Nov. 28
NORTH KOREA:
North Korea Slams Broadcast Showing Public Execution
Angered by the broadcast of a secretly filmed public execution inside
North Korea, the Stalinist state has accused the U.S.-based CNN television
network of promoting Washington's "regime change" agenda.
Pyongyang also hinted at banning the network from future visits.
"We have allowed CNN in our country for news coverage several times and
guaranteed the necessary conditions, but with the incident CNN has dug its
own grave," North Korea's official KCNA mouthpiece charged in a weekend
commentary.
"[CNN] aired a videotape which seriously misrepresented the independent
and fair and aboveboard measures taken by the DPRK for enforcing laws,
without confirming their truth," it said.
DPRK stands for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the reclusive
regime's official name.
CNN earlier this month broadcast a documentary entitled "Undercover in the
Secret State," showing footage reportedly smuggled out of North Korea by a
defector.
In addition to scenes of a public execution by shooting, the program also
showed footage depicting other abuses of human rights as well as signs of
dissent inside the authoritarian state, including images of a dissident
defacing a poster of Kim Jong-il.
The commentary lashed out at the network, calling it a "reptile" and a
"trumpeter" for the U.S. administration.
It painted the documentary as part of a broader conspiracy by the U.S.
against Pyongyang, adding that the Washington Post had earlier been
"instigated" to publish allegations about the use of poisonous gas
experiments.
Secretly filmed footage of executions in North Korea have in fact been
circulating for months, with one such item broadcast on the Japanese
network n-TV last March.
The Washington Post was not alone in covering the poison gas claims. A BBC
documentary aired early this year featured a defector claiming to be a
former senior manager at a North Korean prison camp, who said he witnessed
prisoners gassed to death in experiments suspected to have been testing
agents for non-conventional weapons.
KCNA said the footage shown on CNN was fabricated. It said anyone who knew
even a little about the country could tell that the dress and manner of
speaking on the clip differed from the reality in North Korea.
It said North Korea did not deny having the death penalty, but "does not
use such barbaric execution method as the U.S. has used in different parts
of the world in the present century as well as in the last century.
"It is only the U.S. that is using such harsh torture and execution method
as forcing the prisoner to sit on an electric chair, the method
unanimously denounced by the world people."
The grainy images seen on CNN showed a man shot by a firing squad as
onlookers watch. The convicted man was said to have been accused of
helping a refugee illegally cross the border into China.
Similar footage shown earlier on Japanese television depicted what
appeared to be a cursory public "trial" of two people accused of illegal
border crossing and human trafficking. One is sentenced to death, and the
other to 10 years' imprisonment.
Watched by a crowd, the execution is carried out minutes later. The
condemned person is tied to a post and three soldiers ordered, in Korean,
to "aim at the enemy."
The body slumps to the ground, and soldiers then struggle to cram it into
a sack. An official is said to announce to the crowd: "You have witnessed
how miserable fools end up. Traitors who betray the nation and its people
end up like this."
Life Funds for North Korean Refugees (LFNKR), a Japan-based organization,
took the clip to Geneva to show to delegates at the annual U.N. Commission
for Human Rights meeting.
LFNKR said the footage was secretly taped in Yuson district near the
Chinese border and smuggled out at great risk.
Other North Korean defectors had corroborated key aspects of the footage,
including the area where the execution had taken place and the format.
The organization said the area was on an important escape route into
China, and suggested the public killings were intended to scare other
would-be defectors not to try cross the border.
Tens of thousands of North Korean refugees have slipped into China, but
once there face the risk of being rounded up and repatriated. Beijing
considers them illegal migrants, not refugees.
Those who are forcibly returned face imprisonment or death, according to
human rights researchers.
The U.S. and other Western governments have condemned China's actions,
which they say violate international refugee conventions.
(source: CNSNews)
IRAQ:
Hussein, Back in Court, Is Combative and Feisty
Saddam Hussein returned to court today and quickly seized the floor for a
verbal assault on the American military guards who he said had manhandled
him on his way to the courtroom, calling them "occupiers and invaders" and
demanding that the chief judge in the trial reprove them.
Mr. Hussein's outburst came as the Iraqi High Tribunal re-adjourned after
a 40-day recess to resume the trial of the former Iraqi ruler and 7 others
for crimes against humanity. But the 68-year-old Mr. Hussein quickly
settled down to listen as the court turned to procedural issues, including
the accreditation process that approved a former United States
attorney-general, Ramsey Clark, as a member of Mr. Hussein's defense team.
