Tariq Aziz

Name	Tariq Aziz
Caption	Tariq Aziz, c. 2005
Order	Member of the Iraqi Revolutionary Command Council5th Deputy Prime Minister
Term start	July 16, 1979
Term end	April 9, 2003
President	Saddam Hussein
Successor	Jay Garner*
Order2	Foreign Minister of Iraq
Term start2	1983
Term end2	1991
President2	Saddam Hussein
Successor2	Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf
Birthname	Mikhail Yuhanna
Birth date	April 28, 1936
Birth place	Tel Keppe, Iraq
Party	Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party
Profession	Journalist, politician
Religion	Chaldean Catholic
Footnotes	*As Head of the Coalition Provisional Authority

Tariq Aziz ( ,  , né: Mikhail Yuhanna ( baptized Manuel Christo; born April 28, 1936) was the Foreign Minister (1983 – 1991) and Deputy Prime Minister (1979 – 2003) of Iraq and a close advisor of former President Saddam Hussein. Their association began in the 1950s when both were activists for the then-banned Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party. He is an ethnic Assyrian and a member of the Chaldean Catholic Church.

Because of security concerns, Saddam rarely left Iraq, so Aziz would often represent Iraq at high-level diplomatic summits. What the United States wanted, he averred, was not "regime change" in Iraq but rather "region change". He summed up the Bush Administration's reasons for war against Iraq tersely: "oil and Israel."

Since surrendering to American forces on April 24, 2003, Aziz has been held in prison, first by American forces and subsequently by the Iraqi government. He is currently in prison in Camp Cropper in western Baghdad. He was acquitted of some charges on March 1, 2009 following a trial, but was sentenced to 15 years on March 11, 2009 for the executions of 42 merchants found guilty of profiteering in 1992 and another 7 years for relocating Kurds. On October 26, 2010, he was sentenced to death by the Iraqi High Tribunal, and this has sparked regional and international from Iraqi Bishops and other Iraqis, the Vatican, the United Nations, and the human rights organization Amnesty International, as well as various governments around the world, such as those of the European Union, Greece, and Russia. On October 28, 2010, it was reported that Tariq Aziz, as well as 25 fellow prison inmates, had begun a hunger strike to protest the fact that they could not receive their once-monthly visit from friends and relatives, which was normally set for the last Friday of each month.

On November 17, 2010, it was reported that Iraqi President Jalal Talabani had declared that he would not sign Aziz's execution order.

Early life

Aziz was born on April 28, 1936, in Tel Keppe, to an Assyrian family and is a member of the Chaldean Catholic church. Aziz studied English at the Baghdad University of Fine Arts, and later worked as a journalist, before joining the Ba'ath Party in 1957. In 1963, he was editor of the newspaper Aj-Jamahir (al-Jamaheer) and al Thawra, the newspaper of the Ba'ath party.

In April 1980 he survived an Iranian-backed assassination attempt carried out by members of the Islamic Dawa Party. In the attack, members of Islamic Dawa Party threw a grenade at Aziz in central Baghdad. The attack killed several people. It was among the casus belli of the Iran–Iraq War.

Family

His son Ziad Aziz lives in Jordan with his wife, four children, and Tariq Aziz's two sisters. Tariq Aziz's wife and another son live in Yemen.

On January 9, 1991, Aziz was involved in the Geneva Peace Conference which included the United States Secretary of State, James Baker. The goal of the meeting was to discuss a possible resolution to the occupation of Kuwait.

In 2001 Aziz's son Ziad was arrested for corruption. In January 1999 Ziad was accused by his former mistress of using the official position of his father (mostly his cars) to facilitate smooth crossing of the Jordanian border with contraband, attempted murder on her husband and family, as well as for corruption involving French and Indonesian companies. He was arrested and sentenced to 22 years in prison. Tariq Aziz resigned from his post but Hussein did not accept his resignation. Ziad was eventually released from prison when Hussein decided that Aziz had paid enough for his mistakes.

On February 14, 2003, Aziz reportedly had an audience with Pope John Paul II and other officials in Vatican City, where, according to a Vatican statement, he communicated "the wish of the Iraqi government to co-operate with the international community, notably on disarmament". The same statement said that the Pope "insisted on the necessity for Iraq to faithfully respect and give concrete commitments to resolutions of the United Nations Security Council, which is the guarantor of international law".

Iraq war

In October 2000 the then-junior Minister for Foreign Affairs from Britain, Peter Hain, set up a secret war avoidance team to carry messages back and forth between himself and Aziz. After initial cooperation, Aziz rebuffed the delegations.}}

Detention

He voluntarily surrendered to American forces on April 24, 2003, after negotiations had been mediated by his son. His chief concern at the time was for the welfare of his family. At the time of his surrender, Aziz was ranked number 43 out of 55 in the American list of most-wanted Iraqis despite a belief "he probably would not know answers to questions like where weapons of mass destruction may be hidden and where Saddam Hussein might be."

