VC on the IHT

I'm so excited! I just saw that the ICTJ website has been updated with two reports I've written on the Iraqi High Tribunal's most recent case, Anfal, dealing with the mass killing, dislocation, and use of chemical weapons against the Kurds in Northern Iraq during a series of military operations from 1988-1989 known as "al-Anfal" ("the spoils of war").

The ICTJ covered the trial from beginning to end, and was more or less the only organization on the ground monitoring the trial (since everyone stopped paying attention to the Iraqi High Tribunal after Saddam Hussein was hanged). Since it was basically the only regular presence in the courtroom other than the litigants and courtroom staff, themselves, the ICTJ's trial updates are pretty much the only information source on the trial other than intermittent coverage on Iraqi tv and news report and press releases commenting on the proceedings (that are themselves based on the spotty Iraqi tv coverage).

Before I came to the ICTJ there had already been one update released, in January, related to the first phases of the trial, and that update is here. When I joined I was told that I would be writing the third update, covering the latter stages of the trial, and that the second update, which was in draft form and badly overdue (covering the middle stages of the trial) had been prepared by the intern before me and only needed some touching-up. As it turned out the second update needed a LOT of work and was, in many ways, completely over-hauled. I debated whether or not I should make myself first author (not that it really matters in this context, and not that I even care about publication credit), because I am not sure, at this point, that the second update isn't actually mostly me, but the fact is that the other intern did at least get the skeleton out, and there are parts of it, writing-wise, that I don't like, so I don't want my name to appear first on it anyway! lol

It has been a weird process seeing people take my writing and change things, and I can't say I'm happy with every word of both reports, but I think overall that they're really important documents and I'm proud of how much work I got done this summer (especially because this is not all I worked on...not by a long shot!). It's also pretty cool that they're, right now, being translated into Arabic so we can get them out to the Tribunal judges themselves and Arab human rights and media groups ASAP. It's kind of surreal that I wrote something that's important enough to be translated lol We actually decided not to follow standard legal citation formatting because distinctions like small caps vs. italic don't translate AT ALL into Arabic, and we wanted the citations to be as Arabic-friendly as possible (which I'll have to explain to law people if I use them as a writing sample for the next NGO job I apply for).

Anyway, here is the second update (co-authored), and here is the third update. I won't feel bad AT ALL if you never read them. They don't make much sense if you haven't read the first one, anyway, and I don't think anyone (except my mom, who has read them already!) really wants to read like 60 pages on the Anfal trial! By the way, if you click on the links and they don't work it's because we are editing the URLs for the updates and I haven't yet updated my blog to match -- it's 10pm and I'm still emailing with the communications people (who have been wonderful) to make sure that each of the three links follow the same format (which they don't yet).

:)

VC