After only three hours of exchanges in the court, the chief judge, Rizgar
Mohammed Amin, ordered a new adjournment until Dec. 5, next Monday, to
allow time for Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Mr. Hussein's half-brother, who
is a defendant in the trial, to meet with new lawyers. The adjournment
came when Mr. Tikriti rejected a defense lawyer named by the court to
represent him after his own attorney was killed in a drive-by shooting
this month, and told Mr. Amin that he wanted the two lawyers representing
Mr. Hussein, Khalil al-Dulaimi and Khamis al-Obeidi, to represent him.
Taha Yassin Ramadan, another defendant and the former vice president, also
rejected a court-appointed lawyer. Mr. Ramadan and Mr. Tikriti were
represented by Adel Muhammad al-Zubaidi, who was killed on Nov. 8 in the
shooting in Baghdad.
Mr. Hussein, in a grey suit and open-necked white shirt, was the last of
the defendants to be ushered into court. But he waited only a few minutes
before renewing the feisty challenge that marked the court's brief opening
session in October. Approaching the microphone in the dock, he said he had
been deprived of his notes and a pen before entering the court, and
roughly treated by American guards who had taken his Koran from his
manacled hands as they ascended the stairs to the court.
"I want you to order them, not ask them", Mr. Hussein told the chief
judge, Mr. Amin, who said that he would ask the Americans to be more
careful. Mr. Hussein continued, "You are an Iraqi. They are foreigners,
and occupiers and invaders, so you must condemn them".
Moments earlier, following a pattern he established during his initial
court appearance 17 months ago, Mr. Hussein invoked a verse from the
Koran, on this occasion one that seemed intended to suggest that the
ultimate judgment on the events that occurred during Mr. Hussein's 24-year
rule in Iraq would rest with God, not with the court. "Do you think that
you will enter paradise without Allah judging those among you who fought
hard in his cause, and remained steadfast?", Mr. Hussein said, reciting
the verse from memory.
Mr. Amin, 1 of 5 judges hearing the case, responded with unruffled calm,
devoting the opening 90 minutes of the session to procedural issues
involving the rights of the defense. The court has come under intense
scrutiny, and widespread criticism, from international legal rights
groups, some of which have questioned whether Mr. Hussein and his top
associates can get a fair trial in an Iraqi court that was originally
founded by an American occupation decree. Some of these groups have said
the trial should have been held before an international tribunal outside
Iraq.
>From the procedural issues, Mr. Amin moved directly into the heart of the
trial, instructing the prosecution to begin presenting its case. Mr.
Hussein and his fellow defendants, including Mr. Ramadan and Mr. Tikriti,
are charged with the torture and killing of 148 men and teenage boys from
the town of Dujail, 35 miles north of Baghdad, after an assassination
attempt against Mr. Hussein there in July 1982.
The 1st prosecution evidence took the form of video recordings.
One showed Mr. Hussein on a Dujail street immediately after the
assassination attempt, wearing the military-style uniform of the ruling
Baath party as he questioned three suspects held by guards. When one of
the men said that he could not have been involved in the attack because he
was fasting, and forbidden from committing evil under Islamic tradition,
Mr. Hussein responded with a mocking reference to Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini, the former ruler of Iran, which was then locked in an eight-year
war with Iraq. "Well, we know that Khomeini fasts, and that doesn't stop
him from committing crimes," Mr. Hussein said. He ordered the 3 men to be
separated and taken away for interrogation.
The 2nd item of prosecution evidence showed the videotaped testimony of
Wadah Khalil Hussein al-Sheikh, a former secret police commander who gave
evidence under guard last month in an American military hospital, where he
was being treated for lung cancer. Mr. Sheikh, who has since died,
appeared for his videotaped testimony in a wheelchair, attached to a drip.
He identified himself as the former director of investigations under the
intelligence services, then headed by Mr. Tikriti. He said he and other
officials arrived in Dujail the day after the attempted assassination, and
that by then, more than 400 people had been arrested for the attack on Mr.
Hussein's motorcade. "The number of people who attacked the convoy was no
more than 10 or 12," Mr. Sheikh said. "I submitted a report on this to
Barzan. So I don't know why so many people were arrested."
None of the 400 detainees appeared to have been tortured, the former
interrogator said - a point duly noted down by Mr. Hussein, listening from
his position in the dock. In January 1983, 7 months after the Dujail
attack, Mr. Sheikh said, Mr. Hussein ordered him to move all of those held
by the intelligence service to the southern city of Samawa, and he said he
had no knowledge of what happened to them after that.
