By SHEILAH PEPPER
The Gazette Staff
The journalist John F. Burns, writing from Baghdad for The New York Times, tells a remarkable tale that spotlights the different mindset between a person accustomed to a free and fair society and people who have actually lived under a tyrant and experienced terror on a daily basis.
Burns tells a personal story, about his own reactions to Saddam Hussein. He starts out thus: "Nobody who experienced Iraq under the tyranny of Saddam Hussein could imagine, at the height of the terror he imposed on his countrymen, ever pitying him. Pitiless himself, he sent hundreds of thousands of his countrymen to miserable deaths, in the wars he started with Iran and Kuwait, in the torture chambers of his secret police, or on the gallows that became an industry at Abu Ghraib and other charnel houses across Iraq." Burns said that Iraqis who were "caught in his spider's web of evil, and survived, tell of countless tortures, of the psychopathic pleasure the former dictator appeared to take from inflicting suffering and death."
But Burns recalls a moment when he had pity for Saddam, a memory that came back to him after the death sentence appeal failed in late December. The moment occurred when Saddam made his very first courtroom appearance, which Burns was covering. Unknown to Burns, Saddam, just before he was taken to the court, had asked U.S. soldiers who were guarding him where he was going. They told him he was going to face "Iraqi justice." Since Saddam's notion of Iraqi justice was torture and death, he arrived at the court in great fear, according to Burns, perhaps thinking he might be summarily shot or hanged.
Burns noticed this and felt a moment of compassion for the man.
He concludes, "That I could feel pity for him struck the Iraqis with whom I talked as evidence of a profound moral corruption. I came to understand how a Westerner used to the civilities of democracy and due process - even a reporter who thought he grasped the depth of Saddam's depravity - fell short of the Iraqis' sense, forged by years of brutality, of the power of his unmitigated evil."
Burns makes other points in his piece, including how Saddam grandstanded in front of the media at his trial once he realized the new government was going to give him the benefit of authentic court procedures. But the point about pity is the most compelling. The reader suddenly has a glimpse into the mind of those who suffered and could not forget or forgive. They would save their compassion for persons more deserving.
I recall at the end of the Gulf War, cable news was covering the chemical attack on the Kurds. I remember the horrifying sight of endless bodies strewn across the landscape. The network somehow later obtained a video of a portion of the actual event while it was happening. It showed a young woman trying to shield her two children in her clothing. All three died. I wondered if the person holding the video camera survived. There must be many over there who think the end of a noose was too merciful for the Butcher of Baghdad.
Copyright©2007SheilahPepper
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