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| Axis of Evil |
| Saddam’s Brother Slips Through Net |
| 2002-12-16 |
| Barzan Tikriti, a former head of Saddamâs intelligence service who had served as Iraqâs ambassador to Switzerland during the 1990s, was accused of supervising an operation to kill thousands of Kurdish villagers during the Iran-Iraq war and of taking part in torture and beatings. He was also involved in Iraqâs nuclear programme, allegedly torturing reluctant scientists to work on a bomb. However, at the end of October he slipped out of Geneva after being denied a new visa. He is now untouchable in Baghdad. The circumstances of Barzanâs departure have dismayed war crime investigators who had tried to persuade the Swiss to arrest him. His escape has prompted speculation that Switzerland made him leave so as to avoid a diplomatically awkward investigation. Like those bank accounts, perhaps? The pursuit of Barzan was led by Indict, a London-based human rights group. It had amassed evidence against him and presented it to the Swiss authorities 15 months ago. âIt is an extreme disappointment that the Swiss did not act on the information we gave them,â said Ann Clwyd, the MP who heads the organisation. The Indict dossier claimed that Barzan had pulled out fingernails, thrown boiling water over prisoners, beaten them with cables and administered electric shocks while he was director-general of the Mukhabarat, Iraqâs intelligence agency, from 1979 to 1983. Seems to run in the family. The men were never seen again and none has emerged from prisons during the recent amnesty announced by Saddam. According to one statement in the dossier, 300-350 men were buried in a mass grave near Kirkuk after being shot, some by Barzan personally. A total of 3,500 to 8,000 are believed to have been killed. Barzan also reportedly participated in the deportation and mass murder of the inhabitants of the village of Dujail after an attempt on Saddamâs life. Indict told the Swiss federal prosecutor earlier this year that it could produce as many as 30 witnesses to support the case against Barzan. In June, Clwyd visited Switzerland and alerted foreign ministry and judicial authorities. She thought she had received a sympathetic hearing and said she now felt badly let down. Since September 2000 Switzerland has included the crime of genocide in its penal code. But the federal prosecutorâs office said last week there were not enough âsubstantial suspicionsâ to pursue the investigation and the genocide law was anyway not retrospective. Indict believes, however, that Switzerland could have tried Barzan in a military court of the kind used in connection with the Rwandan genocide. Barzan is one of Saddamâs three half-brothers. He moved to Switzerland after leaving Baghdad in 1983 following a family feud. In 1989 he became Iraqi ambassador to the UN in Geneva, a role that made him his countryâs permanent representative to the UN commission on human rights. He had a clandestine parallel duty as Saddamâs âbanker in the Westâ, managing a secret financial network. Yup, Swiss are still embarassed about those old jewish bank accounts they plundered. They don't want any more bad press. He was recalled home in 1998 amid signs that he had fallen out of favour. At the start of 2000 he was rehabilitated by Saddam, but he still has a long-standing feud with Uday, Saddamâs paranoid and violent elder son, who is married to Barzanâs daughter Saja. He's Saddam's half-brother and Uday's father-in-law. I guess the family that slays together stays together. |
| Posted by:Steve |
| #1 I really do think that a good part of the problems in the Middle East stems from this habit of marrying close relatives. |
| Posted by: Fred 2002-12-16 13:41:56 |