Friday, December 19, 2003
US should also be tried for Saddam's crimes: Rafsanjani
Agence France-Presse Tehran, December 19
The United States should be tried for crimes committed by Saddam Hussein because it supported the ousted Iraqi dictator's regime in the past, former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said on Friday.
"We would not want Saddam Hussein to be punished by the Americans because the United States should itself be tried for Saddam's crimes," Rafsanjani said during Friday prayers broadcast on Iranian national radio.
"From the day the Baathist regime began its fight against the Muslims and the Shiites, the United States, Britain and other oppressor powers rallied around Saddam Hussein," he said.
"They were accomplices in all the crimes committed by Saddam," Rafsanjani charged, referring in particular to the bloody 1980-88 war on Iran.
"The war against Iran was launched with their support and when they saw that Saddam Hussein couldn't hold out any longer (against the Iranian army), they entered the war themselves, attacking our oil platforms, our ships and our planes."
Rafsanjani, who heads the Expediency Council, the Islamic republic's top arbitration body, said Saddam was being branded a war criminal for chemical attacks on the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988, in which some 5,000 people died.
"But we should be asking who supplied Saddam Hussein with these chemical weapons in the first place," he said.
Rafsanjani said the United States was in the Middle East and the Gulf to try to destroy "its own illegitimate children," the Afghan Taliban, the Al-Qaeda terror group and Saddam's Baathists, who he said were "created and strengthened by the Americans themselves."
"We are not content to see criminals like Saddam punished by the United States, but we are happy for such criminals to be punished by the will of God," he said.
"The Americans should know that one day the powerful hand of Allah will take them by the throat."
Iranian leaders have welcomed the capture of Saddam last Saturday by US forces in Iraq, and an Iranian official said Monday that Tehran was preparing to file suit against Saddam before an international tribunal.
© Hindustan Times Ltd. 2003.