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Lynch Law in Iraq By TML Daily
In the U.S., lynchings on a broad scale were at their height in the 1880s and 1890s as part of the government's efforts to crush the people's fight for empowerment and rights in the Reconstruction period in the U.S. This was a period of broad democracy among the people following the end of the Civil War and slavery, when working people together were engaged in rewriting constitutions, themselves electing and being elected and united in fighting for rights and new arrangements. Lynching and lynch law were imposed to block this progress and push social relations back to the near-slave conditions of plantation sharecropping. The thousands of lynchings carried out against African Americans, alongside many hundreds against Mexicans, were commonly organized by the government's paramilitary forces like the Ku Klux Klan. Sheriff's and police agents were usually a direct part of the gang of lynchers, or turned prisoners over to the lynchers. The federal government guaranteed the lynching occurred and would continue -- not only by having its agents backing and being part of the KKK and arming and protecting them, but also through its refusal to intervene, including refusing to pass a law making lynching a federal crime.
Now the modern day international KKK is imposing its dictate worldwide by attempting to create an atmosphere of terror and attempting to impose powerlessness on the people. The U.S. is seeking to draw the American working class and people and the peoples of the world in as spectators to the lynchings, not only to create the notion that somehow they are to benefit from such crimes, but more importantly to increase their powerlessness in the face of the almighty rule of crime and violence and its perpetrators. The aim today, as in the 1880s and 1890s in the U.S., is to make sure the people cannot unite on the basis of their collective political interests. The use of sectarianism by these international state terrorists has the purpose of smashing the ability of the peoples to think and unite politically to defeat their enemies on the basis of their own nation-building projects. Despite international condemnation of these lynchings, the genocide trial of six former Iraqi officials resumed in Baghdad on January 8 on the basis of the same kangaroo court imposed by the occupiers. The six co-defendants are facing charges of genocide against Kurds in the trial of the Anfal case, in which prosecutors said that up to 180,000 Kurds were allegedly killed, many of them by poison gas and mass killings. The so-called "Operation Anfal" trial commenced on August 21 in Baghdad. At the beginning of the current session, Chief Judge, Muhammad al-Urieby said his court dropped all legal procedures against the defendant Saddam Hussein whose chair the co-defendants nonetheless left empty. "According to a letter received from Iraqi High Tribunal on January 7 concerning the execution of defendant Saddam Hussein, the court decided to stop legal procedures against him," Urieby said. According to the western media, the remaining important co-defendant in the Anfal trial is Ali Hassan al-Majid, nicknamed "Chemical Ali" by the media. Ali Hassan is a cousin of Saddam Hussein and former defense minister. The other five co-defendants are also facing charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. If convicted, the remaining six defendants could also face the death penalty. Source:TML Daily, January 23, 2007 - No. 8 | ||
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