From Mr M. Megawer
The former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death for crimes against humanity by an Iraqi court on 5 November 2006 and he was hanged at dawn on the last Saturday of 2006. During the quarter of a century he misruled Iraq, he ruined the country with wars – by invading Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990.
When Saddam Hussein became president in 1979, the country had oil reserves and oil revenues, a good administrative system and well-educated citizens but he reduced his country to poverty. Every family in Iraq lost a member to his disastrous wars and his savage repressions. Saddam paid the price for what he did. There is no doubt that besides the Iraqis, many people in the region suffered the brutal cruelty of his policies but, despite all these atrocities, the execution of an Arab leader was a slap on the face for the regimes in the Arab world.
The images and footage of the former Iraqi President’s execution was an undignified show of force aimed at the Arab world. It was not the Iraqi illegitimate puppet government that engineered the execution; Saddam Hussein was in American custody right up to the last minute. Then, he was given to the Iraqi Shia government to carry out the dirty work. Before the break of dawn on Saddam’s last day, the condemned man was escorted by American troops, who handed him over to the masked executioners and the witnesses were even flown in by American helicopters – they cannot pretend that this was the will of a truly independent Iraqi court! During his final moments Saddam prayed and as he did so some men, thought to be Shia militants, cursed and mocked him. A couple of them even joked. The prosecutor tried in vain to bring some dignity to the moment, but degradation followed degradation. Saddam’s neck snapped loudly and then it was over, except that it cannot be over. His execution does not make an illegal war legal, nor will it end the violence, but rather the execution will fuel the spirit of revenge, it will aggravate further the military-political atmosphere and also exacerbate ethnic and religious tensions.
It’s outrageous that the Iraqi authorities chose to hang Saddam Hussein at dawn on the day the Muslim world began celebrating the most important festival in the Islamic calendar, the feast of Eid el Adha, a day of clemency and generosity for all Muslims worldwide. It sends the message that the execution was more about Shia desire for revenge than Iraqi impartial justice. By choosing the first day of the holiest days for the Iraqi Sunni and the Islamic world to hang Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi government opened a sectarian wound that will never heal. Even the West would not implement capital punishment on Christmas Day, or Good Friday, or any other religious occasion. Imagine the next scenes in Iraq as civil war spreads and more poison will fill the air and the hearts of men. To add insult to injury, the way the US delivered his body to his hometown was ignoble, as if to say “Here! Here is your Saddam in a box. What do you think of that?”
Saddam Hussein will be seen by many as a martyr and hero who was executed because he resisted the Bush family and US/British imperialism. He should have been made to live and die in a decent prison outside Iraq to avoid fuelling sectarian tension and the escalation of civil war. Through polices built on the lies of the Bush administration, thousands of American lives and untold hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives have been lost. Saddam’s biggest “crime” was that he had weapons of mass destruction and was a brutal dictator who “gassed his own people”. If Bush was so concerned about brutal dictators, he had many more terrible people and countries to choose from besides Iraq. The only real hope for both Iraq and the US is that American popular opinion will force change. This is unlikely to happen while Mr Bush is in power. Hence, until he leaves office, one expects more bloodshed in Iraq and the region.
So please Mr Bush, I beg you not to bestow your democracy and freedom on anyone else!
Moustafa Megawer
QAWRA