Belgium could indict Bush and cabinet as war criminals

IT is 2004, and the first President George Bush Snr is in a Belgian court for alleged war crimes committed during the 1991 Gulf War. Back in Washington, his son worries he may be next.

It sounds like Saddam Hussein's fantasy and it probably is just that. But this surreal prospect has entered the broad realm of the possible, thanks to a Belgian law that gives its courts the authority to try anyone for crimes against humanity committed anywhere.

Last week, even as the US-led war on Iraq was getting underway, representatives of seven Iraqi families who say they lost loved ones in the first Gulf War arrived at Belgium's hulking Palais de Justice and filed a complaint naming not just George HW Bush but also Secretary of State Colin Powell, Vice President Dick Cheney and Norman Schwarzkopf, the retired general famous for Operation Desert Storm.

The human rights law has caused such a political headache for Belgium, home of NATO and the EU, the government is frantically trying to amend it.

One proposed amendment would allow complaints only from people who have resided in Belgium for three years.

Senator Alain Detexe, who helped write the original law, isn't optimistic about the prospects of amendment or happy with how the law, devised to ensnare former dictators, is being used. "Belgium has become a magnet for judicial tourists who are turning the country into a political circus," he says.

In the suit filed last week, which led the news throughout the Arab world but got little notice elsewhere, the Iraqis blamed the four men for the February 13, 1991, bombing of the al-Amiriya shelter in Baghdad, which claimed the lives of 403 people.

The US has said it believed the site was a military command centre. As the war in Iraq continues and civilian casualties mount, the law, however exotic, has stoked fears of an open season on US officials.

The Bush administration, concerned about just such a state of affairs, last year declined to endorse the International Criminal Court at The Hague, which this week said it had tentatively selected its first prosecutor.

Lawyers in Brussels are marshalling evidence to file a complaint against current President Bush and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld for alleged atrocities committed during the current war.