NOTE: I will post a debate on a topic of this blog once
a month.
As Adolf Eichmann nicknamed the
Accountant of Death was executed by hanging on this date, 31 May 1962. I
noticed that he had some similarity to another war criminal, Chemical Ali who
was executed by hanging in Iraq on 25 January 2010. I chose this as the debate
of the month to compare their similarities.
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Adolf Eichmann
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Chemical Ali
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SIMILARITIES:
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ADOLF EICHMANN
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CHEMICAL ALI
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Both were high
ranking officers in the military.
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SS-Obersturmbannführer (Lt.
Colonel)
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Iraqi
Defense Minister, Interior Minister, military commander and chief of the
Iraqi Intelligence Service
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Both were mass murderers.
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At
the start of World War II,
Eichmann had been promoted to SS-Hauptsturmführer
(captain) and had made a name for himself with his Office for Jewish
Emigration. Through this work Eichmann made several contacts in the Zionist movement, which he worked with to
speed up Jewish emigration from the Third Reich.
Eichmann
returned to Berlin in 1939 after the formation of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt
(Reich Main Security Office: RSHA). In December 1939, he was assigned to head
RSHA Referat IV B4 (RSHA Sub-Department IV-B4), which dealt with
Jewish affairs and evacuation, where he reported to Heinrich
Müller. In August 1940, he released his Reichssicherheitshauptamt:
Madagaskar Projekt
(Reich Main Security Office: Madagascar Project), a plan for forced Jewish
deportation that never materialized. He was promoted to the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer
(major) in late 1940, and less than a year later to SS-Obersturmbannführer
(lieutenant colonel).
Reinhard Heydrich
disclosed to Eichmann in autumn 1941 that all the Jews in German-controlled
Europe were to be murdered. In 1942, Heydrich ordered Eichmann to attend the Wannsee Conference
as recording secretary, where Germany's antisemitic measures were set down into
an official policy of genocide. Eichmann
was given the position of Transportation Administrator of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question",
which put him in charge of all the trains that would carry Jews to the death camps
in the territory of occupied Poland.
HELLO!!!In
1944, he was sent to Hungary after Germany
had occupied that country prior to a Soviet invasion. Eichmann at first made
an offer through Joel Brand (who
was to act as an intermediary) to trade captive European Jews to the Western Allies for trucks and other goods
(see Blood for goods).
When there was no positive response to this offer, Eichmann started deporting
Jews, sending 430,000 Hungarian Jews
to their deaths in the gas chambers.
In
November 1944, Reichsführer-SS
Heinrich Himmler
ordered Jewish extermination to be halted and evidence of the Final Solution
to be destroyed. Eichmann was appalled by Himmler's turnabout, and continued
his work in Hungary against official orders. Eichmann was also working to
avoid being called up in the last-ditch German military effort, since a year
before he had been commissioned as a Reserve Untersturmführer
in the Waffen-SS and was now being ordered
to active combat duty.
Early
on 24 December 1944, Eichmann fled Budapest just before the Soviets completed
their encirclement of the capital. Eichmann returned to Berlin and then to
Austria, where he met up with his old friend Ernst Kaltenbrunner.
Kaltenbrunner, however, refused to associate with Eichmann since Eichmann's
duties as an extermination administrator had left him a marked man by the Allies.
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Main
article: Al-Anfal Campaign
During
the late stages of the Iran–Iraq War al-Majid was given the post of Secretary
General of the Northern Bureau of the Ba'ath Party, in which capacity he
served from March 1987 to April 1989. This effectively made him Saddam's
proconsul in the north of the country, commanding all state agencies in the rebellious
Kurdish-populated region of the country. He was known for his ruthlessness,
ordering the indiscriminate use of chemical weapons such as mustard gas,
sarin, tabun and VX against Kurdish targets during a genocidal campaign
dubbed Al-Anfal or "The Spoils of War". The first such attacks
occurred as early as April 1987 and continued into 1988, culminating in the
notorious attack on Halabja in which over 5,000 people were killed.
With
Kurdish resistance continuing, al-Majid decided to cripple the rebellion by
eradicating the civilian population of the Kurdish regions. His forces
embarked on a systematic campaign of mass killings, property destruction and
forced population transfer (called "Arabization") in which
thousands of Kurdish villages were razed and their inhabitants either killed
or deported to the south of Iraq. He signed a decree in June 1987 stating
that "Within their jurisdiction, the armed forces must kill any human
being or animal present in these areas." By 1988, some 4,000 villages
had been destroyed, an estimated 180,000 Kurds had been killed and some 1.5
million had been deported. The Kurds called him Chemical Ali ("Ali
Kimyawi") for his role in the campaign; according to Iraqi Kurdish
sources, Ali Hassan openly boasted of this nickname. Others dubbed him the
"Butcher of Kurdistan".
