From Murderer to Martyr: Saddam Hussein’s Botched Trial and Execution
by Aisha Gawad
One of the most infamous dictators of our time, Saddam Hussein, was led to the gallows on Dec. 30. His death, which was videotaped and disseminated online, sparked displays of joy and mourning all over the Arab world, and was yet another dividing factor for the people of the region. His muddled and undignified execution, preceded by a trial which many human rights activists see as a disgrace, served to make the man once known as a tyrant and murderer into a martyr. Although because of the current war in Iraq, it is not surprising that some Sunni Arabs made Hussein into a symbol of the resistance to the U.S. and its allies, his unfair trial and humiliating execution only fueled the fire and encouraged sectarian distrust.
Hussein and two others were sentenced to death in November and were charged with the murders of 148 people from the town of Dujail in 1982. Hussein was also accused of other crimes against humanity, such as the 1988 Anfal campaign in which more than 100,000 Iraqi Kurds were killed. There is no doubt that the man had a vast amount of blood on his hands, but this does not excuse his flawed trial. A trial that met all international fair trial standards would have shown more respect for human rights and for the victims of Hussein’s reign. “The test of a government’s commitment to human rights is measured by the way it treats its worst offenders,” said director of Human Rights Watch’s International Justice Program Richard Dicker.
Before his sentencing, Human Rights Watch compiled a list of problems with the Supreme Iraqi Criminal Tribunal and its statute. There was no requirement to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt, unequal rules guiding the defense and the prosecution, and political interference which disrupted impartiality, among others. Politicians from the ruling party even went as far as to demand the dismissal of Judge Rizgar Amin, whom they accused of being too lenient with Hussein. The trial was marred from the first day, and the disregard for human rights standards followed Hussein until the very end when the noose was slipped around his neck.
The shaky cell phone video shows Hussein being led to his death surrounded by men in black hoods, jeering and taunting him the whole time. The floor beneath him dropped as he was half way through his second recitation of the Shahada, the Muslim profession of faith. He wasn’t even allowed to finish the verse. Questions also surround the time it took for him to die, perhaps due to a miscalculated drop length.
The execution of two other men on January 15 did not go much better. The deaths of Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, former head of Hussein’s secret police, and Awad Hamad al-Bandar, former chief judge of Hussein’s revolutionary court, had the “same surreal and freakish quality that enveloped the Hussein hanging,” wrote John F. Burns in the New York Times. Iraqi officials hoped to avoid the mistakes made at Hussein’s execution and feared turning the accused into sympathetic figures. In the case of Ibrahim, however, his death was even more undignified, as his head snapped off from his body and landed five feet away. The executors miscalculated the drop length again and made it far longer than necessary, causing the rope to decapitate him.
These gruesome hangings have added to the already widespread Sunni-Shiite sectarianism not only in Iraq, but across the Arab world. Sunnis across the region are increasingly distrustful of what they see as the spreading Shiite influence emanating from Iran and reaching into Iraq and Lebanon. Some Sunnis view the execution of Hussein as another display of Shiite power, making him a symbol of Sunni Arab courage. Some Sunni governments, like the one in Egypt, are encouraging and using the split in order to curb Iranian power. According to the New York Times, Egyptian, government-sanctioned televisions stations and newspapers are inundating their audiences with negative coverage of Shiite leaders and positive coverage of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq.
This regional power competition would have emerged even if Saddam Hussein received a fair trial or was executed in an acceptable manner. The bitter sectarian battling in Iraq was bound to spill over into other Arab countries, but Hussein’s death accelerated it. His death, and subsequent transformation into a martyr of the Sunni Arab cause, became a manifestation of the wider regional conflict. Because Hussein was essentially condemned to die before he ever stood on trial, and because he was killed in such a humiliating manner, the U.S, and the Iraqi government it supports, helped to erase his image as a brutal dictator and create a new one of the stoic hero, defiant in the face of his mocking captors. Children in Palestine now sell his picture on street corners, and perhaps if justice had been allowed to play out by the rules of international human rights standards, he would have died just another tyrant whose days were done.
Burns, John. Second Iraq Hanging Also Went Awry. The New York Times. Jan. 16, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/16/world/middleeast/16hang.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1
Slackman, Michael. Hangings Fuel Sectarian Split Across Mideast. The New York Times. Jan. 17, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/17/world/middleeast/17shiite.html
http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/12/30/iraq14950.htm
http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2005/10/16/iraq11883.htm
