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January 1st,
2007 - Rush to Hang Hussein Was Questioned News
article by the New York Times |
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Rush to Hang Hussein Was
Questioned By John F. Burns and Marc Santora New York Times January 1, 2007 Baghdad, Dec. 31 - With his
plain pine coffin strapped into an American military helicopter for a predawn
journey across the desert, Saddam Hussein, the executed dictator who built a
legend with his defiance of America, completed a turbulent passage into
history on Sunday. Like the helicopter trip,
just about everything in the 24 hours that began with Mr. Hussein’s being
taken to his execution from his cell in an American military detention center
in the postmidnight chill of Saturday had a surreal and even cinematic
quality. Part of it was that the
Americans, who turned him into a pariah and drove him from power, proved to
be his unlikely benefactors in the face of Iraq’s new Shiite rulers who
seemed bent on turning the execution and its aftermath into a new nightmare
for the Sunni minority privileged under Mr. Hussein. The 110-mile journey aboard
a Black Hawk helicopter carried Mr. Hussein’s body to an American military
base north of Tikrit, Camp Speicher, named for an American Navy pilot lost
over Iraq in the first hours of the Persian Gulf war in 1991. From there, an
Iraqi convoy carried him to Awja, the humble town beside the Tigris River
that Mr. Hussein, in the chandeliered palaces that became his habitat as
ruler, spoke of as emblematic of the miseries of his lonely and impoverished
youth. The American role extended
beyond providing the helicopter that carried Mr. Hussein home. Iraqi and
American officials who have discussed the intrigue and confusion that
preceded the decision late on Friday to rush Mr. Hussein to the gallows have
said that it was the Americans who questioned the political wisdom - and
justice - of expediting the execution, in ways that required Prime Minister
Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to override constitutional and religious precepts that
might have assured Mr. Hussein a more dignified passage to his end. The Americans’ concerns seem
certain to have been heightened by what happened at the hanging, as evidenced
in video recordings made just before Mr. Hussein fell through the gallows
trapdoor at 6:10 a.m. on Saturday. A new video that appeared on the Internet
late Saturday, apparently made by a witness with a camera cellphone,
underscored the unruly, mocking atmosphere in the execution chamber. This continued, on the
video, through the actual hanging itself, with a shout of “The tyrant has
fallen! May God curse him!” as Mr. Hussein hung lifeless, his neck snapped back
and his glassy eyes open. The cacophony from those
gathered before the gallows included a shout of “Go to hell!” as the former
ruler stood with the noose around his neck in the final moments, and his
riposte, barely audible above the bedlam, which included the words “gallows
of shame.” It continued despite appeals from an official-sounding voice,
possibly Munir Haddad, the judge who presided at the hanging, saying, “Please
no! The man is about to die.” The Shiites who predominated
at the hanging began a refrain at one point of “Moktada! Moktada! Moktada!” -
the name of a volatile cleric whose
private militia has spawned death squads that have made an indiscriminate
industry of killing Sunnis - appending it to a Muslim imprecation for
blessings on the Prophet Muhammad. “Moktada,” Mr. Hussein replied, smiling
contemptuously. “Is this how real men behave?” American officials in Iraq
have been reluctant to say much publicly about the pell-mell nature of the
hanging, apparently fearful of provoking recriminations in Washington, where
the Bush administration adopted a hands-off posture, saying the timing of the
execution was Iraq’s to decide. While privately incensed at
the dead-of-night rush to the gallows, the Americans here have been caught in
the double bind that has ensnared them over much else about the Maliki
government - frustrated at what they call the government’s failure to
recognize its destructive behavior, but reluctant to speak out, or sometimes
to act, for fear of undermining Mr. Maliki and worsening the situation. But a narrative assembled
from accounts by various American officials, and by Iraqis present at some of
the crucial meetings between the two sides, shows that it was the Americans
who counseled caution in the way the Iraqis carried out the hanging. The
issues uppermost in the Americans’ minds, these officials said, were a
provision in Iraq’s new Constitution that required the three-man presidency
council to approve hangings, and a stipulation in a longstanding Iraqi law
that no executions can be carried out during the Id al-Adha holiday, which
began for Iraqi Sunnis on Saturday and Shiites on Sunday. A senior Iraqi official said
the Americans staked out their ground at a meeting on Thursday, 48 hours
after an appeals court had upheld the death sentence passed on Mr. Hussein
and two associates. They were convicted in November of crimes against
humanity for the persecution of the Shiite townspeople of Dujail, north of
Baghdad, in 1982. Mr. Hussein, as president, signed a decree to hang 148 men
and teenage boys. Told that Mr. Maliki wanted
to carry out the death sentence on Mr. Hussein almost immediately, and not
wait further into the 30-day deadline set by the appeals court, American
officers at the Thursday meeting said that they would accept any decision but
needed assurance that due process had been followed before relinquishing
physical custody of Mr. Hussein. “The Americans said that we
have no issue in handing him over, but we need everything to be in accordance
with the law,” the Iraqi official said. “We do not want to break the law.” The American pressure sent
Mr. Maliki and his aides into a frantic quest for legal workarounds, the
Iraqi official said. The Americans told them they needed a decree from
President Jalal Talabani, signed jointly by his two vice presidents,
upholding the death sentence, and a letter from the chief judge of the Iraqi
High Tribunal, the court that tried Mr. Hussein, certifying the verdict. But
Mr. Talabani, a Kurd, made it known that he objected to the death penalty on
principle. The Maliki government spent
much of Friday working on legal mechanisms to meet the American demands. From
Mr. Talabani, they obtained a letter saying that while he would not sign a
decree approving the hanging, he had no objections. The Iraqi official said
Mr. Talabani first asked the tribunal’s judges for an opinion on whether the
constitutional requirement for presidential approval applied to a death
sentence handed down by the tribunal, a special court operating outside
Iraq’s main judicial system. The judges said the requirement was void. Mr. Maliki had one major
obstacle: the Hussein-era law proscribing executions during the Id holiday.
