Trials and Tribulations of a dictator

I wrote this article in Newsvine back in jan..

Recently, Saddam's execution caused a stir in the media's nest.

He is not the world's only or even the first dictator.. and he will most certainly not be the last! He did manage to find much needed support only after his death... Governments and people protesting his death alike! Not that they resented his rule... Groups expressing concern about the much forgotten human rights! Much forgotten.. just as in Saddam's reign..The righteous mourning the fact that he never got a proper trial! Forget the thousands who died without any trial or for that matter for no fault of theirs but being at the other band of the religion spectrum.


I am not a big supporter of the fast track trial which found him guilty and hanged him... Given some more time I believe that more people would have come forward to claim justice for those wronged under his reign. The trial and the sentencing made it sound as if Saddam's only crime was the massacre of the 120 Shia Muslims.


All those lives unaccounted for in the trial did not even beget the honor of being a part of the statistics. They are those 'scores of men and women slaughtered in Saddam's rule', as the News Agencies have truly reported. Men and women without names, without faces and without a voice, alive or dead. And now without justice. All lives lost and no one officially blamed. Saddam's name would be passed on as the alleged killer but nothing more. The near future would know him as a man hastily hanged in a speedy trial.

Not that I advocate a snail trial.. like that of Pinochet.. The man whom the world accused.. The man who never had to accept any form of punishment for all the atrocities he committed! The man who did not even have to hear himself being indicted as the killer! His death was not just the death of a dictator but also the death of hope! Hope for justice and Hope for retribution...


For those who believed that law would take its right course, Pinochet's trial was a mockery. It stretched their beliefs to the limits of their patience. It certainly made those who plotted his assassination rue themselves for their failure, that is, if they were left alive!


Where does that leave the wronged? At the steps of the courtroom, which filters to its convenience what it wants to consider as right and wrong.. Where the law is not equal.. Where your country's geography mattered than the accused's history.. Whose scales are tilted by the attention the Superpowers bestow upon you...


Justice is never served in haste or in delay... In both the cases justice has been denied.