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December 31, 2006
I was sitting with President Jalal Talabani of Iraq
earlier this month when Iraqi television was
broadcasting the trial of Saddam Hussein. The
hearings had shifted into their second phase,
concerning the mass murder of Iraq's Kurdish
minority in the 1980s, and video footage of gassing
and shooting had been played in court, to ram home
the anguished statements of numberless survivors.
There was something both satisfying and unsettling
about the juxtaposition. It is fitting that Iraq's
first-ever elected president is a Kurd, but I
couldn't help noticing that he didn't much want to
be drawn out on the subject. The party that he leads
— the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan — is an affiliate
of the Socialist International, which opposes the
death penalty. In the grimmest days of the "Anfal" —
Saddam Hussein's Koran-inspired name for the
genocide — one of the Kurds' best friends was
Danielle Mitterrand, wife of the late president of
France, whose most lasting monument will be his
abolition of the guillotine. It was she who had
proposed to the Iraqi opposition that it should
become the first Middle Eastern government to do
away with capital punishment.
This did not happen, of course. Instead, the death
penalty remains on the books in Iraq, and the
execution of Hussein took place at dawn on Saturday.
(It is probably not a coincidence that the verdict
of the Iraqi appeals court against Hussein
specifically stated that nobody — including the
president of the country — had the right to commute
the sentence of death).
It's too bad. There are a number of things that
should cause qualms about both the trial and the
sentence of Hussein. For instance, both were caught
up in the sectarianism that now dominates everything
in Iraq. To some, it is enough that Hussein was
convicted of massacring the inhabitants of a Shiite
village, Dujail, in 1982, and his hanging need not
have anything specifically to do with his much
larger and even crueler crimes against Kurdistan,
Kuwait, Iran and the Iraqi people more generally.
Further, it's unclear what benefits his execution
brings. I have heard of Shiite politicians who say
that Hussein's death will help repress the Sunni
insurgency by depriving it of a figurehead and
rallying point and by destroying the chance of a
Baathist restoration. This seems to me the most
extreme foolishness and stupidity. There was no
chance in any case of Hussein returning to power,
and it seems just as likely, if not more so, that
his execution will actually inflame violence rather
than calm it. (While speaking of "execution," many
of these same Shiite leaders are linked to death
squads that murder their fellow Iraqis every single
day and night.)
Almost every transfer of power in Baghdad for the
last half a century has been accompanied by the
killing of the previous incumbents. British-backed
Prime Minister Nuri Said was dragged through the
streets and torn to shreds in 1958; his remains were
then dug up and run over by cars. I remember as a
boy seeing one of his replacements, the
pro-communist Abdul Karim Qassim, on television, his
head lolling after the attentions of a Baathist
firing squad.
The most lurid of all these moments, in this most
bitter and harsh society, came with the sadistic
video that Hussein himself made of the purge of his
party after his seizure of power. Nobody who has
seen that footage — of terrified men dragged by
goons from the room, while the survivors weep with
fear and relief and Hussein indulges in a luxurious
cigar — is likely to forget it. And this atrocity
was only the curtain raiser to further orgies of
mass murder and torture of which we have
unimpeachable evidence from the regime's own
archives.
"After such knowledge," as T.S. Eliot asked in "Gerontion,"
"what forgiveness?"
Jonathan Randal, a former Washington Post
correspondent, repeated this question in the title
of one of the best books on the subject of the
Kurds. For many Iraqis, nothing could possibly begin
to cancel the recent past except an act of exemplary
vengeance. And — to argue against myself further —
for many other Iraqis, there could be no security or
peace of mind while Hussein continued to breathe. It
was rather the same with Nicolae Ceausescu in
Romania, where citizens could not get the oppressor
out of their minds and where a new start was not
thinkable to many until he was certified as dead.
This, in essence, also was the psychological
underlay of the Nuremburg war crimes trials: The
beasts had to die, and to be seen to have died. One
could not bear to live on the same planet as them,
and the memory of their victims would be profaned if
they were long outlived by their murderers.
It is for this combination of fear, insecurity and
agony that some favored the execution of Hussein in
public, or at least on television. Without this
assurance (or perhaps, even with it) many citizens
would have difficulty believing that the tyrant was
actually gone. This moves us almost into the realm
of exorcism — as if there were not enough
"faith-based" horror in Iraq as things already
stand.
But Iraq is not going to be free of beasts just
because Hussein has gone through the trapdoor. And
some of the beasts who still roam the country will
be the ones applauding the loudest.
(In this connection, it might have been better for a
certain Ginger Cruz, an official at the U.S. Embassy
in Baghdad, to have kept quiet instead of loudly
seconding a verdict that doesn't call for any
comment from her. The Embassy should be
concentrating on the job of combing the torturers
and assassins out of the Iraqi police force that
American taxpayers are subsidizing.)
Commenting on the killing of Nuri Said in 1958, that
great student of Mesopotamia, Freya Stark, reflected
on "the savagery for which Iraq in her long history
has ever been notorious … the pendulum swing of
murder, ancient and long familiar, which has made
the pattern from the day when the first Ali was
stabbed in Kufa, and probably long before. Even the
massacre of the Prophet's family is no novelty on
that soil."
It would have been no offense to justice if Hussein
had been sentenced to spend the rest of his days in
prison without the possibility of parole, but it
would represent a break with that sanguinary
tradition. And it might be no bad thing if
Americans, especially those who supported the
breaking of his death grip on Iraqi society, found
ways of conveying their distaste for this rushed and
vindictive — and partial — version of a process of
reckoning that ought to have been sober, meticulous
and untainted.
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