UIA woos Muqtada
Inquiry Launched into Saddam Execution Irregularities
MENA, the Egyptian news agency, reports a demonstration of hundreds of persons on Tuesday in Habhab near Baquba, protesting Saddam's execution. The demonstrators denounced the Iraqi and American governments.
An Iraqi observer at Saddam's execution, prosecutor Munqidh Faraon, maintains that two senior Iraqi government officials took the footage with their cell phones. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has launched an investigation. But national security adviser Muwaffaq al-Ruba'i admits that the footage, which includes Shiite sectarian chanting and taunting, is extremely damaging to the government.
An Iranian wire service reports that the parties making up the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance (the leading bloc in parliament) met with young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in hopes of convincing him to ask the 32 parliamentarians who follow him to return to the alliance. The effort is being guided by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who spearheaded the formation of the UIA in fall, 2004. This Iranian interpretation of the meetings suggests that they are intended to forestall an alliance of the Sadrists with Sunni Arab parties, which would have the effect of dividing the Shiites. Mehr also explains Muqtada's prerequisites for rejoining the UIA, which his deputies left when Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki met with US President George W. Bush in Amman. Muqtada, the report says,
' has said that his supporters will return to parliament and cabinet sessions if a timetable is set for the withdrawal of foreign troops. He also totally rejected the proposals to merge the Mahdi Army with Iraq’s armed forces, saying that would only be possible after the withdrawal of U.S. troops.'
Police found 53 bodies in Iraq on Tuesday: 45 in Baghdad, 5 in nearby Nahrawan to the southeast, and another 3 in Mosul. Political violence left about 10 persons dead on Tuesday. A bombing wounded 3 Iraqi policemen in Kirkuk. Another bombing killed 5 persons in central Baghdad.
Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that Adnan al-Kadhimi, a member of the Dawa Party politburo told its reporter that the new strategy of the al-Maliki government will stand on three pillars: 1) taking security duties over from Americans; 2) making alterations in the Iraqi cabinet, and 3) and implementing a plan for reconciliation so as to gather as many Sunnis as possible [on the side of the government].
Check out Ranger against the War.
posted by Juan Cole @ 1/03/2007 08:16:00 AM
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SPIEGEL ONLINE - January 3, 2007, 02:41 PM
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,457559,00.html
THE WORLD FROM BERLIN
Was Saddam's Execution a Message to Shiites?
The clandestine video of Saddam's execution has become a bestseller among Shiites in Baghdad. German papers wonder if the public spectacle was a deliberate inflammation of Shiite sentiment.
REUTERS
Inflaming sentiments? A boy burns a bank note from the time of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in Baghdad"s Sadr City.
A DVD of Saddam Hussein's hanging has become a bestseller in Baghdad's Shiite suburb of Sadr City, according to German news agencies. The shaky mobile-phone video shows execution guards trading insults with Saddam and praising the radical Shiite preacher Muqtada al-Sadr -- whose father, many believe, was murdered by Saddam. Cheers can be heard after the ex-dictator hangs.
An official video released to Iraqi national TV shows a hangman tightening a noose around Saddam's neck, but the mobile-phone video goes on to show his death.
The international community has been outraged -- especially at Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose government not only let a (banned) mobile phone slip into the execution chamber, but also hurried up the hanging. Saddam's half-brother Barzan Ibrahim and a former chief justice of the Revolutionary Court, Awad al-Bandar, were condemned to death along with Saddam last November for the murder of 148 Shiites in 1982, but their executions were delayed until after the Islamic festival of Eid al-Adha, which for Shiites ends this Wednesday afternoon. The Associated Press reported they would hang this Thursday.
German newspapers see the whole affair as a gruesome circus that either threatens western values or drives another wedge between Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites. Some even suspect Maliki of using Saddam's execution as a sop to his Shiite supporters.
The center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes:
"Under pressure from Shiite Prime Minister Maliki, the death sentence was carried out on the day Sunnis celebrated the first day of Eid, which is considered a holy day of forgiveness. Shiites celebrate the start of Eid one day later. Now there's a danger that the onetime despot will be romanticized by Sunni Arabs as a martyr in the struggle against Shiite Islam. (...)
