World’s First Arab Tribunal on the War in Iraq

by Karen Button

Here in Egypt a nation is mourning the deaths of more than 1,100 people, when a passenger ferry sank off the west coast two days ago; it’s also reading headline news about the detention of George Galloway.

Scheduled to testify at a tribunal being held in Cairo, the British MP was denied entry into Egypt after his arrival at midnight.

“I was held in a small, dirty room for hours without food or water. I have been a friend of the Arab community for 30 years; I don’t understand this treatment” Galloway said from his hotel after he was eventually released. An event certain to be ignored by Western press, Galloway added that “Egypt has now ensured this will make international news”.

And so it has, with Galloway’s Respect party calling the detention “outrageous” after Egypt’s authorities said he was on a list of those to banned, thereby considered a national security threat. After hours of negotiation, and as he was about to board a place, Galloway was allowed to enter the country, but only after the tribunal was finished.*

Other scheduled witnesses were effectively silenced as well; the Palestinians and Iraqis scheduled to testify were all denied visas, some of whom testified in previous tribunals.

Iraqis scheduled to take the stand included Sheikh Mothna Harith Al-Dari, spokesperson of the Muslim Scholars Association and Ali Shalal, the black-robed and hooded man behind Abu Ghraib’s most notorious photo and representative of the group Victims of Prisons.

Among the others were head of the Iraqi Bar Association, doctors, human rights workers, and former prisoners, “including 20 who have never spoken in public before and were to testify in a closed-court session for the safety of themselves and their families in Iraq,” according to their attorney Hala Al-As’ad.

Similar to former tribunals on Iraq, held in Europe, Asia and the US, this one has tried its defendants without their presence, not for lack of invitation, but for lack of response. But what distinguishes this trial from previous ones about Iraq is its organisation by Arabs and its location in an Arab nation; Cairo was chosen because it is the headquarters of the Arab Lawyers Union (ALU), who organised the mock-trial. Of course, the irony here is Cairo’s tribunal had far less Iraqi witnesses than former events.

As a Permanent Bureau member of the ALU, Sabah Al-Muktar represents expatriate Iraqis and is one of the Cairo trial organisers. He’s also on the Advisory Committee of the Brussels Tribunal and has testified in Tokyo and Athens as well.

“This is an extension to the Brussels Tribunal, a follow-up,” he said. When asked why organisers chose to include Ariel Sharon and the issue of Occupied Palestine, when others have not, he explained. “The first reason is that this trial is addressing crimes committed in this region. The second is we know there are Israeli/American-coordinated actions in Iraq, which unfortunately we cannot fully address because these witnesses were denied visas.”

Hala El-asmar, Director of International Relations, elaborated, “We—the Arab Lawyers Union—believe, in the end, that [Bush, Blair and Sharon] are all serving the same object. We believe that the invasion of Iraq is part of an overall plan of interference in the Middle East for control, especially for its oil.

“This ‘new’ imperialism of the US is an extension of earlier British imperialism. There are good relations between Bush and Sharon, and we believe that the multi-nationals are also together in this. Unfortunately, there is also a lack of democracy in this region. Many Gulf leaders and Egypt are part of the project; many leaders work only for their power, as if they are running their own company, instead of a state.”

In fact, the issue of Arab disunity and lack of true democracy was a thread throughout the two-day trial. At the end of his testimony, Salah Saldin Hafiz, of the Arab Journalists Association implored, “There is no single Arab country that doesn’t seek to steal the freedom from the people. This requires another special trial, which I hope we have in the future.”

Later though, an angry man from the audience shouted…”The US will not allow independent Arab regimes!!”

In the courtroom, posters hung from the judges bench, one of them with the photo of an old woman, crying, her arms extended toward the heavens. An Iraqi journalist turned to me, “This photo is famous in Iraq and always makes us cry. There are bombs that have fallen all around, destroying everything, and this old woman is pleading with the occupiers to leave.”

The event began when the presiding judge, Mahathir Mohamed, the former prime minister of Malaysia, asked all to stand for a moment of silence for those that have been killed in both conflicts, in which some were moved to tears. A distinguished list formed the judges panel, including the former prime minister of Malta, Karemenu Mifsud Bonnici, and Fouad Abdel-Moneim Riad, a former judge at The Hague.

Few westerners were present and I was the only representative of American media, for which I was continually thanked by the hundreds of Arabs present.

The only other American present was Stanley Cohen, a human rights attorney from New York, a member of the mock-trial’s prosecution team who began by saying, “I come from the US to speak on behalf of religious tolerance; I am a Jew. There are those who say that if you are anti-Israeli politics, you are anti-Semitic or a self-hating Jew, yet we have an obligation to international law.”