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They were both
hunted and arrested by special agents.
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Israel's
official intelligence agency, Mossad, had as one of
its principal assigned tasks the pursuit and capture of accused Nazi war
criminals. Throughout the 1950s, many Jews and other victims of the Holocaust also dedicated themselves to
finding Eichmann and other notorious Nazis. Among them was the Jewish Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. In 1954, Wiesenthal saw
a letter received by an Austrian Baron from an associate living in Buenos
Aires, saying Eichmann was in Argentina. The message read in part: Ich sah jenes schmutzige Schwein Eichmann. ("I saw that filthy pig Eichmann.") Er wohnt in der Nähe von Buenos Aires und arbeitet für ein Wassergeschäft. ("He lives near Buenos Aires and works for a water company.") With this and other information collected by Wiesenthal, Israel had solid leads about Eichmann's whereabouts. However, Isser Harel, the head of Mossad, later claimed that Wiesenthal played no role in Eichmann's apprehension. Eichmann changed his name but not those of his wife and sons. It was this that led to his capture. Also instrumental in exposing Eichmann's identity was Lothar Hermann, a German half-Jew who had emigrated to Argentina in 1938 after spending time in a concentration camp for underground socialist activity. When Hermann's daughter Sylvia began dating a man named Klaus Eichmann who boasted about his father's Nazi exploits, Hermann alerted Fritz Bauer, the Hessen district attorney, who passed on the information to a Mossad operative, Shlomo Cohen Abarbanel. In her book about the Eichmann Trial, historian Deborah Lipstadt describes how Sylvia, sent on a fact-finding mission, was met at the door by Eichmann himself who said he was Klaus' uncle. Informed that Klaus was not home, she sat down to wait and made small talk with the man. When Klaus returned, he addressed Eichmann as 'Father.' In 1959, the Mossad was informed that Eichmann was in Buenos Aires under the name Ricardo Klement (Clement) and then began an effort to locate his exact whereabouts. When surveillance affirmed that Ricardo Klement was Eichmann, the Israeli government approved a covert operation to bring him to Jerusalem for trial as a war criminal. It was to be a joint operation, carried out by the Mossad and Shin Bet, the Israel Security Agency. The Israelis continued their surveillance of Eichmann in 1960 until it was judged safe to take him. A key figure was Yitzhak Elron, the IDF attache in Argentina, who trailed Eichmann with his wife, Sarah, before the abduction. Eichmann was captured by a team of Mossad and Shin Bet agents in San Fernando, Buenos Aires, an industrial community 20 km north of the center of Buenos Aires on May 11, 1960. The Mossad agents had arrived in Buenos Aires in April 1960 after Eichmann's identity was confirmed. After observing the suspect's routine for many days, they determined that he usually arrived home by bus from his work as foreman at a Mercedes-Benz factory around the same time every evening and planned to seize him when he was walking beside an open field from the bus stop to his house at 14 Garibaldi St (now 4261 Garibaldi Street). The plan was almost abandoned when Eichmann on the designated day was not present on the bus he usually took home. Tension rose when a passerby offered to assist the agents who pretended to be fixing the broken-down Mossad vehicle; the agents declined the offer. Finally, almost a half hour later, Eichmann got off a bus. A Mossad agent engaged him, asking him in Spanish ("un momentito, señor") if he had a moment. Eichmann was frightened and attempted to leave, but while blinded by Mossad headlights two Mossad men seized him and wrestled him to the ground. After a struggle, he was brought to the car and hidden down on the floor. Eichmann told his captors later that as soon as they told him to keep quiet or they would shoot him, he knew he had been captured by Israelis. The Mossad agents ran into a police checkpoint, but managed to pass a license-plate check. Eichmann was brought to a Mossad safe house, Tira, where he was kept for nine days, during which time his identity was double checked and confirmed. Eichmann was drugged to appear drunk by an Israeli doctor included in the Mossad team and dressed as a flight attendant. He was smuggled out of Argentina on board an El Al Bristol Britannia plane which a few days before had transported an Israeli delegation to the 150th anniversary celebration of Argentina's independence from Spain. After some tense delay at the airport over getting its flight plan approved, the plane took off from Buenos Aires to Dakar, Senegal and then to Israel on May 21, 1960. He arrived heavily sedated, and like the agents, disguised in the uniform of the El Al crew. There had been a backup plan in case the apprehension did not go as planned. If the police happened to intervene, one of the agents was to handcuff himself to Eichmann and make full explanations and disclosure. For some time the Israeli government denied involvement in Eichmann's capture, claiming that he had been taken by Jewish volunteers who eagerly turned him over to Israeli authorities. Negotiations followed between Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Argentine president Arturo Frondizi, while the abduction was met from radical right sectors in Argentina with a violent wave of antisemitism, carried out on the streets by the Tacuara Nationalist Movement—including assaults, torture and bombings. Ben-Gurion announced Eichmann's capture to the Knesset—Israel's