Saddam hanging 'repulsive'

2006-12-31 16:36

London - Commentators and the media across Europe expressed shock and unease on Sunday at graphic television pictures showing the last moments of Saddam Hussein just before his execution.

Images of the fallen Iraqi dictator with a noose around his neck, surrounded by hooded executioners, horrified a continent which does not use capital punishment, even though the actual death was not shown.

"The images of Saddam Hussein with a noose around his neck are extremely disturbing and unnecessary," said Sir Menzies Campbell, leader of Britain's second opposition Liberal Democrat party, which opposed the Iraq war.

Patrick Baudouin, honorary president of FIDH (the International Federation of Human Rights), said he was "repulsed by images representing an extremely unhealthy voyeurism".

He added that it reminded him of the execution of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu in 1989.

Shocked the world

"The footage of the execution shocked the whole world," the Austrian daily Oesterreich said on Sunday, while El Mundo in Spain complained that the Iraqi government had "transformed Saddam's execution into a televised spectacle".

For George Galloway, the controversial British lawmaker who has formed his own political party, Respect, on a platform of opposition to the Iraq war, the death was "a squalid little lynching".

A Russian foreign ministry spokesperson denounced "the hurried severity of the execution, which outside investigators were not ashamed to show on television to the whole world".

Commentators expressed a series of theories about why the footage was shown.

"I think they showed the pictures as a symbol, to show that Saddam Hussein is finished," said Nadim Shehadi, associate fellow at international affairs think-tank Chatham House in London.

"Especially for European eyes, the pictures could be shocking, because the death penalty has been abolished, but not for American eyes."

Will become a martyr

Sir Malcolm Rifkind, British foreign secretary in the Conservative government between 1995 and 1997, added that the execution seemed "a bit tasteless".

"But I can see why they felt there was a political need to demonstrate this was happening.

"This was for an Arab audience and there's always a high degree of scepticism about news reporting there," he said.

Ann Clwyd, a British Labour party lawmaker who is Prime Minister Tony Blair's human rights envoy to Iraq, said that, even though she was against the death penalty, she could see why Iraqis would be happy to see Saddam dead.

Many victims might see the execution as "part of the healing process," she added.

Others, though, have warned of the danger of broadcasting the pictures with the Middle East in such turmoil.

Galloway, who was expelled from Labour over his opposition to the war and has met Saddam, took a less optimistic view than Clwyd.

He said that the video would allow Saddam to become in death what he had failed to be in life - a "martyr and Arab hero".

This view was echoed by the Greek daily Kathimerini, which said the execution risked transforming Saddam into a "symbol of Arab nationalism".

- AFP