thedrifter
03-08-06, 07:27 AM
Saddam's Lidice
The dictator's trial reveals a telling historical parallel.
Wednesday, March 8, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
How mighty a state is Germany--
That can drag from his bed unawake, unaware,
Unarmed, a man, to be murdered where
His wife and child must watch and see;
Then carted them off in truck and cart
Into Germany . . .
--From "The Murder of Lidice," by Edna St. Vincent Millay
In the late spring of 1942, the world learned the name Lidice. Czech resistance had assassinated deputy SS chief Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, and Adolf Hitler ordered Heydrich's successor to "wade through blood" to find the killers. Nearly 2,000 innocent civilians were murdered by the Nazis without turning up the culprits. So the decision was made to obliterate an entire village, so that the world would know the price of Nazi blood.
On the evening of June 10, German troops sealed off the Czech mining village of Lidice, chosen because two of its native sons were serving in Britain's Royal Air Force. They gunned down Lidice's 173 men in groups of 10, shipped the women to the Ravensbruck concentration camp and deported some of the remaining children to Germany.
Next the Germans had the village razed, its graves dug up and its rubble buried. Finally, they proudly broadcast the details of what they had done. The world got the message. "If future generations ask us what we are fighting for," said U.S. Navy Secretary Frank Knox, "we shall tell them the story of Lidice."
Fast forward 40 years and to another village, this one called Dujail, in Iraq. In July 1982, Saddam Hussein was nearly killed there when gunmen opened fire on his motorcade. The dictator's reprisal came swiftly: That night, security forces arrested 350 villagers, including 15-year-old Ahmad Hassan Mohammad. "They blindfolded me," Mr. Mohammad recalled while testifying during Saddam's trial in Baghdad last December. "But I was so young, it [the blindfold] kept falling."
He described seeing "a machine that looked like a grinder and had some blood and hair [on it and] I saw bodies of people from Dujail." Of Mr. Mohammad's 10 brothers, seven were murdered by Saddam's henchmen, along with 141 others from Dujail.
As with Lidice, Dujail was razed and its orchards bulldozed. Also like Lidice, the purpose of the massacre was not to dispense justice but to make an example of the villagers. "You people of Dujail, we have disciplined Iraq through you," Mr. Mohammad recalled one of the torturers saying.
Now come to the present. Last week, Saddam acknowledged in court that he had ordered the summary trial that led to the execution of the villagers and the destruction of their farmland. "Where is the crime?" he asked, claiming that as president of Iraq all his actions were lawful. Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg trial famously adopted a similar defense.
Saddam and his seven co-defendants have also been doing their utmost to turn the trial into farce, heckling the judges and calling on Iraqis watching on TV to rise up against Coalition forces. Saddam has also protested the indignity of having to ride a service elevator and use a toilet exposed to public view. "Is this humanitarian?" he griped in court.
While there is much to regret in the way this trial has been conducted--Saddam and his co-defendants should have been placed, Adolf Eichmann-like, in a glass box, to be seen but not heard--there is also much to admire. For Iraqis, it has been a short course in what democratic justice is all about, with its procedures, its standards of evidence, and its respect for the rights of the defendant, and how all that differs from the arbitrary "justice" to which they were too long accustomed. For much of the wider Arab public, the trial has also exposed the criminality of a once widely admired man.
But there's a broader lesson here. We tend to forget that, for all of Iraq's current troubles, the U.S. and its allies deposed a dictator whose methods and purposes were eerily similar to those of the Nazis, even when it came to a comparatively small massacre such as the one in Dujail. That's something in which Americans can take justifiable pride, as much as the World War II generation did in defeating the Nazis. And it's something to which critics of the war, at least those who profess sincere concern with human rights, ought to give some thought. As Millay wrote:
Ask yourself, ask yourself: What have we done?
Who, after all, are we?
That we should sit at ease in the sun,
The only country, the only one,
Unmolested and free?
Catch him! Catch him! Do not wait!
Or will you wait, and share the fate
Of the village of Lidice?
