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New leader past { November 25 2002 }

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   http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34451-2002Nov24.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34451-2002Nov24.html

A Would-Be Iraqi Leader, Caught by His Past
Ex-Army Chief Finds Revolt Plans Stalled by War Crimes Charges in Denmark

By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, November 25, 2002; Page A01


SOROE, Denmark -- In a simple two-bedroom apartment set in an anonymous block of flats in a small town in Denmark, the general waits.

Once he was the most senior officer of Saddam Hussein's army, with a row of ribbons across his chest, a million Iraqi soldiers under his command, and the respect and admiration of a nation. Then he fell out with the Iraqi leader and fled abroad -- lured, he said, by promises from the CIA of support to lead the grand revolt that would topple the dictator and restore Iraq to greatness. He would be Iraq's Charles de Gaulle.

Nizar Khazraji, 64, says he is ready to play the role that his entire life has prepared him for, that the time is ripe now that Washington and the world are applying new pressure on the faltering government. But he is going nowhere. For the general has a past, and a pursuer.

He faces allegations that he played a role in the Anfal, the brutal campaign against Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq in which Hussein's forces slaughtered more than 100,000 civilians, razed hundreds of villages and sprayed poison gas. He has been released on his own recognizance but ordered to remain in Denmark.

He says he is innocent, the victim of false accusations by Hussein's agents and by rivals in the fractious and fratricidal world of Iraqi opposition groups, and of a right-of-center Danish government that is determined to show it is not soft on immigrants in general and an accused war criminal in particular.

To his pursuer, none of this matters. Special prosecutor Birgitte Vestberg said she doesn't much care that the general is a pivotal figure in the Iraqi opposition, nor is she impressed by his claim that he was about to leave Denmark to launch an insurrection against Hussein when she charged him last week with the wholesale murder of civilians and other war crimes. Her response to his complaints is: "How sad," delivered without even a hint of a smile.

She has no interest in his potential role as leader of a new Iraq, nor does she mind if she has upset geopolitical strategies hatched in Washington, London or Riyadh. Her sole task is to determine whether the general has committed crimes he must answer for and to bring him to justice if he has. It could take a year, she said, or it could take longer.

Sitting in his small living room with the dining table jammed against a wall so that people can walk through, the highest-ranking general ever to flee Iraq impatiently tore open another pack of Marlboros, leaned back and pondered his unexpected fate.

"I need to be in Iraq," he said. "Instead, I'm in a cage."

A National Hero
By birth and training, Khazraji is a professional soldier. His father was a brigadier, his uncle an army chief of staff. He studied at the Iraqi military college, served in the armored corps, special forces and engineers, and vaulted up the ranks.

In 1971, he was military attache in Moscow, and there he met Hussein for the first time. The future president was 34 years old at the time and vice president of the ruling Baath Party. Khazraji's uncle had been condemned to death after the 1968 coup that brought the Baath Party to power. Khazraji pleaded for his uncle's life. Hussein promised the sentence would be commuted -- and it was.

From then on, a wary relationship was established. Khazraji said that at first he admired Hussein, who declared he would build a modern Arab state. But in the years that followed, as torture and mass executions became commonplace, he came to understand the man's ruthlessness. During the Iran-Iraq war, Khazraji served as commander of the First Corps in northern Iraq, in the country's Kurdish region. In July 1987, a low point in the Iraqi war effort, Hussein appointed him army chief of staff. Khazraji said he found a demoralized armed forces. He restructured the army and launched a new offensive. Within months the tide had turned and Iran sought a cease-fire. Khazraji became a national hero.

Still, he said, Hussein retained personal control of most military sectors, leaving Khazraji in charge only of the regular army, and kept him in the dark. Then on Aug. 2, 1990, the Republican Guard, under Hussein's authority, invaded neighboring Kuwait.

"I was called to the general command headquarters along with the minister of defense and I was informed," he recalled. "It was like being struck by lightning. I had never dreamed that Saddam would invade another Arab country. And this was a message in capital letters that this man didn't trust me anymore."

