Report of the Iraq Inquiry

Debate between John Nicolson and Ann Clwyd

Thursday 14th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley) (Lab)]

I have had a very long involvement with Iraq. For Members who were not here in the 1980s, the 1990s and even the beginning of the 2000s, let me say that I spoke many times in this Chamber about the regime in Iraq. I chaired an organisation called CARDRI—the Committee against Repression and for Democratic Rights in Iraq—which had many members in this country and overseas. We published several books by academics and people who lived in Iraq about the situation in the country. Somebody who is now the representative of Iraq in South Korea would come here almost every other week with a list of people who had been executed at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. Sometimes the accounts of their executions and their torture were so dreadful that I would say to him, “Are you sure this is right?” He would then come back, perhaps a week later, and say, “Yes, it was right, and here’s another long list.” We therefore had no doubt what the situation was in Iraq, and CARDRI existed for a number of years.

When I came back from the European Parliament in 1984, I was asked to chair an organisation called Indict, which was set up with American and Kuwaiti backing. The Kuwaitis, of course, had a particular interest in finding those Kuwaitis who had been captured during Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. For many years we searched for those missing people—or their graves.

The organisation had a team of researchers and its aim was to collect evidence against Iraqi war criminals. In particular, we had a list of the 12 most wanted, and we collected detailed evidence about a great number of them because the idea was to bring them to court. By the mid-1990s, a body of law existed that allowed human rights abusers to be brought to court. The development of international law was slow; even though laws existed, their application depended on institutions and Governments that had their own political agendas. A new ruling by the International Court of Justice, for example, blocked indictments of ruling heads of state. Therefore, whatever evidence we had against Saddam Hussein, we could not use it in a court of law, unlike in the case of Slobodan Miloševic, who was brought before an international court.

That still left key members of the regime open to indictment, however. We had a great deal of evidence, for example, against Tariq Aziz, who was then the Foreign Minister in Iraq. We also had plenty of evidence against Ali Hassan al-Majid—Chemical Ali. I had meetings with the UN special rapporteur on torture, Max van der Stoel, with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, and with Secretary-General Kofi Annan. I also addressed several international conferences and tried to spell out what we were doing.

We needed evidence that would stand up in court, so we dismissed a lot of the evidence that we felt would not. We had guidance from a top human rights barrister, Clare Montgomery, QC. Our researchers worked hard interviewing thousands of people over five or six years to collect testimonies. Once the evidence had been gathered and analysed by our legal team, the role of myself and Indict’s other board members was to persuade lawmakers in the relevant country that there was enough evidence to indict the people concerned. We came close to a prosecution in Belgium, but it changed its laws at the last minute because someone had tried to indict Israeli leader Ariel Sharon.

[John Nicolson (East Dunbartonshire) (SNP)]

The right hon. Lady is trying to persuade us that Saddam Hussein was a vile dictator. We all accept that, but that was not the case for war. The case for war was based on weapons of mass destruction. She argued strongly in favour of the war. Has she changed her mind on the basis of the evidence?

[Ann Clwyd]

When I come to the relevant section in my speech, the hon. Gentleman will get his answer.

We went to Switzerland, Norway and Belgium. We had a good case in Norway, and I travelled there several times to meet senior law officers. However, just as in Britain, there were lots of warm words, but there was no action. We were therefore trying hard to avoid a war; we thought there was an alternative. We tried to make the case—I made it in this Chamber over many years, and the hon. Gentleman would have heard it had he been here—that there were alternatives. Unfortunately, all the authorities prevaricated, and the issue dragged on without getting anywhere.

Meanwhile, our main funders, the Americans, were having a change of heart. The Clinton Administration had originally been enthusiastic, wanting us to campaign in the US as well as in Europe, but they suddenly changed their mind. They had moved to a policy of containment, not indictment, so our activities no longer really fitted in with their plans. However, the organisation had been set up in this country, so we continued collecting the evidence.

We turned our attention, in particular, to Tariq Aziz, because of his involvement in the taking of British hostages. People forget that British hostages were taken in Kuwait, and we never had proper answers about why they were there and why their plane landed there. Saddam Hussein had already taken Kuwait, and those people were taken as human shields.

I presented our evidence to the Attorney General, Lord Williams of Mostyn. I had several meetings with him and continually pressured members of his team to take action, because they were not moving fast enough. They kicked their heels for a number of years, and our top barrister could not understand why, given the evidence that we had presented. We had as much evidence as we could possibly need. Apart from getting a signed confession from Saddam Hussein in his own blood, there was nothing further, legally, we could have done.