This remained unresolved until late Friday, the Iraqi official said. He said
he attended a late-night dinner at the prime minister’s office at which
American officers and Mr. Maliki’s officials debated the issue. One participant described
the meeting this way: “The Iraqis seemed quite frustrated, saying, ‘Who is
going to execute him, anyway, you or us?’ The Americans replied by saying
that obviously, it was the Iraqis who would carry out the hanging. So the
Iraqis said, ‘This is our problem and we will handle the consequences. If
there is any damage done, it is we who will be damaged, not you.’ ” To this, the Iraqis added
what has often been their trump card in tricky political situations: they
telephoned officials of the marjaiya, the supreme religious body in Iraqi
Shiism, composed of ayatollahs in the holy city of Najaf. The ayatollahs
approved. Mr. Maliki, at a few minutes before midnight on Friday, then signed
a letter to the justice minister, “to carry out the hanging until death.” The Maliki letter sent Iraqi
and American officials into a frenzy of activity. Fourteen Iraqi officials,
including senior members of the Maliki government, were called at 1:30 a.m.
on Saturday and told to gather at the prime minister’s office. At. 3:30 a.m.,
they were driven to the helicopter pad beside Mr. Hussein’s old Republican
Palace, and taken to the prison in the northern suburb of Khadimiya where the
hanging took place. At about the same time,
American and Iraqi officials said, Mr. Hussein was roused at his Camp Cropper
cell 10 miles away, and taken to a Black Hawk helicopter for his journey to
Khadimiya. None of the Iraqi officials
were able to explain why Mr. Maliki had been unwilling to allow the execution
to wait. Nor would any explain why those who conducted it had allowed it to
deteriorate into a sectarian free-for-all that had the effect, on the video
recordings, of making Mr. Hussein, a mass murderer, appear dignified and
restrained, and his executioners, representing Shiites who were his principal
victims, seem like bullying street thugs. But the explanation may have
lain in something that Bassam al-Husseini, a Maliki aide closely involved in
arrangements for the hanging, said to the BBC later. Mr. Husseini, who has
American citizenship, described the hanging as “an Id gift to the Iraqi
people.” The weekend’s final
disorderly chapter came with the tensions over Mr. Hussein’s body. For nearly
18 hours on Saturday, Mr. Maliki’s officials insisted that his corpse would
be kept in secret government custody until circumstances allowed interment
without his grave becoming a shrine or a target. Once again, the Americans
intervened. The leader of Mr. Hussein’s
Albu-Nasir tribe, Sheik Ali al-Nida, said that before flying to Baghdad on an
American helicopter, he had been so fearful for his safety that he had
written a will. Bizarrely, Sheik Nida and others were shown on Iraqi
television collecting the coffin from the courtyard in front of Mr. Maliki’s
office, where it sat unceremoniously in a police pickup. After the helicopter trip to
Camp Speicher, the American base outside Tikrit, the coffin was taken in an
Iraqi convoy to Awja, and laid to rest in the ornate visitors’ center that
Mr. Hussein ordered built for the townspeople in the 1990s. Local officials
and members of Mr. Hussein’s tribe had broken open the marbled floor in the
main reception hall, and cleared what they said would be a temporary burial
place until he could be moved to a permanent grave outside Awja where his two
sons, Uday and Qusay, are buried. At the burial, several
mourners threw themselves on the closed casket. One, a young man convulsed
with sobs, cried: “He has not died. I can hear him speaking to me.” Another
shouted, “Saddam is dead! Instead of weeping for him, think of ways we can
take revenge on the Iranian enemy,” Sunni parlance for the Shiites now in
power. Reporting was contributed by
Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi and Khalid W. Hassan from Baghdad, and an Iraqi
employee of The New York Times from Tikrit. Copyright 2007 The New York
Times Company External link: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/01/world/middleeast/01iraq.html |