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EVOCTIONS |
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awaited him. Dujail!? Why Dujail of all cases? Here is a man who began his career in power in the late 60s by exterminating the entire (mostly Shia) leadership of the Communist party in Iraq, went on to launch an invasion of Iran in 1980 that cost up to half a million lives, massacred his own Kurdish population in 1987-88 when some of their leaders sided with the Iranians, invaded Kuwait in 1990, and massacred Iraqi Shias in 1991 when they rebelled against his rule at the end of that war. And they hanged him for Dujail? It’s as if they had taken Adolf Hitler alive in 1945, but ignored his responsibility for starting the Second World War and his murder of six million Jews and just put him on trial for executing people suspected of involvement in the July 1944 bomb plot. With all of Saddam’s other crimes to choose from, why on earth would you hang him for executing the people suspected of involvement in the Dujail plot? Am not an anti American critic but I would like us to analyse and judge by our selves who exactly was behind the scenes to the downfall of Saddam Hussein and why the Dujail case was picked out of all the other more serious cases. I have done some research to find out exactly why Dujail! I am made to believe that it’s because the US was not involved in the Dujail massacre but was either directly or indirectly involved in the other more serious cases like the massacre of the Iraqi Communists (the US Central Intelligence Agency gave Saddam their membership lists). It was implicated up to its ears in Saddam’s war against Iran to the point of arranging for Iraq to be supplied with the chemicals to make poison gas, providing Baghdad with satellite and AWACS intelligence data on Iranian targets, and seconding US Air Force photo interpreters to Baghdad to draw Saddam the detailed maps of Iranian trenches that let him drench them in poison gas. The Ronald Reagan administration stopped Congress from condemning Saddam’s use of poison gas, and the US State Department tried to protect Saddamwhen he gassed his own Kurdish citizens in Halabja in 1988, spreading stories (which it knew to be false) that Iranian planes had dropped the gas. It was the US that finally saved Saddam’s regime by providing naval escorts for tankers carrying oil from Arab Gulf states while Iraqi planes were left free to attack tankers coming from Iranian ports. Even when one of Saddam’s planes mistakenly attacked an American destroyer in 1987, killing 37 crewmembers, Washington forgave him. And it was George W. Bush’s father who urged Iraq’s Shias and Kurds to rebel after Saddam was driven out of Kuwait in 1991, and then failed to use US air power to protect the Shias from massacre when they answered his call. In my personal conclusion, I feel that the US was deeply involved in all of Saddam’s major crimes, one way or another, so no trial that delved into the details of those crimes could be allowed. Instead, the spin-doctors in the current Bush administration put the Dujail trial first and scheduled the trials for Saddam’s bigger crimes for later, knowing that they would all be cancelled once the death penalty for the Dujail incident was confirmed. The dirty laundry will never have to be displayed in public. But it does mean that the man who was hanged on 30th December 2006 not only had a farce of a trial before a kangaroo court; he was executed for the wrong crime. May his soul rest in peace! |
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Edward Kasamba |
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