A slim guidebook for executing a deposed ruler How-to, or how-not-to, execute a ruler
Mary Jo Murphy | International Herald Tribune | January 7, 2007 http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/07/news/execute.php The Ceausescus of Romania were dragged to their executions on Christmas Day 1989 with Nicolae singing "The Internationale" and Elena alternately directing her captors to hell and snapping at them, "I was like a mother to you." Or so go accounts by some of the executioners. Videotape shown on Romanian television in the aftermath records scenes from a farcical tribunal but stops as the couple are led away after they are condemned, picking up again only after the deed is done, the bullet- pocked bodies cooling where they fell. The event did not need cellphones and YouTube to peel back the veneer of civility. But while there is no manual for such occasions modern history gives