Survivors in Dujail have said that more that 1,500 townspeople, including
women and children, were transferred to a remote desert camp in the south,
and that many died there.
Mr. Sheikh spoke to the judges and prosecutors in a special session that
defense lawyers refused to attend, citing a defense boycott that was
called after one of the 13 lawyers who appeared on the defense team at the
opening of trial was hauled from his Baghdad office by unknown assailants
and killed.
After the 2nd lawyer, Mr. Zubaidi, was shot and killed, it hardened the
boycott and prompted the Iraqi Bar Association to demand that the trial be
moved outside Iraq. The dispute was settled, at least for now, when Mr.
Hussein's chief lawyer, Mr. Dulaimi, and others on the defense team, in
talks that were led by American officials, accepted offers of protection
by Iraqi interior ministry guards and accommodation during the trial
sessions in the heavily-fortified Green Zone command complex in central
Baghdad where the courthouse is located.
Before inviting the prosecution to present its case, Mr. Amin, who is an
Iraqi Kurd, stood to express formal condolences for the 2 slain lawyers,
Sadoun al-Janabi, who represented Awad al-Bandar, the former chief judge
of Mr. Hussein's revolutionary court, and Mr. Zubaidi. "The court
expresses its sorrow over what happened to the lawyers who cannot be
present here today because of what occurred after the last session", he
said. "The court believes that the best memorial for them will be a fair
and open trial".
After the long delays in bringing Mr. Hussein to trial - he was captured
by American troops near his hometown of Tikrit 2 years ago next month -
getting past procedural wrangling and into the substantive part of the
trial represented a significant moment for the court. Members of the
defense team told the court they would be raising new challenges to its
legitimacy, and pressing demands for a 45-day adjournment that would give
them time to study prosecution documents that they said had been
transferred to them in August in incomplete form.
But by attending the court today, and not disrupting the beginnings of the
prosecution case, the defendants and their lawyers appeared to have
acknowledged that the trial will proceed, and that they will play a part
in it. For his part, Mr. Hussein appeared, on his initial showing at
today's hearing, to have acquiesced in the inevitability of the trial,
which is the 1st of perhaps a dozen that prosecutors say they are planning
against him and his top associates.
After his opening salvoes, he sat back in the dock taking copious notes,
and occasionally turning to his neighbor in the dock, Mr. Bandar, the
former revolutionary court judge, or to Mr. Dulaimi, with a quick smile.
In the Dujail case, he and the other defendants face a possible death
penalty, which prosecutors have said would not be carried out until other
cases against them are completed.
Mr. Dulaimi has said the defense strategy will be to challenge the
tribunal's legitimacy. Others on the defense team have said a crucial
argument will be that the tribunal, originally founded under an American
occupation decree and adopted into Iraqi law only last month by the
transitional parliament, contravenes a provision in the Geneva Conventions
that the lawyers contend forbids occupying powers from creating judicial
institutions.
To bolster the challenge, Mr. Hussein's defense team was joined by Mr.
Clark, the former American attorney general, who has a long and
controversial history of offering legal advice to toppled foreign leaders,
including the former Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic.
Tensions over the trial have been evident recently in a series of protests
in Baghdad, and in the Shiite holy cities of Karbala and Najaf, at which
crowds of several hundred, mostly Shiites, have burned Mr. Hussein in
effigy, hoisted signs saying "No, no to the devil!" and demanded that he
be hanged after a quick trial.
Less than 24 hours before Mr. Hussein returned to court, the police in
northern Iraq said Sunday that they had arrested 10 Sunni Arab men
carrying orders from a fugitive associate of Mr. Hussein's to assassinate
the court's best-known judge, Raid Juhi.
Officials in Ottawa and London have confirmed that four Western aid
workers - an American, a Briton and 2 Canadians - were kidnapped in
Baghdad on Saturday.
Insurgents have made a major tactic of kidnapping foreign civilians and
have seized at least 200 in the 31 months of the war, dozens of whom have
been killed, some by beheading. But the tactic has been used much less
frequently since American and Iraqi troops overran the insurgent
stronghold of Falluja outside Baghdad last November, uncovering bunkers
where some of the hostages had been held. Since then, foreigners, like
Iraqis, have faced a greater threat from suicide bombings.
(source: New York Times)