Ellie
The dictator's trial reveals a telling historical parallel.
Wednesday, March 8, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
How mighty a state is Germany--
That can drag from his bed unawake, unaware,
Unarmed, a man, to be murdered where
His wife and child must watch and see;
Then carted them off in truck and cart
Into Germany . . .
--From "The Murder of Lidice," by Edna St. Vincent Millay
In the late spring of 1942, the world learned the name Lidice. Czech resistance had assassinated deputy SS chief Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, and Adolf Hitler ordered Heydrich's successor to "wade through blood" to find the killers. Nearly 2,000 innocent civilians were murdered by the Nazis without turning up the culprits. So the decision was made to obliterate an entire village, so that the world would know the price of Nazi blood.
On the evening of June 10, German troops sealed off the Czech mining village of Lidice, chosen because two of its native sons were serving in Britain's Royal Air Force. They gunned down Lidice's 173 men in groups of 10, shipped the women to the Ravensbruck concentration camp and deported some of the remaining children to Germany.
Next the Germans had the village razed, its graves dug up and its rubble buried. Finally, they proudly broadcast the details of what they had done. The world got the message. "If future generations ask us what we are fighting for," said U.S. Navy Secretary Frank Knox, "we shall tell them the story of Lidice."
Fast forward 40 years and to another village, this one called Dujail, in Iraq. In July 1982, Saddam Hussein was nearly killed there when gunmen opened fire on his motorcade. The dictator's reprisal came swiftly: That night, security forces arrested 350 villagers, including 15-year-old Ahmad Hassan Mohammad. "They blindfolded me," Mr. Mohammad recalled while testifying during Saddam's trial in Baghdad last December. "But I was so young, it [the blindfold] kept falling."
He described seeing "a machine that looked like a grinder and had some blood and hair [on it and] I saw bodies of people from Dujail." Of Mr. Mohammad's 10 brothers, seven were murdered by Saddam's henchmen, along with 141 others from Dujail.
As with Lidice, Dujail was razed and its orchards bulldozed. Also like Lidice, the purpose of the massacre was not to dispense justice but to make an example of the villagers. "You people of Dujail, we have disciplined Iraq through you," Mr. Mohammad recalled one of the torturers saying.
Now come to the present. Last week, Saddam acknowledged in court that he had ordered the summary trial that led to the execution of the villagers and the destruction of their farmland. "Where is the crime?" he asked, claiming that as president of Iraq all his actions were lawful. Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg trial famously adopted a similar defense.
Saddam and his seven co-defendants have also been doing their utmost to turn the trial into farce, heckling the judges and calling on Iraqis watching on TV to rise up against Coalition forces. Saddam has also protested the indignity of having to ride a service elevator and use a toilet exposed to public view. "Is this humanitarian?" he griped in court.
While there is much to regret in the way this trial has been conducted--Saddam and his co-defendants should have been placed, Adolf Eichmann-like, in a glass box, to be seen but not heard--there is also much to admire. For Iraqis, it has been a short course in what democratic justice is all about, with its procedures, its standards of evidence, and its respect for the rights of the defendant, and how all that differs from the arbitrary "justice" to which they were too long accustomed. For much of the wider Arab public, the trial has also exposed the criminality of a once widely admired man.
But there's a broader lesson here. We tend to forget that, for all of Iraq's current troubles, the U.S. and its allies deposed a dictator whose methods and purposes were eerily similar to those of the Nazis, even when it came to a comparatively small massacre such as the one in Dujail. That's something in which Americans can take justifiable pride, as much as the World War II generation did in defeating the Nazis. And it's something to which critics of the war, at least those who profess sincere concern with human rights, ought to give some thought. As Millay wrote:
Ask yourself, ask yourself: What have we done?
Who, after all, are we?
That we should sit at ease in the sun,
The only country, the only one,
Unmolested and free?
Catch him! Catch him! Do not wait!
Or will you wait, and share the fate
Of the village of Lidice?
Ellie