Posted on 12/27/2003 5:17:21 PM PST by Pokey78
She's the firebrand left-wing MP who stunned the Commons into silence when she backed Tony Blair over Iraq. Many said she saved the Prime Minister's skin. After a momentous year, Ann Clwyd talks to Kamal Ahmed
Ann Clwyd was in the shower when the news started coming in from Iraq. Saddam Hussein had been captured, dead, alive, no one was quite sure. It was early on Sunday morning, 15 December.
She got an excited telephone call from a friend in Iraqi Kurdistan saying, 'Have you heard, have you heard? Saddam has been found'. For Tony Blair's human rights envoy to Iraq and the woman who brought the House of Commons to hushed silence earlier this year when she implored fellow MPs to back the war against Saddam on humanitarian grounds, it was a moment of quiet joy.
'I think I just felt a great sense of relief for the Iraqi people,' she said in an interview with The Observer to mark the end of a year when she has moved from also-ran backbencher to one of the key players in Blair's post-Saddam adventure.
'I'd been there the previous week in Baghdad and people had been saying since the end of the war that they wanted Saddam found dead or alive. People still thought that the Baathists were watching them and that when "he" comes back they will all be in trouble. People could not believe that he had left Iraq or that he wasn't masterminding operations [against the coalition].
'One showed me a letter which said the Iraqis should fight back against "the invaders". It was supposedly from Saddam, calling for a campaign of sabotage. The fact that he was taken and taken alive is vital. Now the hundreds of thousands of people who have lost relatives might get some form of justice.'
Justice. A concept which comes in many forms and can have many meanings. Should Saddam face the death penalty? And if he does, what should Britain's position be?
Clwyd is clear on what the future should hold for the deposed dictator. And her opinions now have the stamp of Number 10's approval - on her desk sits a memo in bold type: 'Prime Minister: phone call 3.30pm.'
'I think Saddam should get a fair trial, as should all the people in the custody of the coalition,' she said. 'The Iraqi people have the right to hear what happened to so many of their friends and relatives and the right to hear first-hand that evidence. I agree with them that this is a trial that should take place in Iraq, under Iraqi jurisdiction, but with support from the international community, international judges who have had experience in trials involving genocide and war crimes.
'The last thing the Iraqis want is the charge that those captured didn't get fair trials. We know that their alleged crimes were heinous, but we want a democratic country to carry out a system of trials that are transparent to the rest of the world.'
And the death penalty?
Clwyd, sipping her tea in the House of Commons restaurant, overlooking the Thames, pauses for a brief while. It is a difficult balance. 'I'm against the death penalty, the British Government is against it and the European governments are against it,' she said. 'But attitudes in Iraq have hardened. The majority view is that there must be the death penalty.
'One of the reasons is that Saddam used to grant amnesties periodically, so the Iraqi people are used to seeing prisoners out on the streets again, so of course the thought of having some of these people, including him, out on the streets again in 20 years' time is horrendous for the people who suffered.
'We can only try to exert influence. When the Iraqis take over it will be a sovereign government and they will be able to do whatever they decide to do. I think that is right and proper. I say that with reluctance, clearly, but I can understand the Iraqis' point of view.'
She thinks back to the times that she visited Iraq and saw the horror of a regime built on repression and torture and she travels at least half the journey towards acknowledging where the Iraqi people are coming from. 'When you stand at the mass graves in Hilla, it is like standing on a moonscape, and you see the spot where they think 10,000 to 15,000 bodies are buried, and you see some of those bodies being excavated and elderly women going around with plastic bags looking for remains. You realise that the entire population has suffered from this brutality. It is not surprising they want revenge.'
Earlier this year Clwyd was sitting in her office in one of the more obscure corridors of the House of Commons when she received an email with a Pentagon address on it. Opening it up, she saw at the bottom that it was from Paul Wolfowitz, the American Deputy Defence Secretary, leading Republican, neo-conservative and backer of the American 'new world order', including the removal of Saddam Hussein from power.
Now, any self-respecting left-wing Labour MP - as Clwyd is - might be expected to tut a little, maybe point out to one of her staff that she had received something 'from that warmonger Wolfowitz' and consign it to the trash icon on her desktop.
Not Clwyd. Indeed, she agreed with most of what Wolfowitz was saying on the issue. 'I wrote this piece about these plastic shredders, and the disgusting barbarity of Saddam's regime,' Clwyd said. 'They were used as an instrument of torture. If you were put in head first you died quickly, if you were put in feet first you died more slowly. 'One of the emails I got after that piece, and I got a lot, was from Wolfowitz. It said that he totally agreed with my reasons for supporting the war.'
