assistant director of the Council for the Advancement
of Arab-British Understanding, is a long-time journalist covering the
Middle East and author of Syria: Neither Bread Nor Freedom.


TURKEY LOOKING BACKWARD

While Turkey fails to take up the key role it could play in the region's
future, the West fails to understand its historic sensitivities.

By Ahmet Altan in Istanbul

Turkey is standing on the edge of events that will change history, and yet
it acts as if it does not know it. Developed countries try to understand
today and tomorrow in terms of yesterday. Turkey is still living the day
before yesterday.

Turkey has lived through the dismemberment of one of the greatest empires
the world has ever seen and is still digesting the resulting trauma.
Instead of trying to see what will happen in the future, it is trying to
understand what went wrong in the past.

Those who govern this country see most of the world - including their own
people - as enemies. They belong to a school of thought that considers
territory to be more valuable than people; they interpret life in terms of
land that will be lost. For them, a newly shaped Middle East is of no
concern. Instead they worry about whether Kurds in northern Iraq will, or
will not, divide Turkey.

Still affected by old traumas, Turkey's leaders live in continuous fear of
dismemberment and division.

Turkey stands in the middle of a triangle of trouble covering the Middle
East, the Balkans and the Caucasus. As heir to an empire that once spread
across all these lands, it plays a key role in this region whether it
wants it or not. If democracy, freedom and free markets are to triumph in
this area one day, Turkey should be playing a pioneering role.

One way of looking at things is to say that Turkey resembles neither East
nor West: just as its perception of Islam, and the way it lives Islam,
isolates it in the Islamic world, so its resistance to freedom and
democracy keeps it at a distance from the West. But there is also a second
way of looking at things: as Turkey is the country in the Islamic world
that knows the West best, so it is the country in the Western world that
knows Islam and understands its problems best.

The fact that Turkey is not integrated into either world keeps it at a
distance from both - a bridge between two entities that do not know each
other well and look at each other with distrust. This war has shown how
difficult it will be to change the face of the Middle East without taking
Turkey into account.

This war has taught the West a tough lesson about how to deal with Turkey.
Like individuals who have lost fortunes, countries that have lost empires
are notoriously touchy. When Turkey refused to give the United States the
access it wanted to open a second front in northern Iraq, the whole world
thought Turkey wanted money.

More than money, however, Turkey wanted esteem. It wanted to feel
significant - to be treated with respect, as an equal. The strange delight
which the new neo-conservatives of the West seem to experience in putting
down Muslims has unnerved the entire Islamic world including Turkey, even
though she is not an organic part of that world. President Bush's arrogant
and senseless stand in supporting Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
against the Palestinians has registered even in Turkey.

Napoleon is reported to have said: "You can do anything with a sword, but
you cannot sit on it." The United States can take over Iraq and spread its
presence in the Middle East because it has the sword with which to do
this. But it will not be able to sit on it.

In a world where robots take care of production, where people communicate
from one end of the planet to the other in the blink of an eye, and where
computer manufacturers have replaced arms' dealers at the top of the lists
of the world's richest men, it is unthinkable that the Middle East can
continue to be a mess of dictators, weaponry and oil. History demands that
the Middle East evolve from weapons-consuming backwardness to
computer-driven development. And this requires that dictators be swept
away.

History has a wildly ironic side to it. It looks as if the gates of this
new era will be opened in the Middle East by a violent war initiated by
two men who have neither love for mankind nor intelligence: George Bush,
the representative of America's oil and arms cartels, and Saddam Hussein.

As the world enters with swords into an era where the sword has lost its
importance, there are lessons to be learnt by all. The West will learn
that there is a price to be paid for looking down on countries like
Turkey, and the leaders of countries like Turkey will discover that there
is a price to be paid for alienating their own people and living with
suspicion. The time of swords is long gone: in a world where news travels
in a split-second, borders, states and armies are less important by the
day.

Perhaps this will be the last time we have to learn by covering our
children's coffins with flags.

Ahmet Altan, one of Turkey's best-selling writers, is author of Love in
the Days of Rebellion, Like a Sword's Wound and other novels.

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this project: the Dutch Foreign Ministry, the Ford Foundation, the
Ploughshares Foundation.

For further details on this project, other publications and IWPR
educational and media development programmes, visit: www.iwpr.net

Iraqi Project Coordinating Editor: Julie Flint; Editorial Assistant: Emma
Wallace

IWPR Project Development and Support -- Executive Director: Anthony
Borden; Director of Operations: Alan Davis; Managing Editor: Yigal Chazan;
Senior Operations Manager: Duncan Furey; Associate Editor: Alison
Freebairn

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Copyright (c) 2003 The Institute for War & Peace Reporting

IRAQI CRISIS REPORT No. 11