parliament—on May 23, receiving a standing ovation in return. Isser Harel, head of the Mossad at the time of the operation, wrote the book The House on Garibaldi Street about Eichmann's capture, which was made into the 1979 American television movie of the same name. When Eichmann was brought to Israel for trial, the Israeli police officer Avner Less was Eichmann's interrogator. Extracts from Less's interrogation of Eichmann have been published in the 1983 book Eichmann Interrogated. Heavily edited parts of the interrogation, now available freely and in full from the Israeli archives, were incorporated in the 2007 film Eichmann, dramatizing Eichmann's interrogation. According to historian Deborah Lipstadt, the movie downplays his role in the Holocaust, including his admission of planning the task and his determination to complete it. Some years later, Peter Malkin, the member of the kidnapping team actually assigned to seize the suspect, wrote Eichmann in My Hands, which describes the preparation for and details of the capture, while exploring Eichmann's character and motivations. |
He was
appointed Minister of Local Government following the war's end in 1988, with
responsibility for the repopulation of the Kurdish region with Arab settlers
relocated from elsewhere in Iraq. Two years later, after the invasion of
Kuwait in August 1990, he became the military governor of the occupied
emirate. He instituted a violent regime under which Kuwait was systematically
looted and purged of "disloyal elements". In November 1990, he was
recalled to Baghdad and was appointed Interior Minister in March 1991.
Following the Iraqi defeat in the war, he was given the task of quelling the
uprisings in the Shi'ite south of Iraq as well as the Kurdish north. Both
revolts were crushed with great brutality, with many thousands killed.
He was
subsequently given the post of Defense Minister, though he briefly fell from
grace in 1995 when Saddam dismissed him after it was discovered that al-Majid
was involved in illegally smuggling grain to Iran. In December 1998, however,
Saddam recalled him and appointed him commander of the southern region of
Iraq, where the United States was increasingly carrying out air strikes in
the southern no-fly zone. Al-Majid was re-appointed to this post in March
2003, immediately before the start of the Iraq War. He based himself in the
southern port city of Basra and in April 2003 he was mistakenly reported to
have been killed there in a U.S. air strike.
He
survived the April 2003 attack but was arrested by United States forces on 17
August 2003. He had been listed as the fifth most-wanted man in Iraq, shown
as the King of Spades in the deck of most-wanted Iraqi playing cards. In 2006
he was charged with genocide and crimes against humanity for his part in the
Anfal campaign and was transferred to the Iraq Special Tribunal for trial. He
received four death sentences for his role in killing Shia Muslims in 1991
and 1999, the genocide of the Kurds in the 1980s, and ordering the gassing of
Kurds at Halabja.
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They were both
unrepentant of their crimes.
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The
trial began on 21 August 2006, in acrimonious circumstances when al-Majid
refused to enter a plea. He subsequently had a not guilty plea entered on his
behalf by the court.
He was
unapologetic about his actions, telling the court that he had ordered the
destruction of Kurdish villages because they were "full of Iranian
agents". At one hearing, he declared: "I am the one who gave orders
to the army to demolish villages and relocate the villagers. The army was
responsible to carry out those orders. I am not defending myself. I am not
apologizing. I did not make a mistake."
During
the trial, the court heard tape-recorded conversations between al-Majid and
senior Ba'ath party officials regarding the use of chemical weapons.
Responding to a question about the success of the deportation campaign, Ali
Hassan told his interlocutors:
... I went to Sulaymaniyah and hit them with the special ammunition
[i.e. chemical weapons]. That was my answer. We continued the deportations. I
told the mustashars [village heads] that they might say that they like their
villages and that they won't leave. I said I cannot let your village stay
because I will attack it with chemical weapons. Then you and your family will
die. You must leave right now. Because I cannot tell you the same day that I
am going to attack with chemical weapons. I will kill them all with chemical
weapons! Who is going to say
anything? The international community? Fuck them! The international
community and those who listen to them.
... This is my
intention, and I want you to take serious note of it. As soon as we complete
the deportations, we will start attacking them everywhere according to a
systematic military plan. Even their strongholds. In our attacks we will take
back one third or one half of what is under their control. If we can try to
take two-thirds, then we will surround them in a small pocket and attack them
with chemical weapons. I will not attack them with chemicals just one day,
but I will continue to attack them with chemicals for fifteen days. Then I
will announce that anyone who wishes to surrender with his gun will be
allowed to do so. Anyone willing to come back is welcome, and those who do
not return will be attacked again with new, destructive chemicals. I will not
mention the name of the chemical because that is classified information. But
I will say with new destructive weapons that will destroy you. So I will
threaten them and motivate them to surrender.