In May, following an invitation from Wolfowitz, the two met in the Pentagon.
Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, and as far as many in the anti-war coalition are concerned the man most to blame for events in Iraq, put his head around the door. 'You're the man with the brains,' he said cheerily, gesturing to his deputy. 'I'm just the office boy.'
For Clwyd, it completed a journey. The woman who had once demonstrated with the women of Greenham Common to remove American bases from British soil was breaking bread with someone many of her colleagues consider to be the enemy. 'It was too good an opportunity to miss,' she said. 'He was a very charming man, an intellectual. We joked, and I told him I dreaded to think what my colleagues would think, me sitting here speaking to a neo-conservative in the Pentagon. For me, it was bizarre, talking to someone who had the reputation of Wolfowitz.'
Clwyd entered the public imagination in February. It was the day of the crucial House of Commons vote on whether Britain should commit troops to war on Iraq. Blair was contemplating resignation if he could not get at least half of his restless Labour MPs to back him.
In the end 139 Labour MPs voted against the Government, the biggest rebellion of Blair's premiership. It could have been 30 more and far more politically dangerous had Clwyd not given the remarkable speech about why she was backing the Government's push towards conflict.
This month the chairman of the judges for the Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year Awards said of Clwyd's speech: 'Few MPs have the power to bring the House of Commons to silence. Such was the achievement of Ann Clwyd, who has spoken so passionately about the fate of the [Iraqi] Kurds, and from such direct and personal experience, that it was sometimes hard to tell whether her voice was choking from emotion or from the dust of Iraq.'
Two weeks before her speech, Clwyd had returned from a trip to Iraqi Kurdistan. There she had heard about the shredders, the woman whose baby had died because the prison guards would not give her milk, the teenager nailed to a window frame because he tried to give a torture victim water.
'Even for me, who is hardened to the atrocities of the regime, to hear these stories from witnesses first-hand was horrific,' she said.
'I always felt the regime should be toppled for human rights reasons. Everyone should have made that argument about the war. The barbarity was so acute that no human being could listen to this and not take some action. So, it was the week after I came back and I made that speech. I couldn't look the Kurds in the face again if I opposed the war. Once I had made up my own mind, there was no going back for me.'
Clwyd admits that the question of weapons of mass destruction was the wrong one on which to base the war. But rather than blame the protagonists, she says that the fact that there is only a shaky legal basis under the United Nations for military intervention on humanitarian grounds - apart from to avert genocide - shows that the UN needs to look again at its own charter.
'I am sure people sincerely believed that there were and are weapons of mass destruction,' she said. 'Whether they are right or not, I don't know. As the Kurdish leader said, the biggest weapon of mass destruction was Saddam himself. He didn't understand why we have this obsession with WMD here.'
Clwyd, who also backed military intervention in Kosovo and Afghanistan, said that there were at least two outstanding accusations of genocide against Saddam Hussein, and that the United Nations failed to act on either.
'What's the UN's attitude to that?' she said. 'They even failed to set up a war crimes tribunal. That is why the UN needs to look at the way it deals with issues such as this, its set-up, all over again.'
Has the UN let down the Iraqi people? 'I have to say yes. On matters like this, I really feel they must examine their own consciences and come up with better solutions.'
The question now is the future. The war, the capture of Saddam Hussein, the death of civilians and soldiers, will be for nothing if the country descends into a bloody chaos of strife and becomes ungovernable. Clwyd, who has visited the country three times since the end of the war, now believes that she can see the start of something, even the whiff of a little-known emotion in that troubled country - optimism.
'I met members of Baghdad City Council a week ago and a woman said to me, "It is getting better day by day, but we have to be patient". For me that sums up the mood of the majority of the Iraqi people. They will pull together more and more. People have waited 30 years for this.'
Actually, I think that's the last thing that they care about...
Ann Clwyd was in the shower when the news started coming in from Iraq....
She got an excited telephone call from a friend in Iraqi Kurdistan saying, 'Have you heard, have you heard? Saddam has been found'. For Tony Blair's human rights envoy to Iraq and the woman who brought the House of Commons to hushed silence earlier this year when she implored fellow MPs to back the war against Saddam on humanitarian grounds, it was a moment of quiet joy.
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She was a wonderful and powerful ally from the beginning.
Rummy thanked her in person, in England.
8 See men shredded and say you don't back war ~ March 18, 2003 ~ Ann Clwyd
8 Envoy MP backs Blair ~ June 1, 2003
An honest liberal.
Nat Hentoff has company...
Thank you Ann, for your passionate speech that helped to solidify the move to war. I know that war is abhorant to you, but it really was the only way.
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