Khazraji said that within weeks he wrote two strategic reviews predicting disaster unless Iraq withdrew. On Sept. 18, Hussein summoned him to a meeting and demanded that he read aloud from his report. But Hussein, his face reddening, quickly interrupted him. "He told me, 'Why don't you just spit it out and say you don't want to fight this war?' I was shocked. I told him, 'What I've written is only part of the truth -- the rest is even darker than I've stated.' " Two days later, he was relieved of his post. He believes that only his popularity saved him from execution.

Five months later, as the United States and its allies evicted Iraqi forces from Kuwait, he was summoned back to active duty and dispatched to Nasariya in southern Iraq to help organize a defense against a possible U.S. invasion. Instead, he faced an uprising from the region's Shiite Muslims, who included some of his own soldiers. The local governor and Baath Party leader were slaughtered by a rebel mob, and Khazraji was shot four times in the stomach. It took him seven months to recover.

After that, he said, he lived under virtual house arrest in Baghdad, seldom venturing out of his family compound for fear of arrest or assassination. In 1996, he accepted what he said was an invitation by exiled dissidents connected to the CIA to leave Iraq and join the external opposition. He fled Iraq with his family through the Kurdish zones.

He settled in Amman, Jordan, where he soon met with CIA representatives. He said they wanted him to join the Iraqi National Accord, one of many competing opposition groups. When he refused, he said, the Americans cut off contact. "I made it very clear that I had left Iraq to work for the Iraqi army and people and not to be part of any movement outside the country," Khazraji recalled. "It seems they didn't like this tone."

David L. Mack, a former senior U.S. diplomat and now vice president of the Middle East Institute in Washington who has been working with Iraqi opposition figures, said U.S. officials were disappointed in Khazraji. "It was clear he enjoyed a lot of respect inside the country, especially within the army," Mack said. "But he handled himself poorly in the interviews. The relationship was not continued."

Jordan was not a safe place from which to plot the overthrow of the dictator next-door. Eventually, the general and his family headed for Scandinavia.

Denmark, he assumed, would be a safe haven.

War Crimes Charges
Pieces of shelving and picture frames lay stacked in the corridor outside Birgitte Vestberg's new office on the third floor of a nondescript government building in central Copenhagen. She was appointed to the newly created post of chief prosecutor for special international crimes last June. Top on her list, she said, is Nizar Khazraji.

He, his wife and his younger son Muhammad arrived at Copenhagen airport in July 1999 and applied for political asylum. While waiting for a ruling, they were given public housing and welfare benefits in the small town of Soroe, 45 miles southwest of Copenhagen. There, Khazraji was reportedly recognized by a Kurdish refugee who complained to the authorities that Denmark was harboring a war criminal.

The state immigration service denied Khazraji asylum because of the accusation, but allowed him to remain in Denmark, ruling that he would be endangered if forced to return to Iraq. His file was turned over to the security police for investigation, where it apparently sat inactive for more than a year. Then Politiken, a Copenhagen daily newspaper, got wind. In September 2001 it revealed he was living in Denmark.

The report proved embarrassing for the country's left-of-center government, which was locked in a tough parliamentary election campaign and was under attack for its welcoming immigration policy. Khazraji's legal status soon became a campaign issue, and helped lead to the government's defeat in November 2001. TV camera crews descended on his modest apartment house, interviewing his neighbors and customers at the local supermarket where he shopped. The tabloids dubbed him "The Poison General."

The accusations center on Khazraji's alleged role before and during the Anfal campaign. The operation began in 1987 as Iraqi forces rounded up thousands of Kurdish civilians and handed them over to the secret police and bulldozed hundreds of villages. A mustard and nerve gas attack on the town of Halabja in March 1988 killed between 3,000 and 5,000 civilians.