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"The Sunnis will remember Saddam's last exchange of words with one of his hangmen, who revealed himself as a follower of radical Shiite preacher Muqtada al-Sadr. Sadr commands the militia most feared by Sunnis in Iraq. He's also the most important supporter of al-Maliki's regime. (...)
"Talks are already in process between Baghdad and Washington to replace al-Maliki with another, more energetic Shiite politician. It's possible that the over-hasty execution of Saddam was an attempt by Maliki to win back popularity among his Shiite constituency."
The left-wing Tageszeitung asks ironically:
"What do the minimum civilized standards of the free world mean? The answer is, more or less, that nobody should bring a mobile phone to an execution.
"(These civilized standards) determine how television footage should be edited. Official videos end before the trapdoor opens. (...) Pictures of the body are okay -- including while it is still hanging on the gallows. (...) But the moment of death: That's taboo and has to remain taboo!
"(We need to ask) whether it can ever be squared with our system of values to show a human being in the face of death to the public -- or if we are, in the process, getting closer and closer to the terrorist mentality which we actually want to fight."
The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung writes:
"It would have been a miracle if Saddam's execution had not raised new problems for the Baghdad government, the overstrained US army, or for the violence-plagued Iraqi people. But now a mobile-phone video has turned up, and the pictures and sound both show, first, just how degraded Saddam's death was, and second how depraved a society has to be to turn the execution of a condemned thug into a cheap and coarse spectacle. (...)
"The video also shows that neither the Baghdad government nor the American occupiers are in a position to control an execution. (...) Saddam Hussein's death won't heal old wounds any more than it will satisfy a lust for revenge -- the pictures are more likely to achieve the opposite effect. And a government that can't even prohibit recordings of an execution will never be able to control its country."
- Michael Scott Moore, 12:30 CET
© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2007
All Rights Reserved
Reproduction only allowed with the permission of SPIEGELnet GmbH
Related SPIEGEL ONLINE links:
Saddam Hanging: Iraqi Government Investigating Source of Execution Video (01/02/2007)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,457416,00.html
End of an Era for Iraq: Saddam Hussein Executed in Baghdad (12/30/2006)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,457170,00.html
Death Penalty for Saddam: Hundreds of Iraqis Apply to be Hangman (12/27/2006)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,456652,00.html
Ranger Against War appears to be paralyzed from the eyebrows up. You can't take away home defense weapons if you can't provide security. In Germany and Japan there was a peace treaty and full government cooperation,etc. etc,
You never commented about Sadr negotiating with the Sunnis. It seems odd to me that he would want to form an alliance with his enemies in the civil war against his own sect. Can you square this circle?
I see no reason why anyone should be in trouble for filming the execution. The autorities tried to just put out a sanitized version without the sound and "finale" to impress everyone, so now we get to see what really happens at this execution. All executions should be filmed in their entirety. Just as you shouldn't sanitize a war, you shouldn't sanitize an execution, as it just encourages more of the same.
One of the characteristics of modern European parliamentary politics is one of coalition government. Though this post is certainly not advocating any sort of Western superiority or arrogance, an Iraqi coalition of Shiite and Sunni parties may reduce the sectarian tension that is currently rife in Iraq. Such a coalition would force cooperation between a militant Shiite bloc (Moqtada Sadr's) and former Baathists; to govern even as a minority would render a reconciliation of religious differences. It is also likely that said coalition would deter intersectarian strife, or at least politically-sanctioned violence between Sadr's Mahdi Army and the Sunni parties. Furthermore, a split Shiite bloc would not only force compromise between Sunnis and Shias, but it would also effectively reduce Iran's influence in Iraq, as it would be incapable of manipulating a united Shiite front. What can materialize from a reconciliation between Sadr and Sunni leaders besides a reduction in sectarian warfare? De-Baathification, which would begin to restore the much-needed technocrats from Hussein's government that are more capable of restoring basic infrastructure to the country to say the least. Therefore, perhaps the medium-to-long-run outcome of al-Sadr's split is not entirely destabalizing.
Might want to track this one as well. It could be uglier than we imagined.
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