During
the next few days of the trial, more recordings of al-Majid were heard in
which he once again discussed the government's goals in dealing with the
Iraqi Kurds. In the recordings, Ali Hassan calls the Iraqi Kurdish leader
Jalal Talabani "wicked and a pimp," and promises not to leave alive
anyone who speaks the Kurdish language. Ali Hassan's defense claimed that he used
such language as "psychological and propaganda" tools against the
Kurds, to prevent them from fighting government forces. "All the words
used by me, such as 'deport them' or 'wipe them out,' were only for
psychological effect," Ali Hassan said.
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They both went to
the gallows.
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Eichmann
was hanged shortly before midnight on May 31, 1962, at a prison in Ramla,
Israel. His executioner was Shalom Nagar. Eichmann allegedly refused a last
meal, preferring instead a bottle of dry red Israeli wine produced by Carmel
Winery, consuming about half the bottle. He also refused to don the
traditional black hood for his execution.
There
is some dispute over Eichmann's last words. One account states that these
were:
Long live Germany. Long live Austria. Long live Argentina. These
are the countries with which I have been most closely associated and I shall
not forget them. I had to obey the rules of war and my flag. I am ready.
According
to David Cesarani, a leading Holocaust historian and Research Professor in
History of the Royal Holloway, University of London, Eichmann is quoted thus:
Long live Germany. Long live Argentina. Long live Austria. These
are the three countries with which I have been most connected and which I
will not forget. I greet my wife, my family, and my friends. I am ready.
We'll meet again soon, as is the fate of all men. I die believing in God.
Shortly
after the execution, Eichmann's body was cremated in a specially designed
furnace, and a stretcher on tracks was used to place the body into it. The
next morning, June 1, his ashes were scattered at sea over the Mediterranean,
beyond the territorial waters of Israel by an Israeli Navy patrol boat. This
was to ensure that there could be no future memorial and that no country would
serve as his final resting place.
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On 24
June 2007, the court returned a verdict of guilty on all counts. The
presiding judge, Mohamed Oreibi al-Khalifa, told al-Majid: "You had all
the civil and military authority for northern Iraq. You gave orders to the
troops to kill Kurdish civilians and put them in severe conditions. You
subjected them to wide and systematic attacks using chemical weapons and
artillery. You led the killing of villagers. You ... committed genocide.
There are enough documents against you."
He
received five death sentences for genocide, crimes against humanity
(specifically willful killing, forced disappearances and extermination), and
war crimes (intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population).
He was also sentenced to multiple prison terms ranging from seven years to
life for other crimes. As his sentences were upheld, under Iraqi law,
sentence was to be carried out by hanging, subject to the convictions being
upheld following an automatic appeal, and he was to be executed in the
following 30 days along with two others – Sultan Hashim Ahmad al-Tai,
military commander of the Anfal campaign; and Hussein Rashid Mohammed, deputy
general commander of the Iraqi armed force, assistant chief of staff for
military operations, and former Republican Guard commander. However, the
executions were postponed to 16 October, because of the arrival of the holy
month of Ramadan. He was supposed to be executed 16 October 2007, but the
execution was delayed when Iraqi President Jalal Talabani expressed
opposition to the sentences and refused to sign the execution orders. He then
entered into a legal row with Nouri al-Maliki, and as a result the Americans
refused to hand any of the condemned prisoners over until the issue was
resolved.
In February
2008 an anonymous informant stated that Ali Hassan al-Majid's execution was
finally approved by Talabani and the two Vice-Presidents; this was the final
hurdle in the way of the execution.
On 2
December 2008, al-Majid was once again sentenced to death, but this time for
playing a role in killing between 20,000 and 100,000 Shi'ite Muslims during
the revolt in southern Iraq that followed the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
On 2
March 2009, al-Majid was sentenced to death for the third time, this for the
assassination of Grand-Ayatollah Mohammad al-Sadr in 1999.
The
Iraqi Cabinet put pressure on the Presidential council on 17 March 2009 for
Al-Majid's execution.
The
situation was similar on 17 January 2010 prior to 9 am (GMT); a fourth death
penalty was issued against him in response to his acts of genocide against
Kurds in the 1980s. He was also convicted of killing Shia Muslims in 1991 and
1999. Alongside him in the trial was former defense minister Sultan Hashem,
who was also found guilty by The Iraqi High Tribunal for the Halabja attack
and sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment. Al-Majid was executed by hanging on
25 January 2010. He was buried in Saddam's family cemetery in al-Awja the
next day; near Saddam's sons, half-brother and the former vice president, but
outside the mosque housing the marble tomb of Saddam himself. While he was
sentenced to death on four separate occasions, the original 2007 verdict
sentenced him to five death sentences, and so the combined tally of death
sentences handed out was eight.
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