Welcome to 2007. Belatedly, merry Christmas. Happy New Year. Happy Eid.
The Stoning of the Devil ceremony at Mecca, Saudi Arabia, involving millions of Muslim pilgrims of all colours and from all over the world, passed off with relative peace this year, thanks to new militarised security arrangements in tune with what things are like in the 21st century out here (rather than the first century, whenever that was, when the Devil was still around on the shores of the Earth and swanking openly through the marketplaces and the streets of the five continents, his tail wagging in the air with priapic provocation. The dude has apparently gone underground since then, but the semi-pagan ceremonies remain, as if he’s still lurking somewhere in the neighbourhood).
Yes, they threw stones at the stone walls and columns that represented that old elusive Mr Devil with all the fervour they had in them — men, women and children alike. Who knows whether he, the Devil, felt the slings and arrows — for, unlike God, whose sexuality has recently been brought into question, the Devil is still resolutely seen as a virile guy, a man about town, a dude out there in the hood, wherever the hood might be: on the south side of Chicago, in Hollywood or Watts, in the Bronx, Miami (where, incidentally, it is said that Osama Bin Laden is really living in relative comfort, rather than being on the run in the rugged hills of Afghanistan or, alternatively, Pakistan).
The Devil apparently hangs out nowadays in Berlin, Moscow, Johannesburg, or most likely, Australia or Shanghai, China. The Devil is hanging out anywhere where there is money and trouble to be made. But let’s not go there too soon.
The Devil was most recently seen slouching around in Mesopotamia, currently referred to as Iraq, where war has been raging for the past four or five years, if not more. As James Baldwin said, the Devil always manages to find work, even in hard times.
Somewhere around dawn on the first day of Eid, and just ahead of the Christian New Year that we all bow down to, the Devil stood in the shadows as a man called Saddam Hussein, formerly president of the joint, was taken up to the gallows in Baghdad, and, after some unseemly behaviour from his executioners, men who chose to hide their identities behind sinister hoods for fear of diabolical reprisals, was hanged after a flawed and, in retrospect, hasty trial.
American President George W Bush, known for being the Texan governor who sanctioned endless judicial executions against the tide of worldwide pleas for clemency in the name of being human, called this justice. The evidence of the unauthorised video of the hanging makes the whole thing look a little less like human justice and a whole lot more like the animal in all of us coming out unashamed. The Devil walks. In fact, the dude struts.
There were various comments aired around the world in the media. Some people jumped for joy in the streets in various parts of Iraq, and others, there and beyond, held sombre ceremonies that threatened retaliation, retribution, and an extension of the violent curve that has been unleashed since the British/American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Others were invited to drop their ha’p’orth into the ongoing worldwide debate, such as it was. Many said, ”Hooray!” Human rights organisations had a little airtime to demonstrate why this was a travesty, rather than a demonstration of human justice (whatever that is).
The best comment on the open response live and by email on BBC World in the wake of the execution of Saddam was that this brutal act should have been witnessed live by Bush and Tony ”Blah-Blah” Blair. They should, said the caller, have been standing there on the scaffold, surrounded by the masked executioners taunting the soon-to-be-extinct dictator, smiling as he exchanged his last words of contempt and had the noose put round his neck, before dropping through the trap door and having his neck broken for good.
Yup. Bush and Blair should have been there in the flesh, if they were worth their salt. If they were men, as Saddam pointed out to his tormentors, his hands tied behind his back, his feet presumably shackled (although you couldn’t see that clearly, but he shuffled like they were), alone and outnumbered, they should have been prepared to stand up to the consequences of their own actions. So there he stood, a cornered dog with no escape, baited by the hooded rabble.
Who knows, maybe Bush and Blair were there among the hooded mob, after all. This was what they had come to the land of Mesopotamia, far from their own countries, to pull off. It has long been shown that the issue of ”weapons of mass destruction” was a smoke screen (pardon the pun). The weapon of mass destruction they were really after was Saddam.
The abiding problem is that the trial he was subjected to was not about that. The deeper issues never came out. Which is why his trial was so relatively brief and unsatisfying. The dude formerly known as Saddam (Devil or not) was never given a chance to say where his early support came from, who supplied the nerve gas that killed the Kurds in their thousands, who supplied his lethal weaponry for so long, and who turned a blind eye while the atrocities attributed to him were being committed on a grand scale.
So, yes. The wise comment that Bush and Blair should have been standing on the gallows looking on with self-satisfied smiles while Saddam was tortured and hanged like a dog makes a lot of sense in this context.
As they say: put your money where your mouth is.