The Aesthetics of Execution

By Am Johal, AlterNet. Posted January 3, 2007.

It is a form of irony, that in his final moments of life, Saddam Hussein, the half-baked 'Butcher of Baghdad,' appeared more dignified than his executioners -- anonymous hooded police officers, randomly chosen, hastily carrying out last minute orders while taunting him. The cell phone video that was shown with a minute of advertising preceding it on Western media websites just added to the impromptu and anti-climactic nature of the event.

They were carrying out the red card that Hussein himself had issued on many others. It was like a World Cup match and the Muslims on the Hajj were infuriated.

But it was an amateur, botched operation which reeked of incompetence on the eve of a Muslim religious holiday. Apparently the execution chamber had a foul odour. Saddam was being sacrificed, partially for the violation of human rights, but also for not being a doormat to American empire.

His last words were, "Down with the traitors, the Americans, the spies and the Persians." When he was handed over to Iraqi guards by U.S. forces, he exchanged curses with them.

In the end, Saddam Hussein was hung in an execution chamber that he had created and often used against his enemies ruthlessly.

The New York Times reported that Mr. Hussein "wore a 1940s-style wool cap, a scarf and a long black coat over a white collared shirt."

After his verdict was read to him, Saddam shouted, "Long live the nation! Long live the people! Long live the Palestinians!" He asked for his copy of the Koran to be given to Bandar, a son of a Revolutionary Court judge who was also about to be executed.

As they began to pray near the gallows, the guards taunted him by calling out the name of radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

As one of the guards became angry, they told Saddam, "You have destroyed us. You have killed us. You have made us live in destitution."

Mr. Hussein was scornful: "I have saved you from destitution and misery and destroyed your enemies, the Persians and Americans."

The guard cursed him. "God damn you."

Mr. Hussein replied back, "God damn you."

The images which emerged looked indistinguishable from Iraqi insurgents beheading foreign journalists on home video cameras.

Were these hundreds of thousands of deaths, these billions of dollars to fight this unnecessary war and the charade of judicial process worth this kind of hastily arranged 6 a.m. photo-op? Was this an act of bravado to the Arab world? Or was it to show the Americans that the new regime meant business? Did the trauma imposed upon Shiites and Kurds mean that they were somehow fit to carry out an impartial justice or was this just sweet revenge? Did international law really prevail? Who was more free and was going to live without coercion now in Iraq?

Slovenian academic Slavoj Zizek brilliantly observed recently that, "'human rights are, as such, a false ideological universality, which masks and legitimizes a concrete politics of Western imperialism, military interventions and neo-colonialism."

Saddam coined phrases like “the mother of all battles” and was relatively harmless with his cache of errant scud missiles during the first Gulf War -- a kind of bumbling foe prone to hyperbole. He was, after all, actively supported by the United States, just like Osama Bin Laden, even though they knew about his human rights violations against Kurds, Shiites and his other political opponents in the 1980's. His picture with Donald Rumsfeld from that era is priceless.

The West grew up with him on their television sets. When he defended himself in court, it was a kind of belated, bloated performance of an amateur theater troupe -- a simulation of legal proceeding and a gesture par excellence of democratic process. His legal training from Cairo was finally being put to use in his own defense. Even former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark raised concerns about the process in Saddam's defense.

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Am Johal is a Vancouver writer who has worked on inner-city issues and just completed a human rights internship in Israel.

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