Saddam
Hussein Execution:
A Sectarian Lynching
By Patrick Martin
04 January 2007
World
Socialist Web
A
video of the final minutes of Saddam Hussein, released to the Arab media
late Saturday and widely broadcast around the world, demonstrates that
the execution of the former Iraqi president was an act of sectarian
vengeance by the Shiite Muslim groups placed in power by the US invasion
of the country.
The video, apparently made
using the cell phone of one of the guards or official witnesses in the
death chamber, records the last fragments of conversation between Hussein
and his hooded executioners, who were apparently loyal to the Shiite
radical clergyman Moqtada al-Sadr, head of the most powerful militia
force in Iraq, the Mahdi Army.
Several of the executioners
and witnesses began chanting the name of the Shiite leader, “Moqtada,
Moqtada, Moqtada,” as the noose was slipped around Hussein’s
neck. He responded with surprise, and then a scornful retort, “Moqtada?
Is this how real men behave?”
Other onlookers chanted the
name of Moqtada al-Sadr’s father—a co-founder of the Dawa
Party, one of the backers of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki—and
one shouted, “Go to hell,” to which Hussein responded that
those responsible for his execution had erected a “gallows of
shame.”
Even the judge who had ratified
the death sentence, Munir Haddad, reproached the sectarian outburst
by the Shiite guards, telling them, “Please no! The man is about
to die.” The video then concludes with grisly footage of the trapdoor
opening and Hussein plunging to his death, his neck broken and his body
swinging.
Beyond the events recorded
on the video, the very fact that Mahdi Army loyalists were among the
guards in the death chamber and could record the proceedings without
hindrance has enormous political significance. It demonstrates the extent
to which the US-backed Iraqi regime has become the instrument of factions
in the sectarian conflict raging throughout much of Iraq.
For nearly a year, Sunni
Muslims, Christians, secular Iraqis and others targeted by Shiite death
squads have been hunted down, tortured and murdered. Most of these atrocities
have begun with the seizure of the victims by armed members of the Iraqi
police and military—the very forces the Bush administration claims
it has been training to fight “terrorism.”
By Monday, with the digital
recording circulating throughout Iraq and the entire Arab and Muslim
world, it was clear that for the Maliki government and the US occupation
regime the execution had become a political debacle. Thousands of Sunnis
marched in protest demonstrations in Tikrit, Mosul and cities and towns
throughout Anbar province. In Samarra, where the bombing of the Shiite
Golden Mosque last February touched off the sectarian warfare, Sunnis
marched through the shattered structure with a coffin representing Saddam
Hussein’s.
The Maliki government, in
a belated effort to distance itself from the images of Shiite triumphalism,
ordered an investigation into how the video was shot in the death chamber
and how it was distributed. But at least one eyewitness, one of the
prosecutors in Hussein’s trial, said that the cell phone was brought
in by a top government official, whom he would not name, not by a guard,
and that the recording of the final altercation between the guards and
Hussein was done quite openly.
Detailed reports in the US
media conceded that the execution had backfired on the Bush administration.
An account published in the New York Times Monday observed that it would
be difficult for the White House to disassociate itself from the rushed
execution of the former president, since the hanging took place at a
US-controlled military facility in Baghdad, and Hussein remained in
US custody until he was handed over to the executioners.
The article, co-authored
by John Burns, the Times bureau chief in Baghdad and one of the most
avid apologists for the war, noted that “Iraq’s new Shiite
rulers . . . seemed bent on turning the execution and its aftermath
into a new nightmare for the Sunni minority privileged under Mr. Hussein.”
The Times reported that US
officials in Iraq were “privately incensed at the dead-of-night
rush to the gallows,” and had repeatedly urged the Maliki government
to delay the execution by a few weeks in order to conform to provisions
in the Iraqi constitution and legal code, requiring approval of the
hanging by the three-member Iraqi presidency, and barring executions
during the celebration of Id al-Adha, a Muslim religious holiday.
The timing was perhaps the
most brazenly sectarian aspect of the execution, since Saturday is the
first day of Id al-Adha, according to the Sunni practice, while the
holiday begins on Sunday for Shiites. One official effectively declared
the Shiite observance to be the law of the land, and, as the Times revealed,
the Shiite clergy were given final decision-making power, not the elected
government.
The Times reported that the
Maliki government had debated objections from US officials and Sunni
politicians over conducting the execution on Saturday, then decided
to refer the decision to the marjaiyah, the council of ayatollahs in
the Shiite holy city of Najaf, which is the highest body of the Shiite
clergy. According to the Times, “The ayatollahs approved. Mr.
Maliki, at a few minutes before midnight on Friday, then signed a letter
to the justice minister, ‘to carry out the hanging until death.’”
The Times concluded with
the remarkable admission, “None of the Iraqi officials were able
to explain why Mr. Maliki had been unwilling to allow the execution
to wait. Nor would any explain why those who conducted it had allowed
it to deteriorate into a sectarian free-for-all that had the effect,
on the video recordings, of making Mr. Hussein, a mass murderer, appear
dignified and restrained, and his executioners, representing Shiites
who were his principal victims, seem like bullying street thugs.”
A second article in Monday’s
Times reinforced this picture by reporting the reaction among Sunni
Arabs in Baghdad: “the grainy recording of the execution’s
cruel theater summed up what has become increasingly clear on the streets
of the capital: that the Shiite-led government that assumed power in
the American effort here is running the state under an undisguised sectarian
banner.”
The Associated Press, in
a report on the Sunni response to the execution, noted that the hanging
was followed by a US military raid on the Baghdad offices of a prominent
Sunni politician, in which six Iraqis were killed, and warned, “The
current Sunni protests, which appear to be building, could signal a
spreading militancy.”
Rizgar Mohammed Amin, the
Kurdish judge who presided over the first trial of Saddam Hussein until
he was forced to resign by official pressure from the ruling Shiite
bloc, condemned the timing and manner of the execution. The hanging
violated a clear legal prohibition (enacted under Hussein’s rule
and still in force) stating that “no verdict should be implemented
during the official holidays or religious festivals,” Amin told
Associated Press.
The cell phone video of the
execution of Hussein demonstrates the reality of the “democracy”
which the US invasion has brought to Iraq. The invasion has destroyed
the framework of the Iraqi state, exacerbated social tensions, and provoked
an explosion of sectarian violence at the cost of hundreds of thousands
of lives. The continuing US occupation—in which American and British
troops continue to kill thousands of Iraqis even as murder squads operate
on both sides of the Sunni/Shiite divide—has brought about not
the flowering of “freedom,” but the virtual dissolution
of Iraqi society.
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