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Iraqis
Deserved Better Justice
Shiva Balaghi
La Tercera
(Chile, 12/30/06)
For much of
the time that I wrote my biography of Saddam Hussein between 2003-2005,
its ending remained unclear. Throughout the process of researching
and writing the book, Saddam's government was overthrown, and he
went into hiding. In December 2003, US soldiers participating in
Operation Red Dawn found him hovering in a spider hole near his
hometown of Tikrit. As he was captured, Saddam said, “I am Saddam
Hussein. I'm the President of Iraq, and I want to negotiate.” As
it turns out, his American captors chose not to take him up on his
offer. In the months ahead, Saddam was held in solitary confinement
at Camp Cropper, a US military complex near Baghdad, where he wrote
poetry, gardened, and developed a taste for American junk food.
Many days, I've
woken up before dawn to watch CNN's coverage of Saddam's trial.
He usually appeared in a dark suit and white shirt, indignant about
the proceedings, defiantly pointing his finger in the air as he
derided the judges, and often holding a copy of the Quran. Saddam
was tried by an Iraqi court rather than an international tribunal.
Several people associated with the trial were assassinated. The
decision was taken that Saddam would be tried for each of his crimes
separately, and his first trial was for the killing of some villagers
in Dujail who had conspired to assassinate Saddam. In the reservoir
of Saddam's crimes—which have left in their wake mass graves, destroyed
marshlands, ruined villages, and neighboring countries still recovering
from the wars he inflicted on them—Dujail hardly stands out. Saddam
was in the midst of being tried for Anfal, the mass killing of Kurds
some with chemical weapons, that resulted in 100,000 dead and many
more refugees. Journalists covering that trial say that the process
was revealing new information about Saddam's complicity and the
involvement of foreign governments. The Anfal trial was interrupted
by Saddam's sentencing on his convictions for the Dujail killings,
for which he received the death sentence. The appeals process upheld
his sentence of death by hanging which will be carried out sometime
in the next few days.
Saddam's trial
was supposed to set a standard for law and order in the new Iraq
which was to be the linchpin for the New Middle East that the Bush
Administration and his neocon advisors envisioned. As it stands
now, the trial produced few historical insights into Saddam's ruinous
reign over Iraq, no admirable models for justice, no mechanisms
for peace and reconciliation for a shattered Iraq.
Indeed, as I
await news that Saddam Hussein has been hanged, I think back to
those black and white photographs of 14 men who were hung from scaffolds
in Baghdad's Tahrir [Liberation] Square on January 27, 1969. The
men were charged with treason. Nine of the men were Jewish; pinned
to each body was a sheet of paper with their name, age, religion,
and verdict. Hundreds of thousands of Baghdadis filled Tahrir Square
to watch the macabre justice doled out by President al-Bakr. Saddam,
then an underling of Bakr's, had a front row seat to the spectacle
and learned lessons about the politics of fear.
Unlike some
human rights activists, I am unmoved by allegations that the trial
of Saddam Hussein has been unfair. Saddam did not deserve better
justice, but the Iraqi people did. What bothers me most are the
erasure of history, the incomplete reckoning of Saddam's crimes
against humanity, and a lack of exposure of those individuals, corporations,
and foreign governments that aided and abetted his crimes. I am
troubled that his hanging resembles less the Nuremberg Trials or
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa—and more
the macabre public spectacle of fear that he helped oversee in 1969
in Tahrir Square.
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Shiva Balaghi is Associate Director of the Kevorkian Center at New
York University and the author of Saddam Hussein: A Biography published
by Greenwood Press in 2006.
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