Baghdad, Iraq – In Saddam Hussein’s final hours, calls for a stay of execution came from an unexpected source: survivors of some of the worst atrocities of his blood-soaked regime.
“We are happy that this tyrant’s end has come,” said Sarchanar Mahmoud, a 31-year-old court investigator in the Kurdish town of Halabche in northern Iraq where half her family died in a 1988 poison gas attack. But “not in this sudden manner. We wished that the remaining cases would be settled first.”
Hundreds of thousands were believed to have been tortured in Hussein’s notorious jails, disappeared into mass graves, or died in his wars and chemical attacks. But when Hussein was hanged at dawn Saturday, it was for just one case: the killing of at least 148 men and boys in retribution for a 1982 assassination attempt in the Shiite Muslim town of Dujayl.
Officials with the special court convened to pass judgment on the Iraqi president’s decades-long regime say an ongoing trial dealing with the much wider campaign against Iraq’s ethnic Kurdish minority that resulted in as many as 100,000 deaths is due to resume Jan. 8.
But without the chief defendant, many people fear that interest will dwindle and that countless victims of other atrocities will never receive their proper day in court.
