In Baghdad, Justice Behind the Barricades

07/30/2007

By MICHAEL R. GORDON
NY Times
Published: July 30, 2007


BAGHDAD, July 26 — In a city plagued by suicide bombers and renegade militias, the Americans and the Iraqi government have turned to an unusual measure to help implant the rule of law: they have erected a legal Green Zone, a heavily fortified compound to shelter judges and their families and secure the trials of some of the most dangerous suspects.

The Rule of Law Complex, as it is known by the Iraqi government, is in the Baghdad neighborhood of Rusafa and held its first trial last month.

For Iraqi officials, working at the compound is so fraught with risk that it often requires separating themselves and their families from life outside the complex’s gates.

“Our work is really a challenge,” said a judge who lives in the compound with his wife and children and whose identity is protected by the court’s security procedures. “I have not seen Baghdad for three months.”

The court’s first defendant was a Syrian militant, Ramsi Ahmed Ismael Muhammed, known by the nom de guerre Abu Qatada. Tried on charges of kidnapping, killing his hostages and carrying out other bloody attacks, he was convicted in the complex’s high-surveillance courtroom and sentenced to death.

The utility of the fortified complex, however, depends on more than a single high-profile case. Ultimately, it will depend on the Iraqis’ ability to expand their capacity to try cases at the complex as well as their track record in applying justice evenhandedly to Shiites and Sunnis alike.

The notion of helping the Iraqis establish protected legal enclaves is an important element of the American campaign plan prepared by Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador to Iraq. The hope is that a network of legal complexes will be established in other parts of Iraq, starting with the capital of Anbar Province, Ramadi, where work is expected to begin in the next several months.

The Rusafa complex, across the Tigris River to the east of the government Green Zone in central Baghdad, is still in its early days. Since the court began hearing cases in June it has tried 43 suspects, a rate of about one suspect a day.

The United States provides criminal investigators, lawyers and a paralegal staff to train the Iraqis to run the complex, which also includes accommodations for witnesses, investigators, the Baghdad Police College and an expanding number of detainees. The 55-member American team includes Justice Department and military personnel as well as contractors, and there are only four Iraqi investigators.

But an additional 26 Iraqi investigators are being trained by the F.B.I., according to Michael F. Walther, a senior United States Justice Department official who runs the American military’s Law and Order Task Force. And by next March, the small courtroom where Abu Qatada was tried is to be replaced by an $11 million court built with American reconstruction funds.

The Central Criminal Court in Baghdad is expected to conduct about 5,000 trials this year. Col. Mark S. Martins, the staff judge advocate for General Petraeus’s military command, estimates that once the new Rusafa court is built the complex will be able to handle about one third of that caseload. The Iraqi government will take over the cost of protecting and operating the complex next month and has approved $49 million for the effort.

Despite its status as a protected area for trying Iraq’s most infamous terrorists and militants, the Rule of Law Complex is not immune from the many problems roiling Iraq’s legal system. They include the crush of detainees that has emerged with the surge of American and Iraqi military operations. To try to reduce the backlog of cases, detainees from overcrowded jails in Kadhimiya and elsewhere have been transported to Rusafa, where they are fingerprinted and given retina scans.

The Rusafa prison’s capacity, which started at 2,500, will expand by more than 5,000 by the end of the summer. The main detention building at Rusafa is cleaner and less malodorous than many Iraqis jails, but with 15 detainees in each cell the conditions had reached maximum capacity under international standards.

When a reporter was escorted by the Iraqi prison director through one of the newly erected tent-covered jails a short drive away, a detainee who gave his name as Dawood Yousef, 46, pressed his way to the bars and yelled that he had been picked up in a sweep of Abu Ghraib and had spent five months in various jails, including a month in Rusafa, without being told why he had been arrested or when his case would go to trial. Colonel Martins took down the details.