US should leave; Saddam should be tried: Aldouri

UNITED NATIONS: Iraq’s last UN ambassador said Saddam Hussein should be brought to justice but that Iraqis, not the “colonialist” United States and Britain, should have overthrown him.

Mohammed Aldouri, who represented Saddam’s government until mid-April, said he believed people were glad the ousted Iraqi president was gone but angry at the occupation, according to a television interview broadcast on Monday.

“The regime is over and now we have to tackle another problem, the American and British presence in Iraq as a colonialist power,” Aldouri told BBC World.

“We didn’t ask you to come. I would have preferred that the Iraqi people did that,” he said, according to a BBC transcript.

Aldouri, the first Iraqi official to concede publicly the fall of Saddam’s government, left New York on April 11 for Damascus, Syria. He later went to Dubai, where he gave a series of interviews to the Gulf-based television Al-Arabiya last month.

He once said he hoped to return to Baghdad to teach law but his high profile as a representative of the ousted government may make this impossible.

Asked about the mass graves discovered, Aldouri said he condemned and regretted this. “I hope all these people responsible for these graves are brought to trial to be tried by the Iraqi people,” he said.

Asked if that included Saddam, he said, “ Everybody, Iraqi, British, American — anybody in the world killing any person I think has to be prosecuted before the courts of their country.”

Aldouri, a law professor who was a diplomat for only about four years, said he viewed defending Saddam’s government as representing all Iraqis.

“I defended my people under sanctions for 12 years which were killing more than one and a half million people and for that I am proud that I am struggling against those two countries occupying my country,” he said. —Reuters

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