Iraq's Attorneys Practicing in a State of Fear

Those Who Haven't Fled Prefer the Dictator's Law to None at All

BAGHDAD -- "We are living in terror," Kamal Hamdoun, the head of Iraq's lawyers' union, said as he sat in a shadowy, cavernous office redolent of better days.

As usual, there was no electricity in Hamdoun's second-floor office in Baghdad's Mansour neighborhood. Sunlight slanted in through vertical blinds, shining on ornate chairs painted gold and a huge desk piled with legal folders.

"For example, I'm unable to move around freely," Hamdoun continued. "And there's a gun in my drawer."

He slid open a drawer of his desk, revealing a cocked Browning pistol.

"The control of the jungle is for those who have claws and fangs," he explained.

Such is the life of a lawyer in a nearly lawless society. Iraq's legal system, once one of the most secular in the Middle East, is a shambles. If a "Law and Order" spinoff were set in Baghdad, it would feature police who are afraid to investigate sectarian murders (or are complicit in them, many say), lawyers afraid to take either side of a case and risk the wrath of powerful militias or well-armed gangs, judges assassinated for the decisions they have handed down, and the occasional car bombing at the courthouse.

Two such bombings killed at least 17 people in May alone.

Iraq was hardly an example of blind justice before the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, who ensured that nearly all lawyers and judges were in thrall to his Baath Party. But for routine trials, Iraq's legal system, designed in the 1920s to resemble the Egyptian and French models, generally meted out fair justice guided by well-trained lawyers and judges.

"It was an impressive overall legal system, as long as we did not get into the political sphere," said Khaled Abou El Fadl, a law professor at UCLA and a scholar of Islamic law. "What we have consistently forgotten is how well-educated Iraqi academics are. They're sophisticated people who know quite a bit" about Western law and government.

Now, many of the best-educated have fled the country, and yet life goes on in the lawyers' union, Iraq's equivalent of a bar association, which has 42,000 members nationwide. Well-dressed attorneys flitted in and out of Hamdoun's office quietly, asking the union leader to sign papers. Downstairs, they met in the dark, cigarette smoke-filled cafeteria below Hamdoun's office, where they talked shop with each other or their clients. Their sentiment was unanimous: They preferred the dictator's law to none at all.

"We were waiting for the day when Saddam was gone," said one lawyer, Ali Gatie al-Jubouri, who spent nine years studying engineering in Michigan, only to become a lawyer after he inherited a fortune in property from his father. "But now we feel sorry that Saddam's days are over. It's a tragedy."

The lawyers, along with American legal scholars, almost unanimously blame the United States -- particularly the Coalition Provisional Authority, which administered Iraq in the year after Hussein's government fell.