RSS FeedsSaddam Hussein’s death sentence
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05 Nov
2006 |
Update: I’ve been reading a bit after writing this post and hence, an update. First, Nilesh, a commenter, has opined here that keeping Saddam Hussein and the likes alive would be a needless burden upon the taxpayers. Although I don’t disagree, our governments spend so much on anti-terrorists campaigns that this expenditure would be trifle.
Second, Siddharth Varadarajan sent me an article written by him titled To the victor belongs the judge’s gavel through my contact form. He begins his article (published in The Hindu) with
The show trial of Saddam Hussein was not just a violation of international legal norms by a court operating under the reality of foreign occupation but also an insult to the victims in whose name this political farce was enacted.
I think such articles are a pitiable statement upon the affairs of the world we live in today where we constantly blur the line between rhetoric, logic and reality. All of a sudden there is a hue and cry for the poor Saddam Hussein who so innocently released the poison gas among the Kurds and killed them like cockroaches (no offence to cockroaches although they scare the shit out of me). His entire family was psychopathic; tongues were chopped off, eyes for gorged out, innocent children were decapitated and the vaginas of teenage girls were mutilated to satisfy the perverted sexual urges of his sons under his very nose. He was a dictator of the worst kind and you can easily compare him to the kinds of Ceausescu, Hitler, Stalin, or Pinochet. Who cares he gets justice or not? Does our intellectual heart bleed only for the criminals who somehow become the rulers? What about all those innocent people who die as their victims?
In Samna, the mouthpiece of the Shiv Sena, it’s been written that India should take sides with Suddam Hussein just because he says Kashmir belongs to India. Are we such a lost case that we need endorsements from him? In fact it should be an embarrassment if he speaks for India.
The favorite argument of the intelligentsia is that America is at the core of the entire trial and in fact it should be Bush who should be punished for his war crimes. I totally agree. America needs to be punished for many war crimes, not only for Iraq. The worst cruelties perpetrated by various regimes happen with full American support and endorsement just because they serve the “American interest”. But why this hoarse-crying just when Saddam is being tried? How do his crimes mitigate under the glares of the American crimes, and why do the American crimes attain so much limelight when a loony is being punished, wherever in the world? Bush and his government are environment’s worst enemies and let’s be frank, we’ve only got one planet here and all the wars, war crimes, terrorist attacks, Jihads and the campaigns against the WMDs can only happen if we have the bloody planet under our feet. No intellectual writes about those crimes so feverishly. Punish a Saddam Hussein and the liberty and sovereignty of the world is endangered. This is bullshit.
I read another article published in the Asian Age today where the author has written against the death sentence of Mohammad Afzal Guru and she too follows the much-toed line of the human rights and such. Of course he shouldn’t be hanged because I too find the death sentence barbaric but this doesn’t make him less guilty. The rampant confusion takes place when instead of writing against the death sentence, these confused human-rights activists start writing in favor of the accused (the state is always bad, the accused is always innocent, according to them). They lose track of what the real issue is.
Terrorists and their heads take advantage of this crooked mentality of the so-called activists and intellectuals. The obfuscation is so deep-rooted that sometimes they cannot even correctly define what terrorism is. Afzal and Saddam, sadly, might get the benefit of the same mentality, and hundreds, and perhaps thousands of innocent people will have to pay the price.
The original post follows
Here’s another death sentence that shouldn’t have been awarded. No, I’m not an ardent member of the Saddam Hussein fan club. Neither have I had any soft corner for his ilk. By granting death sentence you needlessly turn these slimies into venerated heroes. Death sentence — as long as it is practiced — should be awarded to really heinous criminals who enjoy no sympathy from any section of the society. Criminals who have got some iota of sympathy from a misguided section of the society should be quietly granted multiple life sentences. Saddam should’ve been quietly given a jail sentence of 200 years where he would have died a death of obscurity.
But I can understand the feelings of those too who are in favor of death sentences. I know it is very hard to believe, but there are many criminals in India who fight elections and get people assassinated or abducted from their prison cells and they live more lavish lives in jails. They become the lawmakers while in jail. Saddam, no matter how dastardly his acts were, has great leadership qualities that he can exploit as long as he is alive. For such people I recommend life-long house-arrest with no means to communicate to the outside world. Just to make sure he doesn’t become a pain-enduring symbol of “resistance”, he should be kept in a very comfortable house with all modern facilities. Let him die a natural death and people will forget him instantly.
Email this link | Posted by Amrit | Tags: International, Politics
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November 7th, 2006 at 9:31 am
Amrit,
I disagree with you here. you are suggesting that people like Saddam should be made to live comfortably with tax payers money. someday their followers will hijack airplan and force the govt to free off Saddam. what i suggest is instead of doing all these they should have killed him instead of capturing him. this way all this money/time spent in prosecuting him would have been saved also.
November 12th, 2006 at 3:44 pm
I must agree with Nilesh as well. I’m not defending America (though I live here) because I do feel that it is responsible for many atrocious things–but, well, I guess I just don’t have that type of sentimentality; especially for mass-murderers.
