Hanging 101

From most credible news reports, the hangings by the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein and his half-brother, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, were badly botched. If the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki had embarked on a deliberate plan to enrage the minority Sunni sect in Iraq, they wouldn’t have been able to think of a better way of provoking their adversaries.

Together with al-Tikriti, another Saddam official, Awad Ahmed al-Bandar, the former head of Iraq’s revolutionary court, was sentenced to death for the killing of 148 Shiites from the village of Dujail in 1968. There is little question that the two, like Saddam, were guilty as hell, but the circumstances of the deaths, first of Saddam and then of al-Tikriti, have led the international community to wonder whether it was justice or sectarian vengeance that was at work here.

The dispensation of justice would have sent a clear message to all Iraqis, despite the opposition of the Vatican and some international groups to the death penalty. But the bungled executions managed to offend the sensibilities of even death penalty advocates and might have galvanized protest against the United States and the Maliki government, of which the US is the acknowledged sponsor.

In the execution of Saddam before the New Year, the raucous proceedings, including the taunting of Saddam by a hostile Shiite crowd and supposed "guards" up to the moment he fell from the gallows, and then more Internet images of deep gashes on the neck of the dead deposed dictator, led to an international outcry.

The executions of al-Tikriti and al-Bandar were carried out, apparently despite the appeals of the world community, as well as the Iraqi Presidency Council, that the executions be further postponed, after several previous postponements.

It might be recalled that initial advance news reports of Saddam’s hanging said that the pair would be hanged together with him. But the Iraqi government decided to defer the executions of the two. These were suddenly implemented the other day, to the surprise of even highly placed Iraqi officials such as Vice-President Tareq al-Hashemi.

But on top of the riotous Saddam hanging, that of al-Tikriti went terribly wrong. As the Agence France Presse reported, "Barzan’s head ripped from his body as he plunged from the gallows." He was, the AFP dispatch noted, "gruesomely decapitated." That’s not supposed to happen, notwithstanding this lame statement by an Iraqi government spokesman: "There was an incident that happened, that is the separation between the body of Bazan and the head. This happens seldom but it did happen and there was an act of God and it was a normal process. It has happened before."

Seldom have the words "incident," "act of God," and "normal process" been used with such bare-faced audacity to disguise simple incompetence, at best, and a shameless determination to inflict ignominy and ridicule, at worst.

No wonder the Sunni sect, to whom the dead men belong, have sworn sustained and unremitting violence against the government and the American occupiers. The latter’s anger is understandable, even as the world roundly condemns the violence they threaten.

We must make clear, yet again, that criticizing the Iraqi government for the botched executions does not at all mean we are inclined to shed tears for Saddam, al-Tikriti or al-Bandar. Saddam was correctly named the Butcher of Baghdad, the brains behind the slaughter of thousands in Iraq during his long regime.

As reported by Reuters News, Al-Tikriti, Saddam’s intelligence chief, was head of the infamous Mukhabarat. He was reputed to have personally overseen torture sessions, eating grapes as he watched, and ordered mass murders.

Al-Bandar, as chief judge of the revolutionary court, was accused of holding show trials that often resulted in summary executions. He was the judge in the trials of those 148 Shiites killed after the aborted assassination attempt on Saddam in 1982.

All three deserved the most extreme penalties allowed by law. Iraqi law permits convicted criminals to be put to death. But beyond the debate on the death penalty, no one argues that even the worst criminals should be executed under the horrible conditions that obtained in the executions of Saddam and two of his accomplices.

Let’s not forget that there are other accused being tried for crimes against humanity before Iraqi courts. The betting is that many of these accused, albeit probably not all, will also be meted the death penalty. If their executions are attended by the same "incidents" that we saw in the hangings of Saddam, al-Tikriti and al-Bandar, the al-Maliki government will reap the consequences of domestic and world rebuke, from which it could arguably never recover.

The Iraqi government must not allow the general disgust of Saddam and his ilk to dissipate amid the universal horror at the almost medieval method of carrying out the court’s sentences. Even pro-death penalty states demand that dead men walking must be treated with respect and dignity.

We do this, not out of some futile or unrealistic hope that their souls will be saved, although many others apparently are at the moment they are about to meet their God, but because we want to demonstrate that in civilized societies, even doomed men that must pay their debts to society are entitled to dignified deaths.

To see them jeered as they die, their bodies mutilated and desecrated, offends all our notions of decency. In life, they may not have shown similar concern for their fellow human beings. But through our insistence that law and justice must prevail, we show them how an orderly society can be different.

If we give in to primitive instincts for retribution and revenge, we confirm that we are essentially no different from the lowlife they became.

The Iraqi government will probably put more of Saddam’s associates to death. It had better get its act together. Al-Maliki should rid his administration of the blood-thirsty, incompetent savages that have shown the world how not to undertake this gruesome task of hanging people.

Justice, not vengeance, must be the unmistakable message. Otherwise, the Iraqi government will have made a powerful argument against the death penalty. I hope there are some in the Iraqi government that still care.