Chemical Ali to Hang

Continuing their fractured ways — last week they failed to agree on provincial elections — Iraq’s Presidency Council is still fighting over the death sentences of Ali Hassan al-Majid, Sultan Hashim Ahmad Jabburi Tai, and Hussein Rashid Mohammed. They have agreed that Chemical Ali should hang, but VP Tariq al-Hashemi continues to oppose executing the other two:

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s office lashed out Friday at the Iraqi presidential council for refusing to approve the executions of two of the three men sentenced to hang for the genocidal campaign against Iraq’s ethnic Kurdish minority under Saddam Hussein.

[snip]

Earlier Friday, senior government aides said the three-member Presidency Council, which consists of President Jalal Talabani and his two vice presidents, had signed off on the execution of Saddam’s cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as “Chemical Ali,” for ordering the use of poison gas against villages said to be harboring Kurdish guerrillas.

The decision was the last legal obstacle to carrying out the sentence, which must be done within 30 days.

But an aide said Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi who, like the defendants, is a Sunni, would not endorse the executions of the two military leaders who helped carry out the deadly attacks: Defense Minister Sultan Hashim Ahmad Jabburi Tai and the ex-deputy head of army operations, Hussein Rashid Mohammed.

Execution orders require the signatures of all three members of the Presidency Council under Iraqi law.

Talabani, a Kurd who opposes the death penalty on principle, has given his Shiite vice president, Adel Abdul-Mahdi, authority to sign on his behalf.

Many Sunnis regard Tai and Mohammed as military professionals who were following orders, and al-Hashemi has argued that their lives should be spared. Sensing an opportunity to encourage reconciliation, Talabani also has urged clemency for Tai, who is said to have had contact with the Iraqi opposition before the war and surrendered voluntarily to U.S. forces in 2003.

However, Iraq’s two main Shiite parties are opposed to commuting Tai’s sentence because of his role in the brutal suppression of a 1991 Shiite uprising at the end of the Persian Gulf War.

In Iraq, law is truly politics by other means.