He continued by making comparisons between what was done to the Jewish people in Hitler’s Germany to the policies of Sharon’s Israel now being applied to the Palestinians, “with mass detentions, forced evacuation, burning of lands, torture, and murder”.

“It is impossible the US can be an independent arbitrator in Israel. It’s like asking Hitler to preside over WWII.”

Many Americans don’t understand the links between Israeli and US/UK policies as they are seen, even by Israeli Jews and Arabs, here in the Middle East. This perspective permeated the past two days, and was described to me in an interview with George Galloway as the “real axis of evil”.

Even without key witnesses, ample evidence was turned over to the panel of judges, who included the former prime minister of Malta.

The Arab Journalists Association handed over two files containing the names and details of journalists killed in Iraq and Palestine charging, “The killing of journalists has been in some cases premeditated; those targeting journalists are also those who are seeking democracy. The killing of journalists has encouraged even greater violence against them.”

“The number of journalists killed in Iraq numbers 79. This is more than were killed in two decades in Viet Nam.” Iraq was recently listed for the second year in a row as the most dangerous place in the world for journalists to work. He added that Iraq has been effectively censored by these acts.

Monsoor Hussein, an elegant Libyan man and head of the Arab Farmers Federation, called both the occupation of Iraq and that of Palestine “racial wars”. “In both places, there have been the mass cutting of trees essential to cultural identity, land seizures, and the forced removal of people. In Palestine it is the olive trees, in Iraq their dates. Iraq has 500 different kinds of dates; this is their cultural heritage. Iraq was once the world’s number one producer; production has fallen by 66 percent. It used to be a great producer of certain types of rice. No longer! Its soil is now polluted by weapons used in the war.”

Spokesperson of the Arab Commission for Human Rights, Dr. Haytham Manna turned over to the court medical accounts and eyewitness testimony from former Guantanamo detainees. A quiet man with a gentle demeanor, the Syrian, who now lives in France, is respected world-wide for his unwavering stance on human rights in all countries.

Then, an older Iraqi man from Basra, Ahmed el-Ghanem, took the stand. Wearing a red and white-checked kaffiya and white dishdasha (a long robe), he stated he is the head of his tribe in southern Iraq. He gave a detailed account of the roundup of all men in his family and the inhumane treatment by both British and American troops, including being kept in a “tent without a roof, where we had no shade from a sun that would melt anything”.

Though, like many Iraqis, he declined to give specifics of the torture he underwent, the story of el-Ghanem’s father was enough. “After my detention for 30 days, US forces entered my house, intimidating my wife and daughters. They broke all the furniture, stole our money and gold (which many Iraqis keep in their home), and then arrested my 74-year-old father, even our servant. They tortured my father and my two brothers badly. Why? To humiliate the head of the tribe. My father had a stroke as a result of the torture. What did they do? They dropped him on the street, where he was found by chance by some neighbors. Forty-five days later he died.”

Other witnesses included Carlos Faria, President of the Spanish Anti-war on Iraq Association, Mohasen Khalim, the former Iraqi Ambassador to Egypt, and Bian Al-Hout, who gave accounts of the massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila by Sharon’s government.

In the end, the verdict was predictable. All three men were found guilty in a decree detailing specific violations of the Geneva Conventions and the Nuremburg Charter.

As in previous tribunals, this one has no legal teeth. It is a symbolic gesture. But, as presiding judge, Malaysia’s Mohamed reminded people, “The message from this trial is that these men are criminals. Even if they cannot be punished under international law at this time, the world sees them as criminals. With each tribunal this becomes more apparent.”

Dr. Riad, who presided in the Hague during the initial Bosnian trials, added, “The great mistake is when people forget history. This is keeping the record. During the [Bosnian Croat Blaskic and Bosnian Serb Krstic] trials, in which some victims travelled to The Hague by foot, they would say, ‘it is enough that the world knows.’

“This kind of documentation is important. These trials can help us go to real trials in the future.”

Until then, say organisers, these issues must remain in the public eye. The importance now, they say, is for the anti-war movement in Europe, Asia, the US and, in “the Arab street” to come together.

It looks like they will next week when Galloway plans “to personally deliver the Cairo verdict to Mr. Blair when I see him in Parliament”. And “until the occupation ends,” he emphasised, “I have one message to the Iraqi people: Stay as one people, do not allow the enemies to break Iraq!”


*In a subsequent interview, Galloway said that the Egyptian government has apologised and he, accepting, considered “the case closed”.