Images of hanging make Hussein a martyr to many

Images of hanging make Hussein a martyr to many
By Hassan M. Fattah
Copyright by The International Herald Tribune
January 5, 2007.

BEIRUT: In the week since Saddam Hussein was hanged in an execution steeped in sectarian overtones, his public image in the Arab world, formerly that of a convicted dictator, has undergone a resurgence of admiration and awe.

On the streets, in newspapers and over the Internet, Saddam has re- emerged as a Sunni Arab hero who stood calm and composed as his Shiite executioners tormented and abused him.

"No one will ever forget the way in which Saddam was executed," remarked President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot and republished by the official Egyptian news agency. "They turned him into a martyr."

In Libya, a government official declared that Libya would erect a statue of Saddam near the site of a monument to Omar al Mukhtar, a Libyan national symbol who resisted the Italian invasion of Libya and was hanged by the Italians in 1931.

Here in Beirut, hundreds of members of Lebanon's Baath party and Palestinian activists marched Friday behind a symbolic coffin representing that of Saddam, praying for his soul. Photographs of Saddam standing up in court, against the backdrop of the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem were pasted on city walls, praising "Saddam the Martyr."

A banner across one major Beirut thoroughfare cursed "America and its spies."

"Our Condolences to the Nation for the Assassination of Saddam and Victory to the Iraqi Resistance," it read.

By standing up to the United States and its client government in Baghdad, and dying with seeming dignity far from the hole where he was captured, Saddam appears to have been virtually cleansed of his murderous past.

Just a month ago, Saddam, who ruled Iraq in a brutal 27-year reign of terror and destruction, was widely dismissed as a criminal who deserved the death penalty, even if his trial was seen as flawed. But shortly after his execution Saturday, when a video apparently filmed with a cellphone showed Shiite guards taunting Saddam and him responding calmly but firmly to them, many across the region began looking at him as a martyr.

"The Arab world has been devoid of pride for a long time," said Ahmad Mazin al-Shugairi, host of a television show on the Middle East Broadcasting Center, which promotes a moderate version of Islam in Saudi Arabia. "The way Saddam acted in court and just before he was executed, with dignity and no fear, struck a chord with Arabs who are desperate for their own leaders to have pride, too."

Ayman Safadi, editor in chief of the independent Jordanian daily Al Ghad, said: "The final scene for many was of Saddam taken out of a hole. That has all changed now."

At the heart of the surprising reversal of opinion is the contrast between the official video aired on Iraqi TV last Saturday, of Saddam taken to the gallows and fitted with a noose round his neck, and the grainy, shaky recording of Shiite militiamen taunting the deposed leader with his hands tied, telling Saddam to go to hell, praising the militant Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr and opening the trapdoor before Saddam had completed his prayer.

Far from a solemn proceeding by a dispassionate state, Saddam's execution has been framed as an act of sectarian vengeance shrouded in political theater and overseen by an American occupation that has resulted in little more than humiliation and tragedy for Iraqis.

"If Saddam had media planners he could not have planned it better than this," said Daoud Kuttab, an Arab media critic and director of the online radio station Ammannet.net. "Nobody could ever have imagined that Saddam would have gone down with such dignity."

In the days since, writers and commentators have stopped short of eulogizing the dictator but looked right past his bloody history as they compared Iraq's current circumstances with Iraq under Saddam.

In Jordan, long a bastion of support for Saddam, many are lionizing him and decrying the timing of the execution and the taunts as part of a Sunni- Shiite conflict.

"Was it a coincidence that Israel, Iran and the United States all welcomed Saddam's execution?" Hamadeh Faraneh, a newspaper columnist, wrote in the daily Al Rai. "Was it also a coincidence when Saddam said bravely in front of his tormentors, 'Long live the nation,' and that Palestine is Arab, then uttered the declaration of faith? His last words express his depths and what he died for."

"For the vast majority Saddam is a martyr, even if he made mistakes in his first years of rule," wrote Mohammad Abu Ruman in Al Ghad on Thursday. "He cleansed himself later by confronting the Americans and by rejecting to negotiate with them."

Even the pro-Saudi media, normally critical of Saddam, chimed in.

In the pan-Arab daily Al Hayat, Bilal Khubbaiz, commenting on Iranian and Israeli praise of Saddam's execution, noted, "Saddam, as Iraq's ruler, was an Iron Curtain that prevented the Iranian influence from reaching into the Arab world" as well as "a formidable party in the Arab-Israeli conflict." And Zuhayr Qusaybati, also writing in Al Hayat, noted that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki or Iraq "gave Saddam what he most wanted; he turned him into a martyr in the eyes of many Iraqis, who can now demand revenge."