[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

May 15


IRAQ:

Saddam's trial and the unbearable cost of his execution


The scarcity of opinion articles on Saddam Hussein's trial in the Arab
press is remarkable. Most newspapers, with slight variations in tone,
limit their coverage to neutral informative articles mentioning the
scheduled date for the resumption of the trial, May 15.

For most Arabs, the trial is only one aspect of America's grand design to
change Iraq and reshape the Middle East. But there is no sense that the
trial will have much impact on the future of the region. This may not be
an accurate assessment and is probably more a reflection of changing
priorities and the feeling that the worst has already happened.

Secular nationalists believe the trial and Saddam's indictment will
further ignite Iraqi resistance. But no one really believes it will
reunify Iraqis of different religious communities around a common
objective. If Iraq's division along sectarian lines is in any way
reparable, it is unlikely that memories of Saddam's rule or his contested
trial will be effective.

The overwhelming majority of Arabs, governments and public opinion alike,
have no trust in the way the trial has been organized. Opinions range from
questioning the legitimacy of the tribunal and the trial procedure based
on legal criteria - as some international human rights organizations have
already stressed - to an outright denunciation of the enterprise as a
farce: the Iraqi judiciary is not independent; the work of the tribunal is
dominated by American advisers; basic guarantees for the accused are
missing; past American support for Saddam's regime will not be revealed;
the composition of the court is flawed and the chief judge is bent on
revenge; the evidence produced to charge Saddam is not valid and much
evidence of the alleged mass executions at Dujail as well as of other
charges to come, has been lost.

In contrast, advocates of "democracy first" across the Arab world, mainly
human rights activists and liberal intellectuals and opinion leaders,
applaud the trial as representing the first time an Arab leader is held
accountable in a court of law for his crimes. In Lebanon in particular,
they see in it a hopeful precedent for the trial of key figures implicated
in the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Saddam is
facing the retribution he deserves and Arabs need to learn that stability
can and must be built on voluntary civic coexistence rather than on the
iron-fist control of a dictator. They need to develop the notion of equal
responsible citizenship as the basis of national cohesion. The
annihilation of Saddam through his indictment and execution will provide
the ruins on which to build this new political culture.

The Arab world is busy coping with the new regional disorder. There
remains some nostalgia among secular nationalists for the dream that
Saddam nurtured of an Arab state endowed with all the ingredients of a
major regional power and the capacity to defend Arab interests. But those
who hold this opinion are now in a minority, and even among them Saddam is
resented for his adventurism, his foolishness, and for having so grossly
misread America's determination and bluffed about his own capabilities.
Nationalists are angry at America for its hegemonic designs, and liberals
are just as angry at the United States for its unforgivable ignorance of
Iraqi realities. But nationalists and liberals alike see that Saddam
brought disaster upon himself, his country and the whole region and that
the Arab world is paying a very heavy price for his fatal mistakes.

Arabs are concerned about the consequences of a chaotic Iraq torn by
sectarian strife for the fragile stability of multi-religious and
multi-ethnic societies. For Arab leaders, Saddam was undoubtedly an
embarrassing partner; but Iraq under his control was stable and secular.
The reasons for which they all supported him in his eight-year war against
Iran from 1980 to 1988 are as valid today as they were 20 years ago. Iran
is now emerging as the uncontested regional power and its Islamist
nationalist discourse is more attractive to Arab public opinion than any
Arab leader's promises. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not a
dictator. He was democratically elected, enjoys wide domestic support and
has the right discourse in the face of the prevailing injustices from
which Arabs and Muslims suffer. Saddam's image has grown pale as Iran's
Islamic nationalism sweeps popular imagination.

On most levels, Saddam Hussein is a man of the past who lost his
credibility. He ceased to be a regional leader long ago, he is not an
ideological symbol anymore, nor is he a national leader. Yet he remains
the last symbol of what was for decades a Sunni-dominated Iraq, and the
godfather of armed Sunni resistance. The security equation and the
possibility of American troops' beginning to withdraw from Iraq may still
depend heavily on him.

It is in this sense only, not because of any form of popularity, that his
indictment and possible execution are likely to represent an unbearable
cost.

(source: Commentary; Bassma Kodmani is an associate professor at the
College de France and director of the Arab Reform Initiative. This
commentary first appeared at bitterlemons-international.org, an online
newsletter----The (Lebanon) Daily Star)






AUSTRALIA:

Looking beyond the death penalty----Art, not politics, inspired Martin
Tighe's decision to paint a series on Victoria's last hanged man.


