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Saddam’s execution was just in time
The Kurds never got their day in court. Edward Luttwak tells why they wanted justice to be swift.
Only if he had fled to Israel could Saddam Hussein have avoided the death penalty, because all other countries in the Middle East still have it, in accordance with Muslim law.
Fundamentalists would apply it to many offences, including disrespect for Moses, Jesus or Mohammed, but leading progressives such as Lebanon's Ayatollah Mohammed Fadlallah argue that only three crimes merit the death penalty in Islam: premeditated murder, the undermining of society by habitual violence, and homosexuality.
Presumably it is under the first two that Fadlallah's fellow Shia clerics in Iraq called for Saddam Hussein's execution, though in many sermons it was simply hailed as a long-awaited act of revenge.
While he was specifically sentenced to death for ordering the killing of 148 Shia villagers in 1982, that "crime against humanity" was only the beginning of the deportations, torture, mass imprisonment, and outright massacres that were inflicted on Iraq's Arab Shia population until the American-led invasion of 2003 finally destroyed the regime.
Hundreds of thousands of Shia lost relatives, and for them Saddam Hussein's hanging is a personal as well as a sectarian act of retribution. They must have accounted for many of the thousands of Iraqis who applied for the post of Saddam's hangman.
Others no doubt were Kurds. Their persecution had started very soon after the Ba'athist regime was established in 1968, but it also came to an end sooner, when a de facto independent Kurdistan, protected by US and British air patrols, was established after the first Gulf War of 1991.
But by then years of insurgency and repression had culminated in the 1986-1989 Anfal campaign of village demolitions and mass murder, which killed at least 100,000 Kurds out of a total population of less than 4 million. Hence in Saddam Hussein's second trial, for the Anfal campaign, the charge was genocide, though because the trial only started this August there was no real opportunity to look at the evidence by the time Iraq's highest court of appeal upheld the conviction for the 1982 Shia massacre.
So, Kurdish victims of the Ba'ath regime and Hussein will not have their day in court. But no protests were heard from Kurdish officials – who include President Jalal Talabani.
The obvious reason for this is that on April 28, 2007 Saddam Hussein would have reached his 70th birthday, becoming immune from execution under Iraqi law. The desire to see him dead evidently outweighed the redemptive and historical benefits of a trial that would finally reconstruct the full record of the horrific Anfal campaign.
Another reason for the Kurds' silence was that in December 2005 a much more convincing Dutch court formally ruled that Hussein's regime was guilty of genocide against the Kurds, when it sentenced Frans van Anraat to 15 years in prison for knowingly selling chemicals for nerve gas to Iraq.
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