Human Rights Watch, the international rights organization, has uncovered several memos and orders that seem to implicate Khazraji during his time as First Corps commander. The first, dated May 14, 1987, states that "the Commander of the First Army Corps issued an order as requested by Comrade Ali Hassan Majeed to execute the wounded civilians after the Party Organization [has] confirmed their hostility toward the authorities."

Another, dated June 3 and labeled "Top Secret and Personal," issued by the Northern Bureau Command of the Baath Party and sent to nine departments, including the First Corps command, states: "Within their jurisdiction, the armed forces must kill any human being or animal present within these areas." A third, dated June 20, calls for First Corps to execute, after interrogation, all persons between the ages 15 and 70 captured in prohibited villages.

Khazraji said he never saw any of these orders and that he played no role in the Anfal or the Halabja massacre. In an interview and in a municipal court hearing last week, he said Hussein had placed total authority for dealing with the Kurds with Majeed, the president's cousin and a senior Baath Party official known as "Chemical Ali" for his use of chemical weapons. Occasionally, he said, Hussein ordered the army to provide troops to Majeed, but those units functioned under Majeed's sole command.

"These were internal security operations," he said. "The army had nothing to do with it and the Kurds themselves know it."

Khazraji has submitted to the court letters from the mainstream Kurdish opposition parties exonerating him. "We strongly believe that these attempts to undermine the reputation of Gen. Khazraji play into the hands of Saddam Hussein's regime to discourage other Iraqi officials from defecting and joining the Iraqi democratic opposition," wrote Dilshad Miran, head of the Kurdish Democratic Party's international relations bureau.

All of the documents are part of a growing file in Vestberg's new offices, along with the 100 witness statements she and her investigators have compiled. There is much more work to do, she said. There are about 2.4 million documents seized from northern Iraq in storage in Boulder, Colo., under the control of the State Department. She needs to view some of the originals to build her case.

A Skeptical Prosecutor
Like Khazraji, Vestberg, who is 60, is a professional. She spent 19 years as one of Denmark's six regional prosecutors for serious crimes. She goes by the book. If Khazraji or the soldiers under his command participated in acts that violated the Geneva Conventions, she will prosecute him. He will not be able, she avers, to claim that he had no knowledge of his men's actions or that he was forced to follow orders.

"It's very easy," she said. The rules established for prosecuting war crimes in Yugoslavia, Rwanda and during World War II, and all the literature on command responsibility make it clear: "It's no excuse to say you were following an order."

Overall, she seems unimpressed by Khazraji's story. "The general did manage to flee from Iraq when he saw fit," she said, "so he might have done so at an earlier stage."

Last week, the general was ready to leave again.

His wife and son were due to travel to Saudi Arabia on Wednesday. Khazraji had planned to follow soon after. He had applied to the police for a one-way travel document. He said he was planning to journey to Iraq's Kurdish north, link up with fellow former officers, then launch an insurrection. There were suggestions that the Saudis were prepared to back him, but the general declined to comment.

He fears that a U.S. military invasion would destroy what's left of Iraq's infrastructure and inflict further suffering on an already battered population. But he said there are hundreds of Iraqi soldiers in exile and thousands more inside the country who are prepared to follow him in overthrowing Hussein. "If we manage to gain control of one army unit -- it doesn't have to be a big one -- they will be backed up by the people and it's going to snowball. No one will be able to stop it."

A police raid last Tuesday ended those plans. The authorities took away Khazraji's files and his hard drive. That afternoon he was summoned to municipal court for a six-hour hearing, accused of murder and other war crimes, and ordered to remain in Denmark pending further investigation.

Darkness fell; the hearing dragged on into the night. As it wound down around 10 p.m., Khazraji sat slumped in his chair, shaking his head in disappointment. Time was passing. Who knows when the Americans will launch their invasion?

"This is a terrible mistake," he said. "These people don't understand what they're doing, and what kind of message they're sending to the Iraqi people."

The prosecutor folded a loose-leaf notebook and returned it to a large white file box with a dozen others. By the next morning she would be back at her desk in Copenhagen, pursuing the general.



© 2002 The Washington Post Company



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