He once taught at Coburg High and could hear muffled announcements to
prisoners at Pentridge in a northerly wind. He could clearly see the
bluestone D Division where Ronald Ryan was the last man in Australia to be
hanged, almost 40 years ago.

Martin Tighe took his father to the prison for a tour as a 70th birthday
gift in the late 1990s and found it "just impregnated with cigarette
smoke".

"There's no soft surfaces in there," he says of the site that was later
sold to be developed.

Pentridge was still open to the public when Tighe came back one afternoon
in late 2004 after completing the 1st painting in a series on Ryan, who
had been found guilty of killing a prison officer, George Hodson, while
attempting to escape in December 1965.

"It was the first Saturday of the month," he says. "All the old buildings
were still intact. I walked into D division and there were a group of
elderly gentlemen milling around the corner and I realised they were
former prison guards.

"So I naively bowled up to them and introduced myself and informed them of
the topic of my most recent painting and almost got into a fistfight. They
weren't impressed at all.

"They asked me if I was going to do a painting of Hodson, the fellow that
Ryan killed on his way out of Pentridge that day . . ."

An artist, emergency teacher and furniture maker, Tighe shows you the
paintings of Ryan on the wall of his north suburban home and in the studio
at the rear of the house.

Lewis, 2nd eldest of his 3 children, celebrates his 17th birthday
tomorrow, on the day an exhibition of these works opens in Collingwood.
Though he's a Cats fan, Lewis took such a liking to one of the paintings
that he put it up in his bedroom in place of a poster of his hero, Gary
Ablett.

Barrister Brian Bourke, who with Dr Philip Opas, QC, defended Ryan, will
speak at the opening. "When I went to have a chat to Brian, he got out his
old accounting books and he was able to say how many days in court, how
much he was paid for it," Tighe says. "He went straight to the shelf and
pulled it out."

He plans to contact one of Ryan's three daughters to invite them to the
opening. "They were sent to school the day that Ryan was hanged, the
girls. In the old days, there was no counselling. You just went off to
school."

Tighe, now 40, was a toddler when Ryan was executed. His "first indication
of the death penalty issue" was when Australians Kevin Barlow and Geoffrey
Chambers were hanged in Malaysia in 1986 for possessing heroin. "My mother
is very devout Catholic and every night we'd say prayers at dinner table
and have a special intention for Barlow and Chambers."

Tighe's father, also Ronald, is a pharmacist. His mother, Margaret, is a
well-known Right to Life campaigner. He shares her opposition to abortion
and says they have similar personalities.

"One's happy to support sound views and also lead an independent life," he
says of her influence.

Tighe abhors execution and the inevitable psychological trauma because
"you know the place and you know the time so you don't have peace of
mind."

He says that even with sophisticated apparatus, enforcement of the death
penalty is essentially no different from the brutal beheadings in Iraq by
suspected al-Qaeda operative, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Ryan was hanged on February 3, 1967. Then premier Sir Henry Bolte was
unmoved by weeks of public outcry and political crisis. Tighe says Bolte
was determined that Ryan should hang after another man feigned madness to
escape the noose.

"There is a legacy there and it is the legacy of the government insisting
on justice without mercy," he says.

Tighe has entered works in the Archibald Prize. His subjects include
playwright Ray Lawler; Melbourne composer Jonathan Mills, who was recently
appointed artistic director of the Edinburgh Festival; Age journalist
Martin Flanagan; and Jack Martin, head of the St Vincent's Institute of
Medical Research.

The Ryan series was inspired by a flyer for Barry Dickins' 1994 play,
Remember Ronald Ryan. Tighe went on to read Mike Richards' book on Ryan,
The Hanged Man, which won the Ned Kelly True Crime Award in 2002.

He sought to work in the tradition of Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly paintings
or Brett Whiteley's series of studies of Christie the murderer.

"I'm not trying to achieve anything on a social or political level," he
says. "Because I don't believe the death penalty will ever be considered
again politically. Australia's progressed far beyond that."

Martin Tighe's exhibition of paintings on Ronald Ryan is on from tomorrow
until May 31 at the Hogan Gallery, 310 Smith Street, Collingwood. Phone:
9419 6126.

(source: The Age)