The United States and Britain, along with many Iraqis, hailed the deaths of Saddam Hussein’s two sons Uday and Qusay on Wednesday, while officials elsewhere mostly limited themselves to expressing hopes that the event would herald an improvement in the country.
”This is a great day for the new Iraq,” said British Prime Minister Tony Blair, while a spokesman for George Bush said the US president ”welcomes this as positive news for the Iraqi people”.
In Baghdad, meanwhile, an explosion of celebratory gunfire broke out even before the deaths were confirmed.
”Uday and Qusay are dead, we saw it on TV,” Hassan Zaif said as he fired his Kalashnikov rifle skyward.
Blair, on a visit to Hong Kong, said: ”these two particular people were at the head of a regime that wasn’t just a security threat because of its weapons programs; it was also responsible — as we can see from the mass graves — for the torture and killing of thousands and thousands of Iraqis.”
In Washington White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the news provided ”further reassurance to the Iraqi people that the regime is gone and will not be back”.
”Over the period of many years, these two individuals were responsible for countless atrocities committed against the Iraqi people and they can no longer cast a shadow of hate on Iraq,” he added.
US Treasury Secretary John Snow said ”anything that removes uncertainty about the course of progress in Iraq is positive and [the deaths] certainly removes some uncertainty… One more vestige… of the Saddam regime is gone”.
US congressmen, particularly opposition Democrats, greeted the news with guarded satisfaction, tempered by disquiet over the slow pace of rebuilding and restoring civil order in Iraq.
”It’s progress,” said Senator Ted Kennedy, about news that the Hussein brothers had been killed in a US military air raid.
”But I still think we need an overall strategy,” the Massachusetts Democrat said.
”American servicemen are at risk every single day, and it seems to me we ought to find ways working through the United Nations (UN) and Nato, as we did with Bosnia and Kosovo, to help provide relief for our servicemen, and help construct democratic institutions,” said Kennedy.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told BBC radio that the pair was responsible ”in the latter decades of Saddam’s rule [for] authorising and supervising the reign of terror”.
He added that UN Secretary General Kofi Annan had estimated at least 290 000 Iraqis had ”disappeared” over the last three decades.
”Saddam was the man principally responsible for that,” Straw said.
”But Uday and Qusay appear to have been extremely unpleasant psychopaths who actually killed quite a number of people with their own hands.”
”I am not rejoicing. I mourn the death of anybody, but it has to be said that it is a very great relief for all Iraqis,” the British official said. – Sapa-AFP