I am against the death penalty. This may not seem as much of a revelation to you, after all, I am a human rights activist and human rights activists are supposed to be against the death penalty, but this was a revelation to me. For years, I've argued that the state has the power to put to death those who have committed the most egregious crimes, under the same theory of self defense that allows individuals (and police) to kill when their lives are in danger and nations to go to war to defend their national hegemony. I have quarreled with mechanisms and the reach of the death penalty in the US - unlike Scalia, I do believe that the innocent must not be executed -, but I've strongly supported the death penalty for both serial killers and mass murderers. In my book, nobody deserved to be put to death more than dictators responsible for the torture, disappearance and deaths of thousands, let alone tens or hundreds of thousands, or - like in the case of Pol Pot - even millions.
But I realized last night, as the hour of Saddam's execution came closer, that I was greeting his death with sadness rather than jubilation. Part of it, clearly, has to do with the fact that he did not enjoy a fair trial. His first trial judge resigned due to government interference with the trial, three of his lawyers were shot, and the surviving ones went on strike to protest the lack of protection due to them. They were followed by court-appointed attorneys with little knowledge of international law. We all know that Saddam was guilty, but if you are not going to respect the basic norms of due process, why bother at all with setting up a kangaroo court?
Another part of my sadness is due to the fact that most of Saddam's victims were denied justice. He was tried - and sentenced to death - for ordering a relatively small massacre of Shias in 1982. He never had to face justice for the torture, disappearances and deaths of hundreds of thousands of other Iraqis. In that sense, his death doesn't seem to me that different from that of Pinochet's (or so many Argentine military leaders) of natural causes. The happiness about their demise is bittered by the fact that they did not face justice for all their crimes.
And the suspicious part of me wonders about the haste to execute him. Like Robert Frisk, below, I wonder if the point of executing Saddam now, was to assure that American responsibility for collaborating with his regime in the commission of crimes against humanity was not exposed and that Saddam would not be able to testify against Americans about their support of his regime. After all, such support might very well be considered a crime against humanity under international law as well.
That said, unlike Frisk below, I don't think it's fair to compare Hussein's crimes to those committed by Bush et al. In the human rights arena, countries often excuse their actions by pointing out to the horrible actions of their neighbors, their accusers or even their victims. Americans and their allies have committed uncountable crimes of war and crimes against humanity in our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, but to talk about those crimes in this context feels like a minimization of the atrocities committed by Hussein and his regime. We may be very bad guys, but Hussein was very bad too.
Beyond all this, I think I'm sad because I've come to the conclusion that the death penalty is simply wrong. States are too unwise, too corrupted, too political to give them the ultimate power to chose between the life and death of their subjects - and the appreciation of life has to encompass the appreciation of the life of even the worst human beings.
Below I copy an article by Robert Fisk on the execution of Hussein. Despite what I said above, I agree with much of what he has to say. I also copy the UN's response to the execution of Hussein.
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UN AGAINST DEATH PENALTY BUT UNDERSTANDS DESIRE FOR JUSTICE IN HUSSEIN CASE -- ENVOY
New York, Dec 30 2006 2:00PM
Reacting to the imposition of the death sentence against Saddam Hussein, who ruled Iraq with terror for nearly a quarter of a century until his ouster in 2003, the senior United Nations envoy there voiced understanding about the desire for justice among many people but reiterated the world body's longstanding opposition to capital punishment.
"The United Nations stands firmly against impunity, and understands the desire for justice felt by the many Iraqis," Special Representative Ashraf Qazi said through a spokesman.
"Based on the principle of respect for the right to life, however, the United Nations remains opposed to capital punishment, even in the case of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide."
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The Independent(UK)
Robert Fisk: A dictator created then destroyed by America
Published: 30 December 2006
Saddam to the gallows. It was an easy equation. Who could be more deserving of
that last walk to the scaffold - that crack of the neck at the end of a rope -
than the Beast of Baghdad, the Hitler of the Tigris, the man who murdered untold
hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis while spraying chemical weapons over
his enemies? Our masters will tell us in a few hours that it is a "great day"
for Iraqis and will hope that the Muslim world will forget that his death
sentence was signed - by the Iraqi "government", but on behalf of the Americans
- on the very eve of the Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, the moment of
greatest forgiveness in the Arab world.
But history will record that the Arabs and other Muslims and, indeed, many
millions in the West, will ask another question this weekend, a question that
will not be posed in other Western newspapers because it is not the narrative
laid down for us by our presidents and prime ministers - what about the other
guilty men?
