Yesterday was a day of justice: journalist Roxana Saberi has been released from an Iranian prison and John Demjanjuk was deported to Germany to be tried for war crimes.
Saberi, who strings for NPR, BBC and other outlets, had been accused of spying by the Iranians. Without much of a trial she’d been sentenced to eight years. She’d been imprisoned since January. After considerable international uproar, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ordered a “careful review” of the verdict and despite vociferous arguments from the spook and security crowd to keep her jailed, an appeals hearing reduced her sentence to a suspended two-year term and ordered her released.
She’s expected to leave the country this week.
In stirring the waters, Ahmadinejad has opened the way for more normalized discussions with the US. It’ll be interesting to see how this pays off.
In the “justice delayed is justice denied” category, the 89-year-old Demjanjuk finally got his slimy Nazi ass hauled onto a plane out of here to face charges for his actions at the Sobibor death camp. I recall the furor 30 years ago when he was first outed as “Ivan the Terrible”—all the truculence and blustering about being just a regular guy caught up in the whirlwind. And he’s just an old man who should be left in peace.
Yeah—he was an SS guard at one of the most hellish places on earth. And how many thousands of inmates had their lives cut short in the most ghastly ways possible because of him and his comrades?
This argument that age somehow mitigates crimes is completely spurious. The only thing about yesterday’s action that sticks in my craw is that it comes not only 60 years after his crimes, but 30 years after he was dug out of his working class hidey-hole.
I’m with Shakespeare’s Isabella:
O worthy prince, dishonour not your eye
By throwing it on any other object
Till you have heard me in my true complaint
And given me justice, justice, justice, justice!
Sad state of affairs that a radical theocracy has righted a wrong within days while the democracies of the world took decades to visit justice on a criminal.
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