Saddam verdict sparks anger, joy

BAGHDAD, Iraq – The trial of Saddam Hussein that ended Sunday with a guilty verdict and death sentence for the former Iraqi leader, once viewed as a means of reconciliation and justice, instead seemed to fuel the sectarian division that grips the country.

Some Shiites and Kurds celebrated. Some Sunnis mourned angrily. For large swaths of the Iraqi people, Saddam has ceased to be the mesmerizing patriarch who once towered over their nightmares and lives. Many interviewed on Sunday and in recent months said they had laid him to rest long ago, more worried about the internecine violence wracking the country.

“The verdict was right, but prolonging it faded the cheerfulness,” said Sameer Asadi, a 38-year-old taxi driver in the southern Iraq city of Basra.

Though Iraqi government officials argue that putting him to death could stymie the hopes of Sunni insurgents, many of those battling daily against U.S. and Iraqi forces long ago dispensed with Saddam as an inspiration, perhaps even before he was found and arrested by U.S. troops nearly three years ago.

The verdict, however, will be felt by many in Iraq as another in a series of divisive jabs in the ongoing battle between Iraq’s long-oppressed majority Shiite Muslims and once-powerful Sunni Arabs now incensed over their loss of centuries-old dominance.

Saddam and seven co-defendants faced charges of crimes against humanity for the deaths of 148 Shiite Muslims, who were killed after a failed assassination attempt against the Iraqi leader in the town of Dujail in 1982. Saddam and two other defendants received the death penalty Sunday, which will be automatically appealed, while four defendants received lesser sentences and another was acquitted of charges.

The yearlong trial may or may not have met international standards for war crimes tribunals. Several human rights organizations that monitor such trials said Sunday that it didn’t. “We’re concerned that flaws in the trial process will jeopardize much of the trial’s impact,” said Miranda Sissons, head of the International Center for Transitional Justice’s Iraq program, in a release.

U.S. officials hailed the verdict as a triumph of “transparency” and an example of the kind of due process denied Iraqis under the former regime.

But such lessons on the healing power of the courtroom and virtues of law may well be lost in contemporary Iraq, where the hundreds who die each week in civil warfare dwarf the 148 Iraqis slain by Saddam’s regime after the 1982 assassination attempt in Dujail.

As the verdict was broadcast on television, war cries broke out on both sides of the sectarian divide.

Noisy demonstrations broke out in Shiite districts of the capital. Revelers pointed their AK-47s into the air and let loose a 15-minute burst of celebratory gunfire. Many held posters of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose followers nightly snatch Sunni Arab men off the streets and torture them with electrical appliances before shooting them in the skull.

“God avenged the killer of my sons,” said a 65-year-old woman in the Shiite city of Najaf who gave her name as Um Hassan.

She said she lost two of her four boys to Saddam’s security forces in the 1991 crackdown on a Shiite insurrection in southern Iraq. “The death penalty is not enough,” she said. “I want him to be buried alive twice as he did with my sons.”

Even Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the pious Islamic activist leading this fragmented country, joined in the celebration of fellow Shiites.

“This is the day where you see the dictator after arresting him in his miserable hole, being tried facing the penalty he deserves,” comparing him unfavorably to al-Sadr’s father and uncle, who were both famous Shiite clerics slain by Saddam’s regime.

“Iraqis have the right to smile and rejoice a little for the death sentence issued against this criminal and his minions,” he said in a television address.

In Sunni Arab towns and neighborhoods, however, there was sullen anger and public displays of support for the former dictator. Clashes and mortar-fire in Sunni neighborhoods in the capital left at least four dead. They held up Iraqi flags and framed portraits of the man they still call “our president,” humiliated that he was to be hanged like a common criminal.

“He did not throw them into a big hole and set them on fire,” Ameen Adib, one of Saddam’s defense lawyers, said of the 148 victims from Dujail. “He just gave them justice. If I were to judge Saddam Hussein, I would have given him a medal for his conduct in this issue.”

In the courtroom Sunday, Iraq’s sectarian divide – the two worldviews battling for supremacy of Iraq – also played out. Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, a member of the defense team, had submitted a brief questioning the court’s legitimacy and by extension the U.S.-led invasion and the Shiite- and Kurdish-dominated government it spawned.

The judge exploded. “Out, Out!” he hollered in English at the befuddled Clark, who appeared befuddled as he was escorted out by several bailiffs. “Get him out. He’s coming from America to insult the Iraqi people and the court.”

Applause erupted from the visitors’ gallery.

After acquitting one defendant and sentencing the three others to 15 years each in prison for their roles in the Dujail killings, the judge sparred with former Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan, sentencing him to life in prison.

Ramadan exploded. The facts, the witnesses and the testimony presented in the case were all for show, a cover for a vendetta, he charged.

“It is very clear that the verdict was previously set and had nothing to do with all the trial sessions,” he said.

The judge quickly handed a verdict of death by hanging to Awad Hamed Bandar, the chief judge of Saddam’s Revolutionary Court. Both the visitors in the gallery and Bandar began chanting, “God is great.”

“God is greater than the unjust,” Bandar said as Abdel Rahman completed the verdict. “God is greater than the occupier. God is greater than the colonizers. God is greater than the collaborators.”

Saddam, wearing his signature black suit and white tie, walked into the courtroom with an air of somberness and gravity, casting himself as the wounded symbol of the Sunni Arab pride that was the cornerstone of his Baath Party’s ideology.

“I will listen to the judgment,” he said, looking much more somber and downcast than he has in past court appearances. “But I will not stand up.”

A bevy of bailiffs surrounded him, forcing him to stand up. One glared at him with what appeared to be a mocking smile as the former president was sentenced to hang for crimes against humanity, including murder, imprisonment, torture, forcible imprisonment and relocation.

“Long live Iraq!” Saddam said, holding up a green Quran. “Long live the Arab nation. Down with the agents! God is great! Long live the people!”

Then Saddam, who helped launch Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic divides by targeting Shiites and Kurds throughout the 1980s and 1990s, took on the role of healer of a country being torn asunder by sectarian passions.

“We recommend the great Iraqi people forgive all those who strayed and we recommended the great Iraqi people not to be angry at the people of the countries that participated in occupying your country,” he said.

“Don’t push,” he told the bailiff escorting him out the courtroom. “I am your brother.”