Justice also dies in Iraq

From Random Hipatia

I was not originally going to write anything about the organized killing of Saddam under a kind of victors justice after a mock trial where the verdict was pre-ordained and the government was determined to make sure no other outcome happened even removing judges who appeared too impartial because I had considered the question and person rather irrelevant. My initial thought was how ironic that Saddam himself should receive the same level of justice he gave to others. And how rather sad that the “new” Iraqi government has proven itself to be no different in this respect than the “old” one. However, there were a number of curious, and of course, completely unreported by the “official” media, reactions in different parts of the world, and it is these developments I thought were worth considering in of themselves.

First of course the media did choose to report a carefully planned and controlled version of events surrounding the execute of Saddam. This is the “official” narrative where only American-Iraqi’s are shown cheering his death, only the out of favor Sunni Iraqi’s are shown angry, no Shia are shown celebrating in public, and the Kurds are not shown at all. Each of these images are deliberately presented to the (North) American public.

The international press is a little more honest and interesting. For example, 9 out of 10 Iraqi’s now believe life since Saddam has been significantly more violent and worse than under his rule, and that the presence of U.S. troops remains the primary source of violence in the country. Indeed if Iraq has “turned a corner” with the death of Saddam, for some, it seems that corner was a reminder of the end of “better days” compared to the Iraq the U.S. has managed to create.

More interesting, however, is the reactions of peoples elsewhere. While you will not hear of it in the North American press, for some people from as far away as Kerala (in India), people in Italy, and in some parts of Latin America, Saddams humiliating ending has yet transformed him before so many as a martyr of the struggle against imperialism, even if a rather imperfect one, largely thanks to Bush. This is the story that the press has not reported, nor the mass and spontaneous demonstrations that had taken place in India among people and groups completely unrelated. I have heard of similar reactions and protests in Italy also from first-hand accounts, and others through more free news sources. A rather curious development indeed.

It seems not just Saddam has been hanged this weekend, but, for many people in the world, so has the most basic concept of justice, and it is this which has brought so many different people and groups out in mass public protests in so many parts of the world. I offer the words of the great Italian physicist, Stefano Barale, to consider, “Today justice is a ridiculous trial carried out by a puppy government in the hand of a nation that has recently deleted the need of an habeas corpus from his law system, and that refuses to apply Geneva’s convention to its war prisoners. If an “Axis of Evil” is ever going to exist, Bush’s America will be its leader nation (followed by the Chinese government and some of the autocracies in the Arab countries).”

Yes, indeed, a corner has been turned this weekend, but a rather dark one for those that care about justice, equality, and the “rule of law”. As in life, Saddam’s death is about the triumph of tyranny over justice, and while I find no tear to shed over his death, but I have many for the slow death of my nation as a result of the process that brought it about.