I would occasionally spot Lord Williams at Westminster, and I would take off after him, chasing him down the corridors. He would frequently joke that he was having to duck into the gents to try to avoid me. One day he said, “I’ve got good news for Indict.” He said he was going to refer the case against Tariq Aziz to Scotland Yard. I looked at him and said, “You’re kicking it into the long grass,” but he denied that that was the case. The Indict team, which was obviously made up mainly of Iraqis, duly visited a Chief Superintendent Bunn in New Scotland Yard. We talked about the evidence we had and offered to help him by providing more, but we never heard a single word back. That is understandable in some ways; it was not Scotland Yard’s remit, and it had neither the resources nor the expertise, and certainly not the interest.

We came in for some ridicule from the British press —the typical tabloid fare, with cartoons of British bobbies apprehending Saddam Hussein—but a good opportunity was missed. I make that point because there were alternatives, but those alternatives, for whatever reasons, were not pursued in the way that I and many other Members would have wished.

I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden), who was of great assistance when we were looking at many of these matters. He was a very wise counsel, and he assisted the Iraqis in many ways.

I became aware of human rights atrocities in Iraq before I was a politician, in the 1970s. I met Iraqi students in Cardiff, and I am sure some of my Scottish friends will have met Iraqi students in Scotland. Some of those students had been imprisoned. I met a couple from Basra. One of them—he was a student activist—had been in prison and gone through a mock execution. I came to learn later on that that was only the tip of the iceberg.

In 1991, when I was the shadow Secretary of State for International Development, I stood up in Parliament and described what I had seen in the mountains of Iraq and Iran when the Kurds fled from Saddam’s helicopter gunships. Those scenes were appalling and typical of the attacks made by the Iraqi regime on Iraqis. Sometime later, I met an Iraqi who made the point that Saddam had killed hundreds of thousands of his own people. He said, “The biggest weapon of mass destruction was Saddam. Why did it take so long for him to be removed?” Many Kurds were killed during the genocidal Anfal campaign, including as a result of the barbarous use of chemical weapons in Halabja.

In 1988, I took some women Members of all parties to a London hospital to see a number of the horribly burned victims. Many people were killed brutally, in cold blood, in a maze of prison and torture chambers all over the country. Repression, abuse, ethnic cleansing and extra-judicial killings continued right up until 2003.

Saddam, without doubt, was a serious threat to domestic, regional and global stability. I had hoped that the international community could remove or neutralise him without force, but sanctions failed, international indictment never took place and UN Security Council resolutions were ignored time after time. All had been tried; all had failed. So from 1997 to 2003, I worked to get Saddam and leading members of his regime prosecuted under international law for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, on the basis of rock-solid witness testimony. The evidence was finally used in the trials of Saddam, Tariq Aziz and others when they eventually stood trial in Baghdad. I was very pleased to be there to witness some of those trials. I knew that our evidence was being used; I saw it in the rooms behind the chamber where they were being tried.

In February 2003, the Kurds were terrified that chemical weapons would be used against them again. I saw the rockets in mountains on the Iraqi-Kurdish border. From 2003 onwards, more secrets of this evil and despotic regime were revealed. I stood on a huge mound in the open air, on several acres in al-Hillah, near Babylon, where about 10,000 bodies were being disinterred from a mass grave, mostly Shi’a Muslims.

On one of more than 20 visits to Iraq as special envoy on human rights, I opened the first genocide museum in Kurdistan. It was snowing, the sky was black and people crammed into the building, where their relatives had been tortured, many to death. There were photos of skulls and shreds of clothing. Former detainees had written messages on the cell walls. Sometimes, the writing was in blood; sometimes, there were just marks to cross off the days of the week. One very old woman came up to me with a bit of plastic in her hand. I unwrapped it and saw three photos. They were of her husband and two sons, who had been killed in that place.

Over the past few days, since the report of the Chilcot inquiry, to which I gave evidence for a whole afternoon, very few voices of Iraqis have been heard. I have here the words of Dr Latif Rashid, who is currently the senior adviser to the Iraqi President. In 2003, he was appointed as Water Minister in Baghdad, and he was very successful. He managed, over a few years, to re-flood the marshes where the Marsh Arabs had been so cruelly displaced. This is what he says:

“It must be remembered that at the time not only did Prime Minister Blair and President Bush wish to remove Saddam Hussain from power in Iraq, but so did most of the entire spectrum of the Iraqi opposition (including Kurds, Arabs, Shia, and all other minorities that make up the Iraq) and most of the international community.

The Iraqi opposition lobbied Governments throughout the world, and we, as representatives of the Iraqi opposition, believe that Prime Minister Blair and President Bush were acting in response to the Iraqi people and to protect them, on the basis of evidence available at that time.

There was concrete evidence that Saddam Hussain was complicit and had instructed organised campaigns of genocide, torture, war, ethnic cleansing and use of chemical/biological weapons against the Iraqi population as well as neighbouring countries. We are still finding the mass graves of the nearly one million Iraqis murdered as a result of his actions.

Although Iraq currently has its problems, I believe they are the result of Iraqis themselves. We will always remain grateful for the support shown by Tony Blair, and the British Government and British Parliament at that time.”