The so-called Butcher of Baghdad, who was president of Iraq from 1979 until he was toppled by Coalition forces in April 2003, was convicted of the 1982 killings of 148 Shiites in the city of Dujail. The iron-fisted dictator, who ruled Iraq for nearly a quarter of a century, was found guilty of crimes against humanity Sunday, Nov. 5, and sentenced to death by hanging.
As the verdict was read, Saddam yelled out, “Long live the people and death to their enemies. Long live the glorious nation, and death to its enemies!” Later, his lawyer said the former dictator called on Iraqis to reject sectarian violence and refrain from revenge against U.S. forces.
The White House praised the Iraqi judicial system and denied the U.S. had been “scheming” for the verdict. “The president thinks it’s an important moment for the Iraqi people,” White House Press Secretary Tony Snow told FOX News.
Reactions to Saddam’s sentencing has been mixed in different parts of Iraq. In Sadr City, the Shiite stronghold of northeast Baghdad, youths took to the streets dancing and singing, despite a curfew declared for Sunday over the most troubled parts of the country. “Execute Saddam,” they chanted. Many carried posters of Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical anti-American cleric whose Mahdi Army militia effectively runs the district. Celebratory gunfire also rang out in Kurdish neighborhoods across the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk.
In Tikrit, deep in the Sunni heartland north of Baghdad where support for Saddam runs hand-in-hand with deep distrust of Iraq’s new Shiite-dominated government, gunshots were fired from rooftops and street corners as Saddam addressed the court. Sunni insurgents with AK-47s and heavy machine guns protested the verdict in defiance of the sentence. A crowd about 1,000, including some policemen and many people holding up pictures of Saddam, chanted: “We will avenge you Saddam.”
The world reacted in different ways to Hussein’s verdict. The EU has welcomed the verdict but also said Saddam should not be put to death. In Vienna on Tuesday, the United Nations’ special investigator on torture, Manfred Nowak, said he disagreed with the death sentence and that Saddam’s trial had not been well conducted.
Iran called on Iraq to carry out its death sentence on Saddam Hussein, saying the former dictator who waged an eight-year war against Iran in the 1980s was a criminal who deserved to die.
Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said his country opposed the death penalty “whether it’s Saddam or anyone else.” Blair added, however, that the trial “gives us a chance to see again what the past in Iraq was, the brutality, the tyranny, the hundreds of thousands of people he killed, the wars,” The Associated Press reported.