Crime, War and Punishment

Publisher and Managing Editor IKRAM SEHGAL wrote these articles for THE NATIONwhich we are re-producing with thanks.

Even without a damning report of the UN inspectors, the US is seemingly poised to go to war to oust the Saddam regime from Iraq. The Brits are the only country firmly in support, quite a few allies are wavering publicly about their commitment. While a “smoking gun” in the form of direct evidence is still not forthcoming, the secondary reasons include the anticipated destabilization of the entire Middle East because of the backlash among the Muslim populace. Purists also argue about a legal basis to initiate war. In DAVOS on Sunday Jan 26, US Secretary of State calmed the fears of the world’s elite while giving a logical explanation of present US troop deployment in the region. However, he said that if need be the US was prepared to go alone.
The US had a legitimate reason to oust the Taliban regime from Afghanistan, they were not only giving sanctuary to terrorists but in fact had allowed them free rein to train terrorists to perform horrific acts diverted against innocent civilians such as 9/11 all over the world. While we must have sympathy for our Afghan brethren, it was not very “brotherly” of the Taliban hierarchy to hand over their Pakistani comrades to the Northern Alliance in exchange for their escape to freedom. Fully 6,000 Pakistanis were buried alive in containers by Rashid Dostum in Shebergan. The Taliban evacuated Kabul in good order leaving the Pakistani element to cover their withdrawal. TV shots showed some of these poor Pakistanis being shot like dogs in Kabul’s street drains, those who survived still languish in prisons, some are let off from time to time. The final irony is that the Afghans are asking for ransom to let them off. There is the still unexplained transfer of about 120 plus Pakistani prisoners to India by air by the Northern Alliance’s Interior Minister Yunus Qanooni. Respected religious leaders like Qazi Hussain Ahmed and Maulana Fazlur Rahman of MMA must question the Afghans (both in and out of power) for this brutal treatment of Pakistanis by our so-called “brethren”.
Our respected MMA leaders must also like to question why not a single Pakistani, not one, was in the Al-Qaeda hierarchy? Pakistan has been used as a transit point and a logistics base for over 20 years by the Afghan Mujahideen and the Arab/Muslim coalition that supported the Mujahideen’s Jihad against the Soviets, and then later against Ahmed Shah Masood’s Northern Alliance. A fair percentage bought property in Pakistan and their families became more legitimate than legitimate Pakistani citizens on the strength of the money they spread like confetti. Obviously the world thinks of Pakistan as a base for “world terrorism” and the Indians fan this canard for all its worth. It is profoundly shocking to have this perception seen as a fact by the world’s intelligentsia. The truth is that Osama bin Laden never trusted Pakistanis; they were simply convenient mules to carry his arms and baggage around and provide him safe houses. If there was even one single Pakistani among the Al-Qaeda hierarchy Osama bin Laden could have never avoided ISI’s monitoring and surveillance about his no-good activities.
In the prevailing circumstances, let us for once examine the question of Iraq with our senses and not our emotions. Saddam Hussain is a cold-blooded murderer who has killed more Muslims than Changez Khan and Halaku Khan put together. In the war with Iran more than a million Iranians were killed, both military and civilians since Saddam bombed Iran’s cities indiscriminately, he also used Russian-supplied Scud missiles. Saddam has used chemical weapons on Iraqi Kurds in the north and Iraqi Shias in the southern mashes, for good measure, he gassed 35,000 of the best Iranian troops in the Fao Peninsula. Even Slovodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia and Russian President Putin have killed less Bosnians and Chechnyan Muslims (about 200,000 each) in the last ten years or so. In the two wars he launched (both against muslim nations, Iran and Kuwait) Saddam unilaterally broke existing agreements that he had signed without provocation or warning. In both cases the reason was greed, he wanted to grab their oilfields. Among the lesser atrocities, he had his sons-in-law, both generals, killed in front of their own wives and children.
Saddam has never had one good word about Pakistan, certainly has never supported Pakistan on Kashmir. In contrast he has always been a good friend of India. During the Gulf War he parked all his civilian aircraft fleet in India, recently he asked for Indians to be on the UN inspection team. And why Indians of all the nationalities one may ask? Was it to blackmail the Indians from doing proper inspection? Could it be the Indians have been helping develop his nuclear weaponry? Which leads us to the half a dozen or so Indians who died in the Israeli raid that knocked out Iraq’s nuclear reactors at Osirik in 1982, what were they doing there? Putting it bluntly, we may have sympathy for the Iraqi people; they are as much victims of Saddam’s sadism as Iraq’s poor neighbours, but not for Saddam Hussain. The Baath Socialist Party is a secular entity giving only lip-service to Islam when it suits them.
Since Saddam and his present cronies have a known record of atrocities both at home and abroad, and on whose hands “weapons of mass destruction” will be an invitation to disaster, sooner rather than later, the US should seek a UN resolution declaring Saddam Hussain and his close aides as “international outlaws”. Muslims will certainly be emotional about the Iraqi people, so why not separate Saddam’s fate from theirs? And if Iraq has to be occupied for some time to give time for a successor regime be legitimized by a free vote of the Iraqi people, many muslim countries on Iraq’s borders should be part and parcel of the occupation forces; this will calm and assuage Muslim fears about US long-term economic intentions. If a war has to be waged to punish Saddam for his crimes against humanity, and to pre-empt further worse crimes in the offing, the war has to be focused on Saddam so that the punishment is only for him and not the Iraqi people, suitably adjusting Dostovesky’s “Crime and Punishment” to reflect “Crime, War and Punishment”.