What Happened to Leaders Like Saddam in the Past When They Were Captured?

Olivia Ward, in the Toronto Star (July 11, 2004):

...The concept of rule of law is the key to understanding the significance of the dramatic trials that have made history through the centuries, experts say.

Now taken for granted, the rule of law - or the belief that rulers should govern by legal means - dates back to the time of Socrates in ancient Greece. The Romans, though no democrats, later created a codified body of law. And the 13th-century Magna Carta forced English monarchs to agree that "no free man shall be seized or imprisoned or stripped of his rights or possessions ... except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the laws of the land."

The rule of law spread throughout Europe. But it did not restrain the rulers who governed with impunity. Even Napoleon's code that revolutionized personal rights in France in the early 19th century gave the emperor latitude to act in his own interests.

Three centuries earlier, a monarch's grip on power was even tighter. England, whose unmarried Queen Elizabeth had no heirs, passed an act of Parliament, making it a capital crime for any claimant to the throne to "plot" against the Queen, even if he or she did not directly participate in the scheme.

It was a trap that sprang on exiled Mary Queen of Scots, imprisoned after fleeing her enemies in Scotland, and believed by many Catholics to be a more legitimate aspirant to Elizabeth's throne than the Protestant Queen herself.

Britain's "Trial of the 16th Century" accused Mary of plotting to kill Elizabeth and take her place: "Never before had a judicial court tried the crowned head of another country," says historian James McGill in his essay "Mary Queen of Scots and the Babington Plot."

"The proceedings were unprecedented and illegal," he writes.

They were also based on dubious letters that may have been forged, and an intrigue framed by Elizabeth's feared spy chief Sir Francis Walsingham.

After intercepting letters offering to rescue Mary from her young Catholic supporter Anthony Babington, Walsingham spun a web implicating her in an assassination plan.

The trial took place swiftly and quietly, beginning on Oct. 14, 1586, and ending in less than two weeks. Mary testified for only two days, her legal defence denied.

"At her trial, Mary had no counsel," McGill says. "She did not see any witnesses against her, her secretaries were not produced and Babington was already dead."

Three months later, Mary was executed, her beheading conducted as clumsily as her trial.

But if Mary's prosecutors had little fear of being held to account for a miscarriage of justice, Britain's next momentous trial was staged with full awareness that history would be the final judge.

The trial of King Charles I in December, 1648, was even more radical than that of Mary, arraigning a ruling monarch. But after Charles, losing the battle against his Puritan enemies, made a secret treaty with the Scots to invade England and secure his throne, Oliver Cromwell and his supporters took action. With no legal precedent to try the king, they turned to a law written by a Dutch lawyer.

"Those who put Charles on trial believed in due process of law," explains historian Austin Woolrych, author of Britain in Revolution 1625-1660. "The supremacy of the law was one of the causes of the revolution, and they strongly believed he should be brought to justice, and not just executed. If he had agreed to abdicate he would have been spared."

The trial was far from popular. In a strange echo of Saddam's trial today, it was held in conditions of maximum security in a courtroom packed with soldiers: the chief judge wore a helmet-like hat for fear of being attacked.

Charles refused to testify, rejecting the legitimacy of the court, and preferring martyrdom to disgrace. Convinced of his arrogance and guilt, the judges condemned him as a "tyrant, murderer and public enemy to the public good of this nation." One month later, he was publicly beheaded.

While Europe struggled with the rule of law, Russia largely ignored individual rights. When Joseph Stalin succeeded Vladimir Lenin in the years following the 1917 revolution, he visited terror on the highest and lowest of the land, including his own onetime allies, who were seized and put on trial.

The Moscow Trials, held between 1936 and 1938, were widely publicized in the international press. At home they struck fear in the population. If 54 hard men of communism could be dragged into the dock, "confessing" treason, who would be next?

The pretext for the show trials was the murder of a senior party secretary, Nikolai Kirov, launching a witch hunt against supposed Bolshevik enemies. By the time the three trials were over, 47 of the defendants were sentenced to death, including Nikolai Bukharin, a founder of the Soviet Union; Grigory Zinoviev, chairman of the Communist International; and top Soviet officials Lev Kamenev and Alexei Rykov. Millions of other Russians were later deported to the camps of the Gulag.

But for Stalin, the murder of dozens of his cohorts was a minor result of the trials. They created docile party bosses who carried out the most vicious orders unquestioningly, and an obedient population who feared their neighbours as well as authority. "Instead of going mad, they accepted terror as a normal administrative method and regarded obedience to all orders from above as a supreme virtue," Bukharin wrote.

The Moscow Trials consolidated Stalin's legal authority through torture, intimidation and murder: ironically, the confessions of so many senior officials convinced Western diplomats of their legitimacy, and strengthened the communist movement abroad.

But on Nov. 20, 1945, Stalin watched from afar as the most significant trial of modern history went into process - not to institute terror, but to end it.

"The Nuremberg trials set the scene for what is happening today," says Lawrence Douglas, a law professor at Amherst College and author of The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust. "The most important principle was that heads of state could be held individually responsible. Until then, you could impose economic sanctions on a nation, but indicting a state leader was unthinkable."

Adolf Hitler, the instigator of the slaughter of Europe's Jews, escaped justice by committing suicide as World War II ended. But at Nuremberg, 21 of his lieutenants went on trial for crimes against humanity, and all but two were found guilty. The effect of the courtroom proceedings was to entrench individual responsibility and destroy forever the defence that following orders was unpunishable.

And, says Dougas, "the trials established a historical record which has become a tool for historians and for public instruction." Thousands of documents from Nuremberg are available on the Internet, and hundreds of books have been written on the monumental trials. They have created an indelible record of some of history's most appalling crimes.

But it was not until the following century that a leader accused of directing mass murder would be put on trial. Exile or execution was the usual fate of a ruler forced to answer to his enemies. And although the European Great Powers mulled over a trial of the defeated Napoleon after the Battle of Waterloo, fears that a courtroom drama could stir French support persuaded them to exile him instead. Similarly, the German Kaiser, pursued by the British after World War I, was allowed to remain in the Netherlands where he had fled.

Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic was not so fortunate. Indicted and brought to trial at The Hague, he was confronted by accusations of crimes from three Balkan wars. Hailed by human rights advocates as a milestone in the struggle against impunity, the trial has also been criticized as biased by some Serbs and Western intellectuals, and as a platform for Milosevic's nationalist views by others. Milosevic's ill heath and insistence that he conduct his own defence are now complicating the proceedings....