However, Nilesh is a bit wrong–generally, it actually takes just as much money or even more to keep an inmate on death row because of the lenghty appeals processes allowed to them (they want to be absolutely sure the person is found guilty).
November 16th, 2006 at 10:16 am
What westerners fail to realize is that you, they, we…are judging saddam by standards that are relevant to our culture and life style, not his. He is a product of his environment, as distasteful as he is to western sensibilities. Also, take into account he was encouraged, armed, and propped up by the United States in order to attain oil, and political advantages in the region. We have done this to ourselves, and now we are part of punishing a person we are angry at for climbing out of the box we unrealistically wanted him to stay inside of and behave. We are extremely short-sighted and have a weak grasp of the violent history of the region, and now we are responsible for breaking something we cannot fix. DO NOT BE SURPRISED IF IRAN TAKES POSSESSION OF THE BOTTOM HALF OF WHAT IS NOW IRAQ, INCLUDING PORTS AND OIL. WAY TO GO NEO-CONS!!!!
November 19th, 2006 at 2:32 am
When the news of Saddam Hussein’s sentence reached me, my initial reaction was that it should have been life imprisonment in communicado and not capital punishment, which I am totally against.
When I expressed this opinion at work, my Kurdish colleague gave a long narration of what Saddam Hussein did in his country: the murders of thousands of Kurds, the sadistic tales of acid pools, mutilation, etc. He ended up with, “If I were the one signing his judgement condemning him to death, I wouldn’t do so because I don’t believe in capital punishment but believe me, Saddam deserves every bit of the sentencing and I won’t be unhappy that he is being hanged.”
Does such a perverted person deserve to be hanged? Yes. Do we have the authority to pass judgement and hang him? No. I still don’t think so. If we can rejoice at the wilful killing of another human being, we are no better than him.
Therefore, I still think that Saddam Hussein should have been sentenced to life imprisonment.
That said, the number of deaths in Iraq since America invaded the country is also a highly controversial issue. If Saddam is going to be made to pay for his crimes, who will pay for the crimes inflicted by America on Iraq when the present is investigated in the future?
December 4th, 2006 at 7:13 am
Saddam is not an American creation, nor a creation of Iraq. I’m not sure exactly why some people are so quick to burden entire countries and governments with the responsibility of creating a monster, when the monster created himself. Saddam chose his life, he chose to do the things he did, he needs to be punished accordingly and SWIFTLY. “Let the punishment fit the crime.” Are we Americans responsible for producing the likes of Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, the Hillside Stranglers, Jeffrey Dahmer or any other murderer of American notoriety? Is Hitler a tragic result of Jewish occupation of Germany, or German brainwashing…or poverty…or whatever else we can come up with?
If I beat my child with a stick, should I then blame my mother for spalnking me as a child?
I am having a hard time grasping this thing called “passing the buck” and blaming everyone but the actual criminal for his own FREE WILL. America is no more responsible for ‘creating’ an abhomination like Saddam, than the Jewish or German community is for creating Hitler. Two children from the same exact family can grow up abused and neglected in the same manner. One may choose to punish people who remind him of his mother by raping and killing them - the other may choose to rise above and become a better person, determined to give his own children a happier childhood. We see this in life. It’s called making choices and living with the consequences.
Saddam deserves to be treated with the grace and empathy that he treated the children he killed, the adults he maimed, tortured, brutalized, raped, mutilated… I do think people are forgetting one thing: the longer a criminal with power and money remains in prison, the better chance he has of corrupting from within (do some research on our incarcerated crime bosses of old, and see where this leads you) Ted Bundy escaped custody TWICE. The second time, he killed and seriously injured a handful of young women. ANYTHING is possible when a monster is still breathing on this earth. The point of putting him to death is simple: ending his power, his reign of terror, and his ability to terrorize. We also need to assure our societies around the world that we CAN and will slay the dragons.
December 6th, 2006 at 4:35 am
if Saddam supose to be hanged, then why not Bush & blair and other politicians, which have killed many innocents as well.
December 21st, 2006 at 1:40 pm
just test soft-a :))))
December 30th, 2006 at 7:43 am
I can’t see my hard-earned tax dollars going to support any criminal. I support the death penalty wholeheartedly. My Grandad taught me that some people are like mad dogs and NEED to be put down. We are not all NORMAL(?!?). I think a penal colony could be set aside for all violent criminals, like Australia used to be. Let them become self-sufficient and only receive periodic drops of medicine and other necessities. If they kill each other for the drugs and/or what little food is available…..oh, well. When someone as twisted as Saddam reaches a level of power, it is up to all of us to take him out. I would have no problem pulling the trigger. Shoot them all, let God sort them out. It’s not like the Earth is going to miss a few people. If I happen to be one of those who go missing, that’s my bad luck. We all go eventually, but anyone creating that much misery and havoc should just go sooner so as to minimize the damage inflicted. In the USA, we vote for our President so perhaps we should do like other countries and shoot the idiots who voted for Dubbya. If he had never been elected, he wouldn’t have the chance to do the stupid things he has done. Is that necessarily his fault or the voters???
December 30th, 2006 at 8:52 am
WHAT UTTER RUBBISH!