Notes from a Show Trial

November 12, 2009

By Ben Bland

Flanked by two broad-shouldered colleagues of menacing appearance but pleasant manner, the former professor of haematology at the University of Baghdad told me at length how the US invasion had destroyed his country.

‘The war by the US and its allies had been disastrous for the state and society, with many breaches of human rights, many people killed and the economy in complete failure. The occupation of Iraq is illegal and based on lies about weapons of mass destruction and the promotion of democracy. The only legitimate thing in Iraq now is the resistance.’

When I asked who he thought was behind the massive car bombings in Baghdad that had killed more than 100 people the previous weekend (attributed in news reports to al-Qaeda in Iraq) and whether such action was justified, he blamed the Americans and the Iraqi government.

‘The resistance is targeted at the occupation only and its infrastructure. There’s no relationship between the resistance and explosions aiming to kill innocent Iraqi people. These innocent killings are a plan by the occupiers and their gangs, militias and death squads.’

Questionable Messenger

Sitting in the courtroom and listening to the former detainees recount their tales of extrajudicial detention and abuse, it is hard to argue with Mahathir’s anti-war initiative or his attempt to bring those responsible for Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and extraordinary rendition to account.

Mahathir compares his drive to criminalise war to the successful campaign by William Wilberforce, the British politician and philanthropist, to abolish the slave trade.

‘Slavery was once widespread and it was considered neither morally wrong nor a crime. But public opinion can change, even if it may take years.’

Few would disagree with his insistence that aggressive wars are a crime against humanity and his logic that if the murder of one individual is considered immoral and illegal, then the killing of thousands ought to be regarded as mass murder.

The problem is not so much the message as the messenger.

Mahathir has been an outspoken supporter of Malaysia’s own Guantanamo, the Kamunting Detention Centre, where suspected terrorists, political opponents and critical journalists have been held without charge or trial thanks to the draconian Internal Security Act (ISA) bequeathed by the British.

Human rights campaigners and legal experts have also attacked Mahathir for promoting his own unilateral tribunal despite the fact that he refused to sign Malaysia up to the International Criminal Court in 1998.

Several Malaysians I spoke to at the conference expressed anger, although not surprise, at Mahathir’s apparent hypocrisy in railing against the United States’ use of detention without trial while insisting that the Malaysian government’s use of similar methods is acceptable.

But, in the closing press conference, Mahathir gave such criticism short shrift. ‘Between us and the Americans, they are worse. Our law doesn’t allow torture, unlike the US.

Regardless of Malaysian law, many of those detained at Kamunting under the ISA claim to have suffered torture and abuse.

Mahathir has always had an eye for the bigger picture and his desire to call the United States to account over its foreign policy in the Middle East is not likely to be sidetracked by such mere details. Mahathir’s influence in Malaysian politics has declined sharply in the last couple of years and the war crimes tribunal and anti-war movement perhaps represents a final chance for the elder statesman to rally his closest supporters around him and to make a difference, as he sees it.

While Mahathir’s tribunal has not yet been taken seriously enough to elicit any official response from the British or US governments, he is, as ever, not deterred by those who dismiss his efforts.

Accepting the limitations of the process, he insisted that the tribunal’s eventual conclusions would be backed by the weight of moral, if not physical, force.

‘We believe that eventually the peoples of the world will come to accept that war is a crime and will condemn the warmongers and regard them as criminals,’ he said. ‘And when this happens we may see the world becoming a more peaceful place.’