He further testified that the Dujail attack was "part of a series of attacks and assassination attempts by this group, including against me." He said that in 1980, Dawa Party insurgents threw a grenade at him as he visited a Baghdad university, killing civilians around him. "I'm a victim of a criminal act conducted by this party, which is in power right now. So put it on trial. Its leader was the prime minister and his deputy is the prime minister right now and they killed innocent Iraqis in 1980," he said.

In closing he stated that "Saddam is my colleague and comrade for decades, and Barzan is my brother and my friend and he is not responsible for Dujail's events."

Imprisonment

On May 29, 2005, the British newspaper The Observer published letters (in Arabic and English) from Aziz written in April and May 2005, while he was in American custody, addressed to "world public opinion" pleading for international help to end "his dire situation":

}}

In August 2005, Aziz's family was allowed to visit him. At the time the location of Aziz's prison was undisclosed; his family was brought in a bus with blackened out windows.

Due to security reasons he has since been moved to Camp Cropper, part of the huge US base surrounding Baghdad airport. On August 5, 2010, The Guardian released his first face-to-face interview since his surrender. On September 22, 2010 documents were released that he had given an interview about how he had told the FBI that the dictator Saddam was "delighted" in the 1998 terrorist bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa but had no interest in partnering with Osama bin Laden.

Trial

He was set to appear before the Iraqi High Tribunal set up by the Iraq Interim Government, but not until April 2008 was he brought up on any charges. This changed when, on April 29, 2008, Aziz went on trial over the deaths of a group of 42 merchants who were executed by the Iraqi regime in 1992, after the merchants had been charged by the Iraqi regime with manipulating food prices when Iraq was under international sanctions. The charges brought against Aziz were reported by The Independent to be "surprising" as the deaths of the 42 merchants had always previously been attributed to Saddam Hussein. Never-the-less, on 11 March 2009 the Iraqi High Tribunal ruled that Aziz was guilty of crimes against humanity, and he was sentenced to 15 years in prison. On August 2, 2009, Aziz was convicted by the Iraqi High Tribunal of helping to plan the forced displacement of Kurds from northeastern Iraq and sentenced to seven years in jail. After these judgments had been passed, the BBC News published an article stating that, "there was no evidence that a Western court would regard as compelling that he had anything like final responsibility for the carrying out of the executions" of the 42 merchants and "there was no real evidence of his personal involvement and guilt" with regards to the displacement of Kurds. That same year, he was acquitted in a separate trial which concerned the suppression of an uprising in Baghdad during the 1990s. amongst them the serving Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Islamic Dawa Party, following a crackdown on a Shia uprising after the 1991 Gulf War. The Associated Press reports that "the judge gave no details of Aziz's specific role" in the crackdown. His lawyer stated that Tariq Aziz's role in the former Iraqi government was in the arena of "Iraq's diplomatic and political relations only, and had nothing to do with the executions and purges carried during Saddam's reign." His lawyer further stated that the death sentence itself was politically motivated and that timing of the death sentence may have been aimed at diverting international attention away from documents released by WikiLeaks, which detailed crimes in which Maliki government officials have been implicated. His lawyers have 30 days to lodge an appeal, following which the court would have another 30 days to look into the appeal; if the appeal is turned down the sentence would be carried out after another 30 days. and European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton stated that Aziz's execution would be "unacceptable and the EU will seek to commute his sentence." That same day, the human rights organization Amnesty International issued a statement condemning the use of the death penalty in this case, as well as for the cases of two other former Iraqi officials; the statement also expressed concern regarding the manner in which trials may have been conducted by the Iraqi High Tribunal. On October 27, 2010, Greek President Karolos Papoulias and the Russian Foreign Ministry both released statements urging the Iraqi government not to carry out the death penalty against Tariq Aziz. Also on October 27, 2010, a spokesperson for United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon was reported to have "stressed that the UN is against the death sentence and in this case, as in all others, it is calling for the verdict to be cancelled." On October 28, 2010, it was reported that Iraqi Bishops and ordinary Iraqis also condemned the death penalty for Tariq Aziz. Furthermore, according to the Wall Street Journal, "several international human-rights groups have criticised the procedures and questioned the impartiality of the court."

According to AFP, his family had stated that Tariq Aziz, along with 25 fellow inmates, has been on a hunger strike following the sentence to protest the denial of their once-monthly visits with family and friends, but an Iraqi court official has denied this. According to AFP, Aziz and the other prisoners were "still at the site of the court in Baghdad’s Green Zone and had not been transferred back to prison where they could have received their monthly visit."

On November 17, 2010, it was reported that Iraqi President Jalal Talabani had declared that he would not sign Aziz's execution order. However, there is still a possibility that the execution will be carried out anyway.

References

External links

Tariq Aziz faces US questions - BBC, April 25, 2003

Tariq Aziz Profile - BBC, October 11, 2002

Category:1936 births Category:Living people Category:Iraqi Eastern Catholics Category:Most-wanted Iraqi playing cards Category:Arab nationalist politicians Category:People from Tel Keppe Category:Iraqi people of the Iran–Iraq War Category:Attempted assassination survivors Category:Iraqi diplomats Category:Ba'ath Party (Iraq) politicians Category:Government ministers of Iraq