ShareThisBy JOHN HALL
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Remarkably, world reaction to the murder conviction and death penalty imposed by an Iraqi court against Saddam Hussein a week ago has been mainly adverse.
One of the tyrants of the age has been held to account for his crimes. Yet his conviction and the prospect of his execution drew scarcely a breath of relief in world capitals. Instead, it was attacked as illegitimate by European death penalty opponents, by international fair trial advocates and by the foes of American intervention in Iraq.
In the editorial and official government reaction from abroad, you will find scarcely a line to suggest that Saddam Hussein is receiving the verdict he deserves.
In fact, there was much cynicism, particularly in the Arab and Muslim world, calling the verdict an "October surprise" staged by the American administration for malleable voters in last Tuesday's American election. Once again, that was a vast misjudgment about American society. Saddam Hussein's conviction and death sentence did not appear to have any impact at all on the voting here.
Overseas, among capital punishment opponents, British Prime Minister Tony Blair was one of the few who spoke out in favor of Iraqi justice for Saddam Hussein last week. While he opposed hanging Iraq's former leader, he felt the trial exposed "the brutality, the tyranny, the hundreds of people he killed."
Otherwise, few said a word against a man accused of gassing an entire village of Kurds and approving the execution of Shiite men and boys. His government kept the boys in jail until they came of age before slaughtering them like livestock. Yet somehow, Saddam Hussein has come to be regarded by many opinion makers abroad as a poor misguided monarch whose only sin was to have lost a war.
He emerged after his conviction and death sentence last week to appeal to the country he had savaged for forgiveness and reconciliation of the Kurds and Arabs, quoting Jesus Christ and the Prophet Mohammed. Some people took him seriously, even though he spent his trial mocking the court.
His trial was seriously flawed. But Saddam Hussein at least had an opportunity to defend himself, which was more than he gave most of his victims. He had competent lawyers, including Ramsey Clark, who got thrown out of court on the last day trying to defend him.
Like Nuremburg, the war crimes trials after World War II, the defense in this case called the Baghdad trials "victor's justice."
Nuremburg was, by and large, a path-breaking legal case _ bringing war criminals before the bar of civil justice, rather than before a military firing squad. Whether the Iraqi trial of Saddam Hussein proves to be that kind of breakthrough is doubtful, mainly because it was allowed to become too much of a television circus and is now being trashed worldwide.
A sampling of opinion:
France's "Le Figaro" feared the verdict would legitimize a "military intervention undertaken under false pretenses" and South Africa's Cape Times said the trial was no more than a "symbolic victory over his brutal reign," which would just bring more instability and bloodshed to Iraq.
One small Moscow newspaper said Saddam Hussein "deserves to be hanged 1,000 times (as) one of the biggest serial killers in modern history." But few others applauded the verdict.
The problem with those who commit repeated crimes against humanity is one of impunity. Does the world just let them get away with it?
I spent a day at The Hague a couple of years ago watching some fine jurists from all over the world trying former Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic and other ethnic Serbians for genocide and crimes against humanity. The trial had long since ceased to attract much public interest, but these attorneys and prosecutors were determined to see it through to the last the scrap of evidence. Their mission: smothering war criminals' impunity in the totality of facts.
If his trial had been sent to an international war crimes tribunal, Saddam Hussein would have died in captivity and obscurity, like Milosevic did, before satisfying every legal demand.
Milosevic died of a chronic heart condition. He might as well have died of boredom in that interminable trial, which was already entering its fifth year. What an end that would have been for Saddam Hussein, the egomaniac.
(John Hall is the senior Washington correspondent of Media General News Service.E-mail jhall(at)mediageneral.com. For more stories visit scrippsnews.com)
