Ashraf Qazi has a problem
On September 23rd, Ashraf Qazi, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Iraq, has “expressed deep concern that efforts towards ensuring human rights and fundamental freedoms could be undermined” by the death penalty as administered by Iraqi courts.
Since 2004, 140 persons have been sentenced to death by the courts of the Iraqi government, and 50 have been executed. Recently, the Kurdistan Regional Government executed 10.
This certainly represents a change from the Ba’athist regime, whose judicial executions numbered in the tens of thousands. (Such formal executions don’t include the hundreds of thousands of Kurds and Shi’ites killed in “disappearances” and mass slaughters that the United Nations has itself documented.)
Depending on whose numbers you believe, Saddam’s regime killed between 75 and 125 Iraqi citizens per day.
Got that? Prior to the invasion of Kuwait, the U.N. didn’t say peep against the Ba’athist regime, which killed more Iraqis each-and-every day for 25 years. But now, says Special Rep. Qazi, the democracy is undermining “human rights and fundamental freedoms” by executing 50 mass murderers and terrorists since 2004.
Special Representative Qazi spent his career as a senior diplomat for Pakistan, which not only practices capital punishment, but which recently reinstated the death penalty for juveniles. The Lahore High Court that did so cited this problem: adults were hiring juveniles to commit murders for them.
The Iraqi democracy faces murderous challenges each day from hostile neighbors, jihadist fanatics, and partisans of the old dictatorship. These rebels will not only kill elected officials at a heartbeat: they will slaughter their fellow-citizens for no better reason than to inspire revenge and chaos.
Today, United Nations bureaucrats have little immediate reason to fear these thugs. That’s because they set the style for “cut-and-run.”
On August 19, 2003, Al Qaeda in Iraq bombed the offices of U.N. envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello, killing the envoy and 21 others, and wounding 100 more. The bombing happened in the wake of de Mello’s refusal to allow the U.S. to provide security for the U.N. mission at the Canal Hotel in Baghdad.
Among the dead were the coordinators for the UN Children’s Fund, the Christian Children’s Fund, and the director of peace and conflict studies for the Council for Foreign Relations.
Abu Musab al Zarqawi, then the head of Al Qaeda in Iraq, gave the following rationale for the mass killing:
We destroyed the U.N. building, the protector of the Jews, the friends of the oppressors and aggressors. The U.N. has recognized the Americans as the masters of Iraq. Before that, they gave Palestine as a gift to the Jews so they can rape the land and humiliate our people. Do not forget Bosnia, Kashmir, Afghanistan and Chechnya.
Negotiate with that.
With his dying breath, de Mello (to his credit) pleaded for a continuation of the U.N. mission to aid the Iraqi people. But one month later (September, 22, 2003), a second bombing occurred at the Canal Hotel, killing two and wounding 19. The U.N. withdrew its 600-person mission.
Ashraf Qazi, the new United Nations “special representative”, presides over a token staff for a deserted mission. From this vantage point, he delivers his pronouncements on the fictional brutality of the democracy.
But is not hypocrisy what we expect from the United Nations?