The Hussein execution is likely to have serious repercussions for the region
I miss the old days of colonialism. You know, the days when the suppression of the natives was done with a little panache. Nowadays, it’s all shoving and a none-too elegant boot up the collective backside.
Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was hanged at dawn on Saturday, Dec. 30, 2006.
It was the first day of Eid Al-Adha, one of the Muslim calendar’s holiest days. The execution was handled in much the same way as the occupation of the country has been handled; it was ham-fisted, short-sighted and, I imagine, had much the opposite result to what was originally desired.
Saddam Hussein was not a particularly good or noble man. He had the blood of hundreds if not thousands of his countrymen on his hands. He was a dictator who handled dissent with brutal, if expedient methods. Those who opposed him wound up dead, some significantly later than they prayed for.
He appeared to have little or no code of honor; when he started a war with neighboring Iran more than quarter of a century ago, Kuwait stood by him. This tiny state couldn’t send people to help fight, but caravans of food, medical supplies and money trundled over the borders almost nightly. He repaid Kuwait’s support by invading it in 1991 and brutalizing its people for almost six months before a coalition of international forces threw him out.
He’d been on trial for almost a year. The trial was a farce. He was held by US forces during its duration; he had been since they dragged him out of bunker like an animal gone to earth, and then gleefully beamed images of him being deloused to a bemused world.During the trial, those of his lawyers who managed to escape assassination were given two weeks to pore through a 300-page court decision.
The trial was a travesty of justice and with every passing day, the Arab world was more convinced that Western powers had one system of justice for themselves and another for Arabs. There are very few in the Arab world who believe that the Iraqis had very much control over the proceedings – generally speaking, occupied nations don’t.
And finally, the man was executed on the first day of Eid Al-Adha. I wonder how many television stations in the West would have run footage of someone’s execution on Christmas Day and expected viewers to consider as merely another news item?Apparently, the Americans had asked the Iraqis not to rush the execution and to ensure that due process was observed.
We are being asked to believe that an occupying force, which had arrested and detained a man during his entire trial, handing him over only for the execution, had no say in the matter.
And apparently, while there is general consensus that the Iraqi government allowed the execution to be filmed, no one knows how someone sneaked in a mobile phone and filmed the entire proceedings. The execution, in all its horrifyingly graphic detail, was online the world over in less than 24 hours.
It shows Saddam Hussein, surrounded by what is essentially a Shiite lynch mob, being taunted, being told to ‘go to hell’ the taunts at one point being drowned out by cried of “Muqtada! Muqtada in reference to Muqtada Al-Sadr, a Shiaa leader who has spearheaded Sunni murders.
Hussein’s answer to the taunts was to say calmly, “Muqtada? That’s what you consider being a man?
The trapdoor was released while he was still in the middle of repeating the Shahada. They didn’t let him finish repeating his last prayers.
And with that, it lost any credibility that it had in the region. Saddam Hussein, who murdered children by the dozen, is about to become a regional hero thanks to the crass way his execution was handled. ‘He may have been a thug,’ Arabs will ration, ‘but he was our thug, and we should have dealt with him ourselves.’
Hussein was a mass murderer – but he came off as calm and dignified. He died, for lack of a more insightful word, like a man.
There were no Western countries that objected to the farcical trial, although many have expressed appropriate distaste at the circus side-show elements. Nor, for that matter, did any Arab states open their mouths. Iraq has descended into a quagmire of sectarian strife and we haven’t said anything. Sunnis and Kurds will be running for cover to the background of conspicuous silence from their neighbors.
When a pot boils over, the stove gets dirty. There is nothing sanitary or confined about the type of violence that is set to be unleashed in Iraq. We can only hope that the silence that we have lived in doesn’t deafen us.
Mirette F. Mabrouk is the Publisher of The Daily Star Egypt
