Saddam Hussein’s conviction for the 1982 slaughter of 150 Shiite Muslims in the village of Dujail followed a trial that only underscored the totalitarian nature of his violent regime.
For all its flaws, the trial was infinitely fairer than any Hussein gave his own victims.
The sentence by the Iraqi High Tribunal brings a measure of justice to the victims of the Dujail massacre – an atrocity largely ignored by the world for decades. As it happens, The Denver Post was one of the few voices in this country that protested that massacre shortly after it happened. The Dujail murders were Hussein’s response to an attempt on his life. An editorial headlined “A Lidice in Iraq” compared the massacre to the 1942 Nazi murder of 340 villagers in Lidice, Czechoslovakia in reprisal for the assassination of an SS leader by Czech resistance fighters.
There are other parallels between the Iraqi tribunal that tried Saddam and the Nuremburg tribunals that punished surviving Nazi war criminals. The judgments at Nuremburg were largely based on documents written by the Nazi leaders themselves. Similar documentary evidence provided the most damning evidence against Saddam and his cohorts.
Iraq’s appeals court will now review the verdicts, probably by the middle of January. While we believe that Saddam and his minions received a fair trial under difficult circumstances, many European leaders have urged that the death penalties meted out to the deposed tyrant and two co-defendants be reduced to life in prison. Such reaction is understandable, since opposition to the death penalty is an article of faith among member nations of the European Union.
Indeed, most calls to reduce Saddam’s sentence where based on categorical opposition to the death penalty, not sympathy for Hussein himself. British British Prime Minister Tony Blair, while noting that he opposes the death penalty in all cases, also praised Saddam’s trial as: “A chance to see again what the past in Iraq was, the brutality, the tyranny, the hundreds of thousands of people he killed, the wars in which there were a million casualties.”
While The Post has long opposed the death penalty, we recognize that Saddam’s best hope for lifetime imprisonment may be that commuting his sentence would add legitimacy to the Iraqi government in the eyes of other nations.
It would be ironic if the conscience of the world community that Saddam so scorned during his despicable years in power would now save his life.
Many Iraqis are hoping instead that justice will run a final course.
