05 Nov Hussein Convicted
Great news on the conviction of Saddam Hussein. Here is how Iraq the Model, who is part of Pajamas Media and one of the top Iraqi bloggers, expressed his views regarding the news of Saddam Hussein’s conviction:
I was overwhelmed with joy and relief as I watched the criminals being read their verdicts. For the first time in our region tyrants are being punished for their crimes through a court of law.
Until this moment and while I’m typing these words I’m still receiving words of congratulations in emails, phone calls and text messages from friends inside and outside the country. These were our only means to share our happiness because of the curfew that limits our movement.
This is the day for Saddam’s lovers to weep and I expect their shock and grieve to be huge. They had always thought their master was immortal so let them live in their disappointment while we live for our future.
This is a day not only for Iraqis but a historic day for the whole region; today new basis for dealing between rulers and peoples are found.
No one is above the law anymore.
I was particularly pleased by the way Judge Raouf Rasheed handled the session; he was reading the court’s decision and at the same time chastising members of the current government for their misbehavior and threatened to throw them in custody regardless of their ranks!
We are living a new era where there’s much hope despite the difficulties…our sacrifices have a noble cause, that is to build a new model that obviously terrifies other tyrants.
I believe it wasn’t Saddam alone who was shaking and shouting in hysteria when the verdict was read; I can see hysteria takes over all of Saddam’s followers and apologists.
Today we had turned a page that was full of pain and ugly crimes that were committed by the same criminals who were shaking in the hands of Iraq’s new justice….
Right now volleys of bullets ring not far from where I sit, some are fired to express joy while others are fired in a desperate expression of denial but I have no doubt who is going to prevail. Although the road is long but we are walking forward and will not look back.
I salute the honorable special tribunal that challenged threats and risks and insisted on keeping up the work until the end, and today it brought back the pride of the land that wrote the world’s first laws.
I salute the witnesses who risked their lives to reveal the truth and expose the crimes of the dictator.
I salute the brave men and women of the coalition who came to this land and made this day possible.
Congratulations to all my Iraqi brothers and sisters on this glorious day.
I wish I were as optimistic as you about the outcome, Professor Alford. Hussein surely deserved to be sentenced for his crimes. But I see this trial, like so many other aspects of the Iraq intervention, as a lost opportunity to be something much more powerful.
I don’t want to dismiss the opinions of someone living in Iraq and under far more threat than I am — even if those opinions are being broadcast by a rightwing media network whose American outlets have gone well beyond support for this war to outright cheerleading for it — but the bullets being fired in a “desperate expression of denial” could very easily be just one more salvo in an ongoing civil war between Sunni and Shiite of which this trial has now become a part. And the trial did not need to end up that way. That to me is a great disappointment.
I agree with Non liquet, in that this was a great opportunity to do something more powerful. For me, that was to actually move international criminal law forward, rather than simply executing a dictator. It is sad and disappointing that the vast majority of his crimes will never be documented in court for history to judge. Instead, we have a verdict on one crime against humanity, rather than a whole slew of them. The whole thing smacks of a cheap political show – execute the dictator within 30 days so that we can be seen to be progressing, rather than actually providing real progress.
I think the trials from the Bosnian conflict very much poisoned the well for having a similiar trial for Saddam Hussein. Both the Americans and the Iraqis wanted relatively swift justice, something a foreign trial under international law was almost certain not to provide.