Human Rights Watch, which used to consistently condemn Saddam Hussein’s regime for its brutal abuse of power, this week condemned the trial of the fallen dictator. He was found guilty of the 1982 murders of 148 people in Dujail after he survived an assassination attempt outside the town.
The organization criticized a range of judicial shortcomings in the process. It is certain that, in every way, Saddam’s trial was far from normal. Nobody ever doubted that he held the power of life and death over every Iraqi and that he was the ultimate arbiter of everything that happened during his absolute rule. Indeed Saddam himself asserted this during the case. The question was, however, whether there was enough actual evidence to link the dictator directly with the massacre of the largely Shiite townspeople. Human Rights Watch believes there was not.
What is overlooked is that flawed though Saddam’s two trials may have been, they represented the re-awakening of due legal process in a country which was long subject merely to the deadly whim of a dictator and his henchmen. Had Saddam been carried off to the Hague like Slobodan Milosevic for a trial, the proceedings might have been more orderly and dispassionately judicial. Their impact would never, however, have been the same as seeing the man examined and judged by Iraqis in an Iraqi law court. Imperfect though Saddam’s trials may have been, they were in no way lynch law. No victim of Baathist terror was ever treated so fairly. Some have said that it might have been better if Saddam had been shot out of hand when he was discovered cowering in a hole on a farm outside Tikrit. His two sons had already been killed. Had the dictator himself perished that way, the death would have been over and done with. The victors, however, wanted Saddam’s brutality exposed to the world in what they assumed would be an open and shut case. They expected Saddam to remain the confused, beaten and pathetic figure they dragged out of the ground. This was just one more in the immensely long list of US miscalculations about Iraq.
Saddam’s trial has put an immense strain on Iraq. It has encouraged Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias to more murderous violence with defense lawyers, judges’ relatives, witnesses and Justice Ministry officials falling victim to killers. If and when Saddam finally goes to the gallows, it seems horribly inevitable that more Iraqi lives will be lost in merciless bombings timed to demonstrate the anger of die-hard Baathists. The execution itself will also begin the process of turning Saddam from monster into martyr. To the undoubted horror of the Americans, Saddam has conducted himself with considerable arrogance during his trial. In years to come, this behavior will be falsely presented as courage. As a man who knows he has absolutely nothing to lose, Saddam has harangued the court, the elected Iraqi government and the occupation forces, seizing every opportunity given him by the Americans for one last huzzah, which will probably echo long after the brutal dictator is dead.
