Connecticut Post 12/26/2006
Area Kurds approve Saddam sentence
EDWARD J. CROWDER ecrowder@ctpost.com
Article Last Updated: 12/26/2006 11:47:08 PM EST
Fifteen years ago, Gazi Hassan spent four months in an Iraqi prison just for writing things Saddam Hussein didn't like. Hassan said he was tortured, and lucky to survive. Many other Kurdish dissidents simply disappeared, snuffed out by the brutal regime.
Now, it is Saddam's turn. An Iraqi appeals court on Tuesday upheld the former Iraqi leader's death sentence, ordering him hanged within a month, possibly as soon as today.
Hassan, a Fairfield resident studying journalism at Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport, has no sympathy.
Like many others in the region's small Kurdish community, he will be glad to see the dictator's end.
"I believe the Kurdish people, of course, will welcome it," he said. "For a long time, 70 years, the Kurdish people were working for freedom, and the Kurdish people paid a lot of blood for freedom."
The Bridgeport area is host to an Iraqi Kurdish community of 20 or so families. The Kurdish homeland includes northern Iraq as well as parts of Iran, Syria and Turkey.
Saddam, champion of Iraq's long-ruling Sunni Muslim minority, was sentenced Nov. 5 to hang for the 1982 killings of 148 people from Dujail, a Shiite Muslim town, after an attempt on his life there.
Saddam is also in the midst of a second trial charging him with genocide and other crimes during a 1987-88 military crackdown on ethnic Kurds. An estimated 180,000 Kurds died during the operation. That trial is in recess until Jan. 8. It is unclear how the appeals court ruling Tuesday might affect proceedings in the trial.
Derby resident Farhad Ali, a real estate agent who left Iraq seven years ago, said the region's Kurds celebrated when U.S. forces captured Saddam two years ago.
"He killed 5,000 people in one village alone," said Ali, who said he came to the United States to escape the oppression in his homeland.
He said people in his village and some family members were arrested by Iraqi authorities under Saddam and never seen again.
President Jalal Talabani and Iraq's two vice presidents must ratify the appeals court decision. Talabani opposes the death penalty but has in the past deputized a vice president to sign an execution order on his behalf, a substitute that was legally accepted.
The White House called Tuesday's ruling a milestone in Iraq's efforts "to replace the rule of a tyrant with the rule of law."
At his trial, Saddam argued that the Dujail residents who were killed had been found guilty in a legitimate Iraqi court for trying to assassinate him in 1982.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Anson C. Smith, Public Relations Coordinator
Housatonic Community College
900 Lafayette Blvd.
Bridgeport, CT 06604
Tel: 203-332-5229, Fax: 203-332-5247
E-mail: asmith@hcc.commnet.edu