Opinion - Editorials   

Outrageous

Saddam Hussein was a leader whose brutal actions and calamitous miscalculations brought unimaginable suffering to the people of Iraq and neighbouring countries. The brutal actions of his regime included the killing of political rivals and large numbers of civilians, above all Shias and Kurds, and the use of chemical weapons against Kurds and Iranians. President Hussein's two big miscalculations were the eight-year war of unprovoked aggression against Iran, in which hundreds of thousands of people were annihilated, and the akratic invasion of Kuwait. Following the first Gulf War, a million Iraqis, including hundreds of thousands of children, are estimated to have died because they were deprived of adequate nourishment and medical care on account of the economic sanctions imposed on their country by the victors. Arguably, Mr. Hussein had an opportunity to bring to an end this suffering by being more forthcoming and proving to the satisfaction of the world that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction (WMD). His refusal or failure to divulge that he had destroyed all his stockpiles soon after the 1991 war played into the hands of his enemies, above all President George Bush who came to office with the agenda of invading Iraq and destroying the Saddam regime for strategic reasons.

However, it would be mendacious for anyone to claim that justice was served when Mr. Hussein was executed before dawn on December 30, 2006. The judicial process set up to prosecute Mr. Hussein for "crimes against humanity" was designed by a United States-led coalition that had itself committed the supreme war crime of unprovoked aggression against a sovereign nation. The fact that the coalition's illegal invasion and occupation had caused the death of over 600,000 Iraqis evidently made no impact on the collective conscience of its leaders. The present Baghdad regime, which is propped up by the occupation forces, did not just lean on the judiciary; it went so far as to replace judges until a sufficiently partisan presiding officer was found. This judge did the bidding of his political masters and scandalously ensured that the defence was always at a disadvantage. The appeal court that confirmed the sentence of death handed down by the trial judge acted as if the completion of other cases against the accused was of no consequence. That all these legal proceedings were nothing but a sordid farce became clear to the whole world when the Prime Minister of Iraq, who had announced ahead of the appeal court's verdict that the former President would be executed before New Year, even usurped the judiciary's prerogative of setting the date for execution. To go by the manner in which the client Iraqi regime has behaved in all spheres, it was a small mercy that Mr. Hussein was handed over to it by his American jailors just before he was forced to mount the gallows. Various components of this regime run militias that have tortured and butchered hundreds of innocents. Those who engineered this violent and unjust end to the life of a leader who was overthrown by war — in flagrant violation of international law — have much to answer for before the court of humanity.

The Indian Government must take a forthright stand against this outrage. It needs to go beyond its expressions of "disappointment," its indirect criticisms of "victor's justice," and its pious hopes of "reconciliation" and "restoration of peace and normalcy" in Iraq. It must condemn, without equivocation, Mr. Hussein's execution at the hands of the occupation army and its client state, even if the occupying powers maintain the fiction that the trial, sentence, and execution of the former Iraqi President were exclusively the business of the "Government of Iraq." The United States helped sustain Mr. Hussein in power through the 1980s in the full knowledge that his regime had used poison gas against the Kurds of Halabja and against the people of Iran. The Bush administration plumbed new depths of shamelessness when it handed over its captive, its prisoner of war, to a Shia-controlled Iraqi court rather than to an international war crimes tribunal, as many advocates of human rights and justice demanded. At a surface level, Iraqis may be divided, reflecting tragic sectarian divides, in their reactions to the end of Mr. Hussein. However, his hanging is expected to lead to major reprisals from the Sunni resistance to the occupation — and a spike in violence in Iraq. It will also fuel anger and hatred towards the United States among the people of various countries in the Arab world. While condemning this outrageous case of "victor's justice," the world must express its solidarity with the people of Iraq, whose sufferings seem to know no end.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

Outrageous

Copyright © 2006, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu