Rallies continue after Saddam verdict

[thedrifter]

Rallies continue after Saddam verdict

By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN, Associated Press Writer

Jubilant Shiites marched by the hundreds Monday, celebrating Saddam Hussein's conviction and death sentence as Sunnis held defiant counter-demonstrations.

The surge in violence expected after the Sunday verdict on Saddam's trial for crimes against humanity still did not materialize. An Interior Ministry spokesman credited a round-the-clock curfew in Baghdad and two restive Sunni provinces.

But Iraq's relentless death toll continued: the bodies of 50 murder victims were discovered Sunday, the bulk of them in Baghdad, police 1st. Lt. Thaer Mahmoud said.

Baghdad, which has a mixed Shiite-Sunni population was relatively quiet Monday, with offices and the international airport closed and few cars or pedestrians on the streets.

Officials said the clampdown, which brought additional patrols and checkpoints in the capital, would likely be lifted by Tuesday morning.

"We need to keep on guard over any kind of response from Saddam supporters," Brig. Abdel-Karim Khalaf said.

The U.S. military announced the deaths of two Marines and one soldier in fighting in Iraq's Anbar Province, and said a helicopter crashed north of Baghdad, killing two American soldiers.

The deaths bring the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq this month to 18.

No gunfire was observed in the area at the time of the crash, the brief statement said. The incident occurred in Salahuddin province, which includes Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit and was under curfew.

In mainly Shiite Hillah, 60 miles south of Baghdad, around 500 people marched carrying placards and shouting slogans denouncing the former dictator, who is accused of killing tens of thousands of Shiites following a 1991 uprising.

"Yes, yes for the verdict, which we have long been waiting for!" chanted the crowd, largely made up of students and government workers.

Underscoring the widening divide between Shiite and Sunni, about 250 pro-Saddam demonstrators took to the streets in the Sunni city of Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. They were dispersed by Iraqi soldiers for breaking the curfew over the province. There were no reports of deaths or injuries.

Another 400 protesters marched through Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, denouncing the verdict against Saddam and demanding the ouster of Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who had called for the former president's execution.

The curfew was temporarily lifted in Tikrit to give allow residents to shop and run errands. Angry crowds had gathered in the city on Sunday, holding aloft Saddam portraits, firing guns and chanting slogans vowing to avenge his execution.

Saddam was sentenced by the Iraqi High Tribunal for ordering the execution of nearly 150 Shiites from the city of Dujail following a 1982 attempt on his life.

Iraq's president, whose office must ratify the death penalty sentence against Saddam if it's upheld on appeal, said from Paris Sunday that the trial of the ousted Iraqi leader was fair.

Jalal Talabani would not comment on the guilty verdict or death sentence for fear it could inflame tensions in his volatile nation.

If the appeals court upholds the sentences, they must be ratified by Talabani, a Sunni Kurd, and his two vice presidents, one a Sunni Arab.

Talabani has opposed the death penalty in the past, but found a way around it by deputizing a vice president to sign an execution order on his behalf — a substitute that has been legally accepted.

Saddam was found hiding with an unfired pistol in a hole in the ground near his home village north of Baghdad in December 2003, eight months after he fled the capital ahead of advancing American troops.

Barzan Ibrahim, Saddam's half brother and intelligence chief during the Dujail killings, was sentenced to join him on the gallows, as was Awad Hamed al-Bandar, head of Iraq's Revolutionary Court, which issued the death sentences against the Dujail residents.

Former vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan was convicted of premeditated murder and sentenced to life in prison, while three other defendants were given up to 15 years in prison for torture and premeditated murder. A local Baath Party official Mohammed Azawi Ali, was acquitted for lack of evidence.

The death sentences automatically go to a nine-judge appeals panel, which has unlimited time to review the case. If the verdicts and sentences are upheld, the executions must be carried out within 30 days.

A court official told The Associated Press that the appeals process was likely to take three to four weeks once the formal paperwork was submitted. If the verdicts are upheld, those sentenced to death would be hanged despite Saddam's second, ongoing trial on charges of murdering thousands of Iraq's Kurdish minority.

The chief prosecutor in Saddam's separate trial for his crackdown against Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s — the so-called Anfal case — will continue while the appeals court considers the death sentence rendered Sunday.

President Bush called the verdict "a milestone in the Iraqi people's efforts to replace the rule of a tyrant with the rule of law."

"It's a major achievement for Iraq's young democracy and its constitutional government," he said.

"Today, the victims of this regime have received a measure of the justice which many thought would never come," he added.

But symbolic of the split between the United States and many of its traditional allies over the Iraq war, many European nations voiced opposition to the death sentences in the case, including France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden.

Islamic leaders warned that executing Saddam could inflame those who revile the U.S., undermining President Bush's policy in the Middle East and inspiring terrorists.

"This government will be responsible for the consequences, with the deaths of hundreds, thousands or even hundreds of thousands, whose blood will be shed," Salih al-Mutlaq, a Sunni political leader, told Al-Arabiya satellite television.

International legal experts said Saddam should be kept alive long enough to answer for other atrocities.

"The longer we can keep Saddam alive, the longer the tribunal can have to explore some of the other crimes involving hundreds of thousands of Iraqis," said Sonya Sceats, an international law expert at the Chatham House foreign affairs think tank in London.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Justice for Saddam
But he remains the face of our enemy in Iraq.

Monday, November 6, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

The temptation, and in some quarters the desire, is to dismiss yesterday's conviction of Saddam Hussein for war crimes as a historical footnote. Would that this were possible. While it is certainly a case of justice being done, it should also remind us about the enemy our troops continue to face, and the U.S. could yet lose to, in Iraq.

For even as Saddam will now hang for his crimes, his legacy survives in the vicious insurgency that his former intelligence agents and Baath Party colleagues are prosecuting. This continues to be the main enemy in Iraq, aided by the likes of Syria and Iran. Its assaults are what finally this year caused the Shiites to respond with death squads of their own that are contributing to the "sectarian violence" so evident in Baghdad. And it is one of the main mistakes of the Bush Administration during this war that it has failed to maintain military and American public attention on the nature and strategy of this enemy.

There's an honest debate over whether Saddam planned the insurgency before he was ousted from power. Whether or not it was planned in detail, however, there is little doubt that the Sunni element of the insurgency has long since formed into an organized movement. At its heart is Saddam's old intelligence service, the Mukhabarat. The Baath Party also continues to function in secret and to communicate to the extent it can.

Only last month, newly independent Iraqi newspapers obtained and reported on a terrorist assassination list with the names of 60 government, military and political figures. The document was dated September 5, 2006 and issued from Thi Qar Operation HQ in the name of the "Martyr Qusay unit/Karkh sector," which is Baghdad. Qusay is Saddam's son, who was killed in Mosul in 2003.

Addressed to "comrades" and "commanders of Special Operations," the order translated into English declares that "Approval of deputy combatant comrade, treasure of the country (Baath Party-Iraq branch), and the supreme commander of armed forces was granted, and communicated to us by the letter from the country treasure office . . . Execution punishment regarding criminals, agents, apostates, names below, in addition to their first, second, and third degree relatives. Execution (of the order) by your units is according to the plan and to your suitable timing discretion."

The list includes major Shiite, Kurdish and Iraqi political figures, as well as Sunnis who are participating in the government. And the killings seem to have already begun with the murder of several relatives of men on the list. We keep being told by our own intelligence services that the Sunni insurgency is leaderless. But tell that to those on this list or to their relatives.

The goal of the terrorists who created this list is to intimidate Iraqis from joining the government, and to maintain as much disorder and violence as possible so the U.S. will lose patience and withdraw. Then they will take their chances with the majority Shiites, who they have beaten before. The Saddamists will have won, even if Saddam himself is dead.

None of this is intended to diminish the importance of Saddam's conviction and likely execution after appeal. The verdict reminds the world of his crimes, specifically the 1982 murder of 148 Shiites in Dujail, which in its systematic revenge recalls Hitler's slaughter at the Czech town of Lidice during World War II. That the U.S. and its allies were willing and able to depose, and his countrymen then try and punish, a national leader who ordered those crimes is a warning to other tyrants. The U.N. routinely deplores the Saddams of the world but never has the will to act against them--whether in Rwanda, Darfur, Kosovo, Bosnia, Cambodia, or Kurdistan. In Iraq, the U.S. finally acted.

Justice for Saddam is one admirable legacy of the American sacrifice in Iraq. But to make it permanent, the U.S. must also defeat the insurgency that battles on in Saddam's name. No matter what happens in Tuesday's election, the U.S. commander in chief who ended Saddam's tyranny has to find a strategy and generals who will finish the job.

Ellie