IRAQ: ‘Why Isn’t Saddam Dead’

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Ferry Biedermann

NAJAF, Dec 18 2003 (IPS) - An extraordinary number of Iraqis just want their former president dead.

The Sunni supporters of Saddam Hussein because they are ashamed over his arrest. His many Shia and Kurdish victims because they see death as the only punishment.

"I can’t believe the Americans treat him so well," says Hussein Ali Al Saberi, a director of the Najaf branch of the Union of Political Prisoners in Iraq. "When I was taken by his men, they beat me and tortured me with electricity."

He does not advocate the same treatment for Saddam but says he would like to see the former leader a little less relaxed about his arrest.

"We understand there are new rules now," says Al Saberi. "We want to belong to the rest of the world and we know that Saddam has to be treated according to international norms." But that should still lead to the same end, he says.

"For this man who was so much evil there is only one punishment, the death penalty," Al Saberi says.

Al Saberi was arrested in 1987 for staying away from work in protest against the regime. He was a member of the Islamic Dawa party that had begun to resist Saddam very early on.

He knows what happened to many of them. "There was a group of us, some 25 people," says Al Saberi. "They executed about half and tortured the other half."

Al Saberi was detained, and then released after the Shia uprising of 1991. But that was not the end of it. "I was not allowed to travel, I could not work, they followed me all the time. It was not a life."

The Shia south of the country suffered much under Saddam Hussein, just like the Kurdish north. The uprising of 1991 was put down mercilessly.

Everybody in Najaf seems to have suffered at the hands of the Saddam regime, or at least to know someone who has. Many men do not have an eye; beating on the eyes appears to have been a favourite way for Baath party supporters to punish their critics.

The Hamudi family lives in dire poverty in a muddy alleyway near the Imam Ali mosque in the centre of Najaf, the holiest Shia shrine. The mother has been ill since her eldest son Raad was taken away by government soldiers during the 1991 uprising.

His sister Hebba was little at the time but she knows what happened.

"Raad was wounded in his leg during the fighting and it had to be amputated," she says. "When the soldiers entered the city we fled, but Raad and some other men who were wounded stayed in the house. They took everybody away and we have not heard from them again. They were all executed."

Hebba and her family hoped to find at least the remains of Raad when mass graves were discovered after the fall of Saddam Hussein. "We are still looking."

But she feels better after the capture of Saddam Hussein. "We are not afraid any more of him or his supporters."

Public, religious and official opinion in Najaf seems one in demanding the death penalty for the man who brought so much suffering to the city.

Dawa party leader Ali Merzah Al Asady is furious at what he sees as unsolicited international meddling in the fate of Saddam Hussein. He is particularly scathing about the suggestion of United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan that the captured ex-president should stand trial before an international body.

"So what are they going to do?" he says. "Take him to The Hague and treat him like a king, just like they are doing with the Yugoslav president? So that he has to appear only now and then in court where he can brag about what he has done?"

Al Asady wants a trial in Baghdad. "There his victims will be able to attend the trial, there will not be such long delays and even if he is convicted of one crime, he will get the death penalty which he deserves."

People who demonstrated in Sunni areas in support of Saddam after his arrest are a minority, he says. "Everybody will be glad to see the end of Saddam Hussein."