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| Opinion/Letters | |
| The great betrayal in IRAQ *TANONOKA JOSEPH WHANDE 1/7/2007 6:41:38 PM (GMT +2) I can only imagine what happens to a child when he or she discovers that their parents or role models are a sham. And what about those who spend a lifetime believing in something not only to have their acquired convictions shuttered but so shuttered in the irrevocable international fora? | |
| My respect for America is immense because for almost 12 years Boston and the Berkshires of western Massachusetts were my home. America shielded me as a political refugee student when Ian Smith was violently resisting the advent of Zimbabwe. What I was taught about America is at loggerheads with what America does. As Saddam Hussein was being led to the gallows, George W. Bush was supposedly asleep after earlier having been evacuated from his ranch in Texas in fear of an advancing tornado (no pun intended). However, Bush issued a statement to the effect that Saddam Hussein's hanging was "an important milestone". Couldn't he just have kept quiet? "Even though Saddam Hussein was a dictator," wrote Zimbabwean Tawanda Shoniwa on the BBC's 'Have Your Say', "he did not deserve to be killed in the manner he was." Bush was naive enough to underestimate something called 'public opinion', a dynamic conglomerate of individual opinions of millions of like-minded people. When Saddam was toppled, the reaction in Iraq was one of jubilation. There were few sympathizers. Then Bush orchestrated a legal fiasco in a pitiful attempt to show the world that, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, there was justice and democracy in Iraq because of America's intervention. To the American president, it was 'a stroke of genius' to go it alone. He invaded Iraq, captured its leader then paraded Saddam in front of live international television cameras, humiliating him in an Iraq court. Months after months, the world was subjected to the spectacle of Saddam's trial. For months on end, the world saw and heard Saddam defiantly answer back. Saddam became a frequent visitor in our living rooms. He was sentenced to death in November 2006. The BBC conceded that the tide had slowly started turning in his favour. Like mass hypnosis, the Stockholm Syndrome was settling in. November became the bloodiest in Iraq since his capture. The Stockholm Syndrome is "a psychological response...in which the hostage exhibits loyalty to the hostage-taker, in spite of the danger in which the hostage has been placed." The Oxford dictionary describes it as "feelings of trust and affection felt...by a victim towards a captor." This is why people root for the underdog, whether fond of him or otherwise. This is why people cheer for the 'bad guy' in those awful wrestling matches. "I lived through the bloody war that Saddam started with Iran," wrote Iranian Alireza Pahlavani. "Still, I am not happy with Saddam's execution." The Stockholm Syndrome got its name from a 1973 bank robbery in Norrmalmstorg, in Stockholm, Sweden, in which bank employees who had been held hostage for six days became emotionally attached to their captors. And after only eight weeks of capture, newspaper heiress, Patricia Hearst, helped her captors, the Symbionese Liberation Army, to rob a bank. However, the most recent example of the syndrome is that of Austrian Natascha Kampusch, who was abducted by Wolfgang Priklopil when she was only 10. After eight years of capture and living in a basement cell, she 'escaped' in August 2006 when she was 18. Upon hearing that her captor had committed suicide by jumping onto the path of an oncoming train on the day of her escape, Kampusch broke down. She tearfully told her rescuers right there that Priklopil was "part of my life". And so here we are with mixed reactions to Saddam's demise. Why? He was up against the biggest odds and against the greediest and richest country. The mere fact that America captured and then allowed its proxies to put Saddam on trial and then hang him turned this whole political episode into an unpalatable political tragedy. Not that Saddam did not deserve to die for what he did, but because the way in which "justice" was meted out was totally askew. "I feel saddened by the death of Saddam," said Pakistani Nafeesa Zafar, "not because he deserved to live but because it took place under US occupation of Iraq." Iraq was an American mistake right from the start, especially if we consider who supported and armed Saddam against Iran in the early 80s. The people who did so are the same ones who just killed him. Sure, there are people we do not like to have around. Leaders who murder children while they supposedly clean up our cities. Tyrants who rape and kill innocent citizens. Dictators like Mugabe, Museveni and all the filthy dirty autocrats of their ilk deserve maximum punishment for killing defenseless citizens. But I have never been able to dance and cheer at the killing of a person, regardless of how loathsome they may be. I do not think I ever will. I intensely disliked Laurent Kabila, for both national and personal reasons, but I was dismayed to witness my compatriots celebrating his death in the streets of Harare before riot police intervened to deny them their freedom of expression. While we pray for natural causes to please come to our rescue in Zimbabwe, I would not cheer to see Mugabe, Museveni or Taylor dangling at the end of a thick rope, deserving it as they may. Good riddance, yes, but I'd not cheer. There is always a tendency to root for the underdog. I was humbled to see Saddam slightly tipping his head backwards to allow the hangman to slip a scarf around his neck before the noose proper was tightened and before the hangmen started to taunt and to insult him. Seeing him standing there with his hands handcuffed to his back with the noose around his neck asking his taunting and overzealous executioners, "Is this manly behavior?" must have touched many people who had wanted to see him hanged. "I personally was appalled by the Hussein dictatorship," said Briton Francis Howard to the BBC, "however, I was impressed by the way he dealt with his last few seconds before the trap door opened. Would Bush or Blair be so brave, I doubt it." Witnessing the manner in which the great Iraq dictator was hanged became an anti-climax. That one hanging will never avenge the thousands he killed. I could not feel that the Americans and the Iraqis had avenged anyone or anything. A life is the ultimate sacrifice. Saddam died because he killed. He gained nothing from those killings and we, his survivors, gained even less because we allowed ourselves to sink lower than he had ever been. This deplorable display of inhuman and barbaric behavior has prompted Italy to declare its intention to campaign, through the UN, for the worldwide abolition of capital punishment. "To feel compassion does not mean we agree with whatever Saddam did," Canadian Lee-Anne of Surrey, British Columbia, says on 'Have Your Say', "but in the time of one's death, how hard is it to keep hate alive?" The heart of the matter is that the Americans, through their Iraqi proxies, should just have executed Saddam without making a disgraceful public spectacle of the whole sordid exercise, especially considering the flawed and biased trial he was subjected to. This appalling display of 'justice' forced many people to sympathise with the former Iraq dictator because of the clear absence of fairness. The killing exhibition is one that some of us find difficult to associate with America. It is what I, as a human being, fail to come to terms with. It was a betrayal of those beliefs and values that their schools and universities taught me. How many 'legal executions' of convicted murderers are shown on American TV? I am sadly reminded of the callous and uncivilised conduct of the Somalis several years ago when they were shown dragging the headless and naked torso of an American soldier behind a truck on the streets of Mogadishu. Where have all of earth's humans gone? We are all animals, aren't we? *Tanonoka Joseph Whande is a Zimbabwean journalist |
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