'Where is the crime?' It was everywhere in 1991
Towards the end of Wednesday's court session in the trial of Saddam Hussein, all of us in the overheated press box were fighting to stay awake. After two days of witnessing the introductions of thousands of documents into evidence, and hardly an outburst from any of the defendants, boredom was beginning to set in.
Then, at the end of the day, Saddam asked to speak.
In a shocking declaration, the former Iraqi President admitted that he gave the orders that led to the execution of 148 Shiite men from the town of Dujail in the 1980's. He believed he had the right as a head of state to exact punishment because the men of Dujail had tried to assassinate him.
"Where is the crime," he declared.
It was then that I snapped to attention, but my mind quickly drifted back 15 years. I shook my head. "Where is the crime," I thought to myself. It was everywhere back in 1991.
I've never been able to get the memory out of my head - at least a 100,000 Kurdish refugees packed into a high mountain valley near the Turkish border.
The time was early spring 1991 and NBC News had sent me and cameraman Jeff Riggins to northern Iraq. The first Gulf War was over. Iraq had been pushed from Kuwait, but Saddam Hussein was exacting his revenge on the Kurds who took to heart President George H.W. Bush's call to them and Shiites in the south to rise up against Saddam Hussein.
The Kurds and Shiite's did indeed launch uprisings. They believed that the United States would back them up, but it did not. Now, I was witnessing the horrible result.
Kurds, forced from their homes with only what they could carry, were trapped between Turks, who did not want them in, and Saddam's forces who wanted to push them out.
The snow-covered high valley was their last stand, and the cold and filth was taking a horrible toll. Dozens were dying each day.
Jeff Riggins and I were the first Westerners to arrive. As far as the Kurds were concerned, we WERE the United States of America, and President Bush had sent us to help.
I was surrounded by dozens of mothers holding children wrapped in thin white blankets. They were begging me for help. Many of the babies were already dead, but their mothers did not want to believe it.
Hundreds more would die before the United States finally sent relief aide. Each day I would walk by the corpses neatly stacked along a mountain path and wonder if those responsible would ever be punished.
My mind returned to the courtroom. I was sitting a few feet from Saddam Hussein and he was declaring once more, "So where is the crime?" Fifteen years later, maybe there will be punishment.
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