Pressure mounted on Monday on Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to halt the executions of two of Saddam Hussein’s henchmen amid growing international criticism over the way the ousted dictator was hanged.
With former secret police chief Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti and revolutionary court judge Awad Ahmed al-Bandar expected to be hanged in days, New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said the executions would further highlight ”the Iraqi government’s disturbing disregard for human rights and the rule of law”.
”The execution of these two, however heinous the crimes involved, is cruel and inhumane punishment that will only drag a deeply flawed process into even greater disrepute,” HRW director Richard Dicker said in the statement.
”The haste and vengeance infusing Saddam Hussein’s hanging should prompt the Iraqi government to halt these executions,” said Dicker.
United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon on the weekend ”strongly” urged Iraq to suspend the executions of Barzan, Saddam’s half-brother, and Bandar, who were found guilty along with the deposed leader of executing 148 Shi’ite civilians from Dujail, north of Baghdad, in the 1980s.
In a statement released by the UN, Ban ”strongly urged the government of Iraq to grant a stay of execution to those whose death sentences may be carried out in the near future”.
Their executions have been postponed several times amid the growing global outcry, with one official from Maliki’s office admitting the delays were ”due to international pressure”.
But Iraqi government spokesperson Ali al-Dabbagh told the BBC’s Arabic service on Sunday that the two could be executed in two days.
The December 30 hanging of Saddam sparked outrage after the leak of an unofficial, grisly cellphone video of his execution that showed a guard taunting the former dictator moments before his death.
A number of leaders criticised the hanging, saying it appeared more like a sectarian lynching than a court-directed punishment after a guard, believed to be a Shi’ite, taunted the Sunni former president in his final moments.
The strongest criticism came from Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who said the execution had made Saddam a ”martyr”.
Even staunch Iraq ally Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair said the manner of Saddam’s execution was ”completely wrong”, according to his Downing Street office.
But Maliki on Saturday lashed out at his critics, threatening to ”review” relations with countries that criticised the bungled execution and arguing the hanging was an internal matter.
”The Iraqi government could be obliged to review its relations with any state that fails to respect the wish of the Iraqi people,” warned Maliki, who has ordered an investigation into the illegal filming of the execution.
”We consider the execution of the dictator an internal affair that concerns only the Iraqi people,” he said. ”We will go ahead in applying the law against those who abused the Iraqi people and whose hands are stained with the blood of innocents.”
HRW said Maliki’s rejection of criticism over the hanging was reminiscent of the former regime itself, which grossly violated human rights.
”HRW recalls comparable statements from Hussein’s former Ba’ath party regime in attempting to rebuff criticisms of its horrific human rights violations,” it said.
The condemned men’s lawyer, meanwhile, described his clients’ agonising wait for death as ”more terrifying” than the execution itself.
On the day of Saddam’s hanging ”the Americans went to see Barzan al-Tikriti and Awad al-Bandar in their cells. It was after 1am and they woke them up to inform them they will be executed,” said Jordanian attorney Issam Ghazzawi.
He said they were taken to a building, asked to write their last will and testament and left waiting to die for more than seven hours before they were told the execution was postponed.
”This sort of wait is frightening and more terrifying than the execution itself. Had it happened in any other country the execution would have been scrapped,” said Ghazzawi.
Barzan and Bandar both wept over Saddam’s death, and Bandar said he wished he had been executed along with the ousted president, the lawyer said. — AFP