No, Tony Blair is not Saddam. We don't gas our enemies. George W Bush is not
Saddam. He didn't invade Iran or Kuwait. He only invaded Iraq. But hundreds of
thousands of Iraqi civilians are dead - and thousands of Western troops are dead
- because Messrs Bush and Blair and the Spanish Prime Minister and the Italian
Prime Minister and the Australian Prime Minister went to war in 2003 on a potage
of lies and mendacity and, given the weapons we used, with great brutality.
In the aftermath of the international crimes against humanity of 2001 we have
tortured, we have murdered, we have brutalised and killed the innocent - we have
even added our shame at Abu Ghraib to Saddam's shame at Abu Ghraib - and yet we
are supposed to forget these terrible crimes as we applaud the swinging corpse
of the dictator we created.
Who encouraged Saddam to invade Iran in 1980, which was the greatest war crime
he has committed for it led to the deaths of a million and a half souls? And who
sold him the components for the chemical weapons with which he drenched Iran and
the Kurds? We did. No wonder the Americans, who controlled Saddam's weird trial,
forbad any mention of this, his most obscene atrocity, in the charges against
him. Could he not have been handed over to the Iranians for sentencing for this
massive war crime? Of course not. Because that would also expose our
culpability.
And the mass killings we perpetrated in 2003 with our depleted uranium shells
and our "bunker buster" bombs and our phosphorous, the murderous post-invasion
sieges of Fallujah and Najaf, the hell-disaster of anarchy we unleashed on the
Iraqi population in the aftermath of our "victory" - our "mission accomplished"
- who will be found guilty of this? Such expiation as we might expect will come,
no doubt, in the self-serving memoirs of Blair and Bush, written in comfortable
and wealthy retirement.
Hours before Saddam's death sentence, his family - his first wife, Sajida, and
Saddam's daughter and their other relatives - had given up hope.
"Whatever could be done has been done - we can only wait for time to take its
course," one of them said last night. But Saddam knew, and had already announced
his own "martyrdom": he was still the president of Iraq and he would die for
Iraq. All condemned men face a decision: to die with a last, grovelling plea for
mercy or to die with whatever dignity they can wrap around themselves in their
last hours on earth. His last trial appearance - that wan smile that spread over
the mass-murderer's face - showed us which path Saddam intended to walk to the
noose.
I have catalogued his monstrous crimes over the years. I have talked to the
Kurdish survivors of Halabja and the Shia who rose up against the dictator at
our request in 1991 and who were betrayed by us - and whose comrades, in their
tens of thousands, along with their wives, were hanged like thrushes by Saddam's
executioners.
I have walked round the execution chamber of Abu Ghraib - only months, it later
transpired, after we had been using the same prison for a few tortures and
killings of our own - and I have watched Iraqis pull thousands of their dead
relatives from the mass graves of Hilla. One of them has a newly-inserted
artificial hip and a medical identification number on his arm. He had been taken
directly from hospital to his place of execution. Like Donald Rumsfeld, I have
even shaken the dictator's soft, damp hand. Yet the old war criminal finished
his days in power writing romantic novels.
It was my colleague, Tom Friedman - now a messianic columnist for The New York
Times - who perfectly caught Saddam's character just before the 2003 invasion:
Saddam was, he wrote, "part Don Corleone, part Donald Duck". And, in this unique
definition, Friedman caught the horror of all dictators; their sadistic
attraction and the grotesque, unbelievable nature of their barbarity.
But that is not how the Arab world will see him. At first, those who suffered
from Saddam's cruelty will welcome his execution. Hundreds wanted to pull the
hangman's lever. So will many other Kurds and Shia outside Iraq welcome his end.
But they - and millions of other Muslims - will remember how he was informed of
his death sentence at the dawn of the Eid al-Adha feast, which recalls the
would-be sacrifice by Abraham, of his son, a commemoration which even the
ghastly Saddam cynically used to celebrate by releasing prisoners from his
jails. "Handed over to the Iraqi authorities," he may have been before his
death. But his execution will go down - correctly - as an American affair and
time will add its false but lasting gloss to all this - that the West destroyed
an Arab leader who no longer obeyed his orders from Washington, that, for all
his wrongdoing (and this will be the terrible get-out for Arab historians, this
shaving away of his crimes) Saddam died a "martyr" to the will of the new
"Crusaders".
When he was captured in November of 2003, the insurgency against American troops
increased in ferocity. After his death, it will redouble in intensity again.
Freed from the remotest possibility of Saddam's return by his execution, the
West's enemies in Iraq have no reason to fear the return of his Baathist regime.
Osama bin Laden will certainly rejoice, along with Bush and Blair. And there's a
thought. So many crimes avenged.
But we will have got away with it.
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited