Iraqi-Americans reacted with sadness to the execution of Saddam Hussein Saturday, calling the former Iraqi president’s death by hanging early this morning Baghdad time a missed opportunity for justice. An Iraqi tribunal set up by the United States government had convicted Hussein of murder in the killings of 148 Shiite Muslims from the Iraqi town of Dujail, where assassins had tried to kill Hussein in 1982. The crime, while severe, is actually one of his smaller-scale atrocities.

In 1988, Hussein’s government began the Anfal campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Kurds of northern Iraq. More than 100,000 Kurds were killed, many of them lined up and stripped before being machine gunned and dumped into trenches. “As a Kurd, I don’t think Saddam should have been executed right now,” Kani Xulam, founder of the Washington-based American Kurdish Information Network, said.

“They say suffering brings about compassion,” he said, “but if suffering is not validated, is not honoured, is not heard, then people turn into cynics. Those are the issues that the Kurds feel, that I as a Kurdish activist feel.” In death, Xulam said, Hussein will escape justice for gassing Kurdish civilians with chemical weapons, as well as the brutal murders of thousands of Shiites who rose up against his regime at George Bush Sr.’s urging after the 1991 Gulf War.

Shakir Mustafa, a Baghdad-born professor at Boston University, agreed with Xulam’s analysis. “During the trial, Saddam sounded really ready to provide such details,” Dr. Mustafa said. “For the Dujail case, for example, Saddam said ‘Yes, I wanted these men executed because they committed a crime. They wanted to assassinate me.’ He volunteered these and other details and I think the Iraqi people would be interested in hearing about what he says he had done for Iraq’s security.” Another reason Hussein’s hanging is unlikely to bring closure to his victims, Mustafa said, is the fact that his trial was carried out under an unpopular US occupation.

The trial “lacks legitimacy,” he said. “[It’s] being done by an occupying force and government that very much lacks legitimacy itself, so that closure, I don’t think its coming,” he added. From the beginning, observers note, Hussein’s trial had been directly supervised by US officials. It was funded by a $138 million grant from Congress and by a large staff of foreigners working out of the US Embassy in Baghdad called the Regimes Crime Unit. Previous key moments of Hussein’s trial had coincided closely with the needs of the George W. Bush administration.

Some observers believe Washington closely managed Hussein’s trial in order to avoid having Hussein reveal damaging secrets about his past relations with US presidents, especially Ronald Reagan. With Hussein’s execution, his precise relationship with the United States government during the Cold War will go unexplored, as will any investigation into possible US

complicity with specific crimes companies that sold chemical weapons and other instruments of terror to Hussein are also likely off the hook with his death. “I think there are companies that supported Saddam inside the United States and Europe,” the American

Kurdish Information Network’s Kani Xulam said. “My fear now is that they will go scot-free.” — IPS