Bringing Autocrats to Justice

I’m not in favor of the death penalty, not even in cases like Saddam Hussein’s. I suppose one could argue that his fate might give a certain pause to the petty dictators of the world. It might make them think before conducting campaigns of mass murder against their fellow countrymen but would it? It’s rarely invoked. Regicide has occurred occasionally throughout history but that never prevented regents murdering their rivals. Kings were never assassinated for their crimes, only for their power. These days exile is a more common penalty for fallen despots. Idi Amin lived out his life in comfort as a guest of the Saudis. Ferdinand Marcos, thief that he was, was given sanctuary in Hawaii. The last Shah of Iran died in a New York hospital, safe from the vengeance of his country’s revolutionaries. Chile’s Augusto Pinochet didn’t even get exile, efforts of a Spanish judge to extradite him not withstanding. Neither did Hirohito, though a number of other prominent Japanese were put to death for war crimes. Nobody ever seriously suggested bringing Joseph Stalin to trial, or Ho Chi Minh, or Chairman Mao. They all died securely in office. Other than Saddam the only former dictator I can remember seeing executed in recent decades was Romanian Nicolae Ceausescu, shot by firing squad along with his wife in 1989. Ousted dictators are more often treated like fired American CEOs, complete with golden parachutes to ease the pain. Criminologists say that for capital punishment to be an effective deterrent it should be swift and likely if not certain. It is neither. Saddam’s execution came more than three years after his capture and many years after the worst of his crimes. I would hardly call that swift. That he was executed at all has to do with losing a war, one he probably didn’t think would actually happen and even if he saw it coming he probably thought he would negotiate some sort of settlement. Libya’s Muammar Ghaddafi may have been thinking about the US invasion of Iraq when he agreed to settle with families of Pan Am bombing victims but the message there is it is better to settle than to be hanged. The sponsors of genocide in Sudan don’t seem to have been affected at all. Would a better strategy be to keep them in jail? Once a year we could issue a press release as a reminder that crime doesn’t pay. I suppose not though. Trouble is crimes by dictators usually do pay; they so rarely are brought to any sort of justice. In this modern day they remain above any law. I doubt that Saddam Hussein knew who Panama’s Manuel Noriega is. I can’t remember the last news report I saw on Noriega. He is apparently scheduled for parole from a federal prison in Florida this coming September and to be returned to Panama where he has been convicted of murder. The story hasn’t been widely covered. The US Parole Commission hasn’t issued a press release in two years. I don’t think the Bureau of Prisons much likes publicity either. The good news is that the world seems to be slowly developing mechanisms for more or less peacefully removing bad regimes from office. South Africa offered amnesty. The orderly transfer of power there was well worth the price. The amazing collapse of communism across Eastern Europe in the 1980’s went largely without bloodshed, Romania not withstanding. Most astounding of all was the fall of the Soviet Union with no more than a hint of bloody civil war. It’s interesting to note that these non-violent reforms came largely from within. The UN, courts in The Hague, and international sanctions all had no more than minor roles to play. It seems to work better that way.