The devils’ advocate

For most people, to defend a blood-stained tyrant is perverse and shocking; to defend two seems like recklessness. Yet the causes of both Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic are what occupy Ramsey Clark, 78, as he crowns a political career that started with his appointment to the US government on the first day of the Kennedy administration in 1961. Promoted to the post of US attorney general by Lyndon Johnson in 1967, Clark’s left-liberal political trajectory has taken him so far from the political mainstream that he is now campaigning for the rights of the two most hated men in the world.

Is he mad? These men’s very names resound with the thud of the scud and the sear of the flame-thrower’s torch. The shock is all the greater because, in office, Clark pursued a host of politically correct causes such as African-American emancipation and the abolition of the death penalty. How, I asked him when I caught up with him recently in a modest family-run hotel in a quiet residential quarter of The Hague, can a man who says he sticks up for the weak now side with thugs and dictators? How can you defend people who represent everything you hate — authoritarianism, brutality, nationalism, cruelty, war?

‘The question contains the assumption of guilt,’ Clark replies carefully. ‘Whatever my political views, the main thing I am about is this: are you going to follow the law? People used to react in the same way to my death-row cases. “Why are you standing up for those killers?” they would ask. This is no different.’ Clark is convinced that Saddam’s trial will be unfair. ‘Is there a pre-existing competent court with jurisdiction to try him?’ he asks. ‘The very name “Iraqi Special Court” suggests that there is not. If equality is the mother of justice, then there should not be special courts at all.