Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 24, 1991 TAG: 9103240105
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
This weekend, about 20 American prosecutors at the Nazi war crimes - gray now or bald, some practicing or teaching law, others retired - held a reunion and discussed whether Iraq's Saddam Hussein warranted the same treatment.
Being lawyers, they haggled.
Where, one demanded, was the "credible evidence" sufficient to stand up in a court of law?
But in the end, most signed a resolution calling on the world community to subject Iraq's leadership to judgment.
Failure to do so, said Whitney Harris of St. Louis, would undermine the principle established at Nuremberg.
"The world may have its tyrants," Harris said, "but life upon this planet will not survive except by justice made sure through law."
Benjamin Ferencz, who teaches international law at Pace Law School in New York, said Nuremberg established the concept that aggressive war "is a crime for which even a head of state could be held responsible."
Iraq's conquest of Kuwait on Aug. 2 was as aggressive an act as Hitler's invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, Ferencz said.
Ferencz, short and scholarly, was an infantry sergeant in World War II. When he was assigned to the prosecution staff at the end of the war, he was promoted to general: "The shortest general," he said, "since Napoleon."
At Nuremberg, between 1945 and 1949, the leaders of Nazi Germany were brought before judges from the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union. It was the first such tribunal in history.
Some were charged with causing World War II; nearly all were charged with murder, enslavement, looting and committing atrocities against soldiers and civilians of occupied countries. Some were charged with persecuting Jews and other groups.
Ex-prosecutor Charles Horsky acknowledged the difficulties of trying Saddam if he stays in power.
"He could be tried in absentia," Horsky said, but difficulties would remain.
At Nuremberg, prosecutors had a mountain of incriminating documents. Similar evidence may exist in Baghdad, he said, but getting it would be impossible unless a new Iraqi government cooperated.
Horsky worried that while President Bush spoke often during the war of trying Saddam, "there seems to be a lessening of enthusiasm."
But Bush said in addressing Congress this month that Saddam will be "held accountable," noted Walter Brudno of Dallas. "He will have a hard time backing off that."
Some misgivings were expressed.
One questioner asked if the same standards would not require a war-crimes trial against the United States for its actions in Panama and Grenada. Some noted a trial could trigger a backlash in Arab lands or make Saddam a martyr.
But Brudno said a permanent good would result from Saddam's aggression, if a trial is held. It would "nourish the rule of law in the ashes of his defeat."
Brudno later told a reporter that most of the prosecutors feel an obligation to enhance the Nuremberg principle. For them, Nuremberg was a central point in their lives.
"I participated in only one criminal trial in my life," he said. "And it was the most important criminal trial in history."
by CNB