The Kurds never got their day in
court. edward luttwak tells why
they wanted justice to be swift |
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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 |
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| For Kurds the desire to see Saddam dead outweighed the redemptive benefits of his trial for the Anfal genocide |
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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  |
