Notes On An Execution

One wants to avoid the anecdotal when arguing for or against the death penalty. Even the fully justified claim that innocent men, deprived of the benefit of DNA tests, are put to death doesn't quite cinch the case for abolishing capital punishment. Either one is opposted to state executions on principle, or one is not. "Thinking with the blood" is how Kipling described human rationalism tainted by sanguinary impulses, and Kipling knew whereof he spoke. People who oppose wars because they hear of horrific tales of fallen soldiers would do well to study the Bard of Empire: He lost his only son Jack in the First World War, a tragedy that only redoubled his conviction that the "Hun" was a blight worth eliminating from the civilized world. If you'll excuse the blog-friendly free association, this is the same poet who wrote "Mesopotamia," a strophe of which runs:

Our dead shall not return to us while Day and Night divide – Never while the bars of sunset hold. But the idle-minded overlings who quibbled while they died, Shall they thrust for high employments as of old?

This can and should be read as one of Kipling's famous rebukes of colonial hubris. I think of it whenever I read that U.S. troops are without armor or the proper defenses against the crude weaponry used by our enemy in Iraq. Still, one thing our idle-minded overlings have got right about the postwar situation is the need for Iraqis to determine their own future, which perforce includes deadling with their recent past.

Part of the mission in Mesopotamia today is one of "reconciliation" and a gathering of personal testimonies about the crimes of Baathism. Saddam's dead will not come back to us, as they simply cannot. Does this mean a single act of strangulation will bring justice to the hundreds of thousands killed or orphaned or widowed by the abattoir regime ended three years ago?

Hitch, who keeps his powder dry on this and many other occasions, forwarded me the following story about an Iraqi journalist for The Observer who was murdered by Saddam for being a "spy." The guy's father shows no schadenfreude for the monster's fate.

Farzad Bazoft was a 31-year-old freelance journalist working for The Observer when he was put to death by the Iraqi regime on the grounds that he was a spy. In fact, Bazoft was simply what he said he was: 'a journalist going after a scoop'.

Because he was born in Iran, and deemed therefore a foe of Iraq, Saddam insisted Bazoft's corpse should be hanged multiple times.

His body was dumped in a box outside the British embassy in Baghdad. The Iraqi Information Minister crowed: 'Mrs Thatcher wanted Bazoft alive. We gave her the body.' Saddam ignored repeated protests from world leaders to release Bazoft. He showed no justice. He displayed no mercy.

It would perhaps be understandable then if his father, Sowaini Bazoft, a 77-year-old Muslim whose home town of Abadan in Iran was razed by Iraq, welcomed Saddam's fate. Perhaps he might even have rejoiced when the news came through that the dictator was to die – and not by the gun, as Saddam had requested, but by the rope.

The truth, however, is more complicated, more poignant. 'Even the wolf, the tiger and the shark are better than Saddam,' Mr Bazoft told The Observer from his home in London. 'He hanged my son. And because he was an Iranian he said the body had to hang 60 times. These people don't care for others; they just see their nose, their stomach. People will be happy he is to be hanged. When the news came through that he was to be executed many people phoned me saying, "congratulations". But this [his execution] is not in my blood.'

His voice becomes a whisper as he attempts to articulate his thoughts. 'I don't like to see pain. I don't hurt the birds or the ants. That is my personal belief. I will close my eyes and ears when they hang Saddam. I don't want to see anybody hang, not even him.'

My grief, by the father of reporter executed in Iraq | World | The Observer