National Affairs
Shed no tears for Saddam Hussein
Claire Hoy

Sometimes there is little you can do or say beyond just shaking your head. One of those times, alas, is now, the result of a flood of unbelievably pigheaded criticisms of the Iraqi government's decision to hang Saddam Hussein.

To hear some tell it, you'd think that Iraq - cheered on by the dreaded Americans, of course - is guilty of a great miscarriage of justice. It's just too much. It really is.

For the record, this correspondent does not support capital punishment. To me, it's part of the same continuum which allows our so-called advanced western societies to kill unborn babies with impunity. But that having been said, Iraq does believe in capital punishment and Saddam - unlike his victims - was at least given a trial where he was allowed representation and given every chance to face his accusers.

Yet we read in Monday's Globe and Mail the ravings of Nehal Bhuta, a man about to begin teaching international human rights law at the University of Toronto - and author of a wellpublicized report of Hussein's trial.

Here's what Bhuta had to say about the situation: "In the aftermath of a fundamentally unfair trial, the death penalty is completely indefensible. The legal context really suggests that the Iraqi government - and this is consistent with what we've seen all along - had no interest in seeing that this is a process which would have credibility, except perhaps in relation to their own constituency or their own supporters."

According to him, the who exercise "was a means of providing revenge rather than real concern about legality or due process."

Ah yes, due process. Reminds us of that old saw about their being too much law and not enough justice in the justice system. Certainly makes it easier to fixate on fine points of law - and ignoring the difficult circumstances under which the trial was conducted - rather than focusing on the monstrous nature of the clearly documented crimes committed by the late Iraqi dictator.

They didn't call him the "Butcher of Baghdad" for nothing.

When Hussein was in charge, of course, the mere notion of justice or fair trials was laughable. This is a man directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis - and others - and somebody wants to quibble about legal technicalities. Spare us, please.

As the Globe editorialized on this point, "Given the security threats to court officials and the growing disorder in the country, it is a minor miracle the court carried off a trial at all."

Indeed, because of the trial many Iraqis, after decades of being denied freedom to any news beyond the government approved kind, learned for the first time of the depth of Hussein's depravity, of the existence of mass graves and torture chambers.

Hussein, it must be remembered, went to his death without the least show of remorse for his crimes or, in the words of British Prime Minister Tony Blair (also an opponent of capital punishment) "the total and barbaric brutality of that regime."

He was only convicted of one crime - although it's horrendous, it's relatively minor compared to the massive scope of his overall brutality - and that was the slaughter of 148 men and boys from the town of Dujail in 1982. What was Hussein's response during the trial to that charge? Was he sorry. Hell, no. He boasted that it was the "right of the head of state" to sign death warrants against those who threatened him.

There are credible estimates that Hussein killed some 180,000 Iraqi Kurds in the 1991 Anfal campaign, many by the use of poison gas.

And that's not even counting the destruction of the Marsh Arabs nor the murder and torture of hundreds of Kuwaiti citizens after he attacked that country in 1990.

There have been at least 200 mass graves discovered so far and, as the Globe correctly described it, "at least one of them filled mostly with women and children gunned down after being herded Nazi-style into a pit dug by power shovels."

So please, let us not shed a tear for Saddam Hussein.

Let us not get so hung up on the strict, westernized interpretation of trial procedures, that we somehow make him the victim.

It would have pleased this writer more to have kept Hussein under lock and key, in isolation, for the rest of his miserable life.

But Iraqi law dictates that for his crimes he had to die. And so he's dead.

His dreadful legacy, however, lives on. And to attack those who did their best to afford this man a trial - and thereby somehow to infer his innocence - does a grave disservice to his victims.

Obviously, Iraq is still a contrary wracked by serious problems. But with Hussein gone, the world did become just a little bit brighter.