FORMER IRAQI deputy prime minister Tareq Aziz was yesterday sentenced to death by hanging by the country’s supreme court for involvement in the former regime’s suppression of a 1991 rebellion by Shia religious parties.
Badia Arif, a lawyer who previously represented Mr Aziz, said the sentence was politically motivated. “Mr Aziz used always to tell me, ‘They’ll find a way to kill me and there is no way for me to escape this’.”
Mr Aziz’s son Ziad accused the current government of seeking revenge.
“The verdict is a disgrace,” he said.
Ousted president Saddam Hussein was executed in 2006 for the murder of 147 Shias in retaliation for an attempt by the Shia Dawa party, now led by premier Nuri al-Maliki, to kill the president during a visit to the village of Dujail.
An urbane, cigar-smoking, fluent English speaker, Mr Aziz was named deputy prime minister in 1979. He also served as foreign minister and regime spokesman but was never a member of Saddam’s inner circle or a decision-maker.
Nevertheless, an attempt on his life in early 1980 by the Tehran-backed Dawa was one of the reasons Baghdad launched an eight-year war on Iran in September that year.
Mr Aziz won US and Arab support for the conflict and served as an international spokesman when the regime tried and failed to prevent the wars launched by the Bush administrations in 1991 and 2003.
High on the US list of wanted regime figures, Mr Aziz surrendered to US forces in April 2003 shortly after the fall of Baghdad.
In 2009, he was imprisoned for 15 years for involvement in the 1992 execution of 42 traders who violated price controls during the crippling sanctions regime imposed following Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait. He was given a separate seven-year sentence after being convicted of deporting Kurds from northern Iraq. He has been ill during his incarceration and suffered a stroke last January.
Mr Aziz was born Mikhail Yuhanna in 1936 to a Chaldean Christian family living near the northern city of Mosul. He read English at Baghdad University and became a journalist.
In 1957, he joined the secular pan-Arab Baath party and was appointed editor of the party's newspaper, al-Thawra. Last August, he accused the US and UK of destroying Iraq. He said he had been hopeful when Barack Obama was elected US president because he would correct the mistakes of his predecessor. But, commenting on his decision to withdraw US troops by the end of next year, Mr Aziz observed, "He is leaving Iraq to the wolves."
The court also ordered the execution of two other former senior figures, presidential secretary Abid Hamoud and interior minister Saadoun Shaker.
Appeals may be lodged within 30 days. Death sentences have to be confirmed by Iraq’s president Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, and his Shia and Sunni deputies.
Mr Talabani, who opposes the death penalty, has refused to sign execution orders for members of the toppled Baathist regime who have already been executed.
