Saddam hanged, Malayalees suffer

According to an Iraqi court Saddam Hussein was  found guilty of the massacre of Iraqis in Dujail and sentenced to death.

“Now, he is in the garbage of history,” said Jawad Abdul-Aziz, who lost his father, three brothers and 22 cousins in the reprisal killings that followed a botched 1982 assassination attempt against Saddam in the Shiite town of Dujail. It was the Dujail killings of which Saddam was convicted. [Iraqis execute Saddam for mass killings]

But then in Kerala we mourn for such brutal dictators and a hartal was called by both the Communists and Congress.

Stating that the “American imperialism has raised a grim challenge to the world peace once again through the execution of Saddam Hussein”, Chief Minister V S Achuthanandan said the Iraqi leader would be remembered forever as a martyr who heroically fought the imperialist interests.[Hartal in Kerala, leaders condemn Saddam’s execution]

For members of a party which think that the Communist occupation and enslavement of Tibet is “peaceful liberation“, Saddam could be a martyr. No mention of his invasion of Kuwait or the murder of a large number of Shiites and Kurds or any of the atrocities mentioned in an article in the New York Times.

DOING the arithmetic is an imprecise venture. The largest number of deaths attributable to Mr. Hussein’s regime resulted from the war between Iraq and Iran between 1980 and 1988, which was launched by Mr. Hussein. Iraq says its own toll was 500,000, and Iran’s reckoning ranges upward of 300,000. Then there are the casualties in the wake of Iraq’s 1990 occupation of Kuwait. Iraq’s official toll from American bombing in that war is 100,000 — surely a gross exaggeration — but nobody contests that thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians were killed in the American campaign to oust Mr. Hussein’s forces from Kuwait. In addition, 1,000 Kuwaitis died during the fighting and occupation in their country.
More recently, according to Iraqis who fled to Jordan and other neighboring countries, scores of women have been executed under a new twist in a “return to faith” campaign proclaimed by Mr. Hussein. Aimed at bolstering his support across the Islamic world, the campaign led early on to a ban on drinking alcohol in public. Then, some time in the last two years, it widened to include the public killing of accused prostitutes.

Often, the executions have been carried out by the Fedayeen Saddam, a paramilitary group headed by Mr. Hussein’s oldest son, 38-year-old Uday. These men, masked and clad in black, make the women kneel in busy city squares, along crowded sidewalks, or in neighborhood plots, then behead them with swords. The families of some victims have claimed they were innocent of any crime save that of criticizing Mr. Hussein. [How Many People Has Saddam Killed?]

Of course, as usual Americans are terrified after listening to the hardship enforced on Malayalees by Malayalees and are busy googling to see who Achyutanandan is.