Why
The Rush To Execute Saddam?
By Tarek Fatah
04 January, 2007
The
Toronto Star
Four
days after the ugly and degrading execution of Saddam Hussein, neither
Prime Minister Stephen Harper nor any other Canadian politician has
the courage to comment or say anything on the matter.
The execution, which was
more reminiscent of a public hanging in the 18th century than a considered
act of 21st-century justice, has shocked even the harshest critics of
Saddam, but has left our politicians in a state of paralyzed silence.
If the Canadian Prime Minister
chose to maintain silence, the American president did not lose much
sleep and managed to express his now familiar musing about freedom and
liberty. George Bush may consider the hanging of Saddam Hussein "as
a milestone on the road to Iraqi democracy," but the reality is
that no one outside his administration, not even Saddam's executioners,
take the U.S. president's prognosis seriously.
The fact is that far from
fostering democracy in Iraq, the execution of the Iraqi dictator has
turned a murdering monster into a martyr of mythical proportions for
the Arab people.
Saddam's stature will grow
across the Arab world as each day passes and his crimes against his
own people will be largely forgotten as new generations of Arab youth
will see in him a rare Arab who stared death in the face and did not
blink.
The man responsible for the
death, torture and imprisonment of tens of thousands, should have been
remembered for those crimes. Instead, because of the great American
folly in Iraq, future generations of people in the Middle East will
embrace his memory as an epitome of courage and resistance.
The fact that Saddam was
sent to the gallows on the day a billion Muslims were commemorating
the patriarch Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son to God –
Eid al Azha – will add a religious texture to Saddam's legacy.
Canada was not always a silent
spectator on Iraq. In 1988 when Saddam was a U.S. client and had bombed
the Kurds with chemical bombs, the United Nations Sub-Committee on Human
Rights wanted to condemn Iraq for rights violations. However, so strong
were the links between Saddam's Iraq and the U.S. that despite the massacre
of the Kurds in Halabja, the vote was defeated 11 to 8. It was Canada
and the Scandinavian countries that stood up to U.S. pressure and voted
to censure Saddam's regime.
The question that remains
unanswered and is a mystery to many is, why was there such haste in
executing Saddam? Even though he was judged guilty by a questionable
court, Saddam had yet to face a second trial where the charges were
of a far more serious nature and which had international implications.
His hurried execution appeared to be revenge, not justice.
At the second trial, which
began in August 2006, Saddam and six co-defendants were charged with
genocide during the Anfal military campaign against the Kurds of northern
Iraq. In March 1988, Iraqi air force jets allegedly dropped chemical
bombs on the town of Halabja killing thousands.
The trial could have shed
much light on the massacre of the Kurds in Halabja. It could also have
shed light on the links between Iraq and the U.S. during the Iran-Iraq
War. At that time Saddam was a U.S. ally.
The trial would certainly
have delved into the discussions former U.S. defence secretary Donald
Rumsfeld had with Saddam during the three meetings the two had in Baghdad.
In fact, the ties that bound
the United States to Saddam go back to the 1960s when the CIA helped
the Baath Party stage a coup against the pro-Communist government of
Abdel-Karim Qassim. Hundreds of Iraqi leftists, identified by the CIA,
were systematically murdered – killings in which Saddam himself
is said to have participated.
Additionally, the Halabja
trial would also have shed light on the claim by Stephen C. Pelletiere,
the CIA's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War,
that both Iran and Iraq "used gas against the other in the battle
around Halabja." Pelletiere made the astonishing claim in The New
York Times in January 2003 that the "condition of the dead Kurds'
bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent –
that is, a cyanide-based gas – which Iran was known to use."
With the death of Saddam,
the secrets that could have emerged at the Halabja trial will probably
never come to light.
His death will be a relief to those in America who feared being exposed
for having aided Saddam as he murdered so many of his countrymen.
To the teeming millions in
the Muslim world who saw Saddam being led to his death by slogan-chanting
masked men, his hanging was an act of revenge, not justice, a lynching,
not the carrying out of a death sentence.
Tarek Fatah
is the host of television's Muslim Chronicle on CTS and a founding member
of the Muslim Canadian Congress.
© Copyright Toronto
Star
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