London: Former US president George W Bush and ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair should be hauled before the international criminal court for lying about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu demanded on Sunday.
In a write up in The Observer newspaper, the 80-year-old South African peace icon and hero of the anti-apartheid movement accused the former US and British leaders of lying about weapons of mass destruction, saying that the invasion left the world more destabilised and divided “than any other conflict in history” and wrote that the leaders should be made to “answer for their actions.”
The 1984 Nobel Peace Prize winner suggested that the controversial US and UK-led action to oust Saddam Hussein in 2003 created the backdrop for the civil war in Syria and a possible wider Middle East conflict involving Iran. “The then leaders of the United States and Great Britain fabricated the grounds to behave like playground bullies and drive us further apart. They have driven us to the edge of a precipice where we now stand – with the spectre of Syria and Iran before us,” Tutu wrote.
Tutu argued that different standards appeared to apply for prosecuting African leaders than western counterparts, and added that the death toll during and after the Iraq conflict was sufficient for Blair and Bush to face trial. “On these grounds alone, in a consistent world, those responsible for this suffering and loss of life should be treading the same path as some of their African and Asian peers who have been made to answer for their actions in The Hague,” he wrote in the weekly Sunday newspaper. “Even greater costs have been exacted beyond the killing fields, in the hardened hearts and minds of members of the human family across the world,” he wrote.Tutu, a staunch critic of the Iraq war, snubbed Blair last week by pulling out of a South African conference on leadership because the ex-premier was attending. Blair has strongly contested Tutu’s views and said Iraq was now a more prosperous country than it had been under Saddam Hussein.
“To repeat the old canard that we lied about the intelligence is completely wrong as every single independent analysis of the evidence has shown,” Blair said in a statement.
“And to say that the fact that Saddam massacred hundreds of thousands of his citizens is irrelevant to the morality of removing him is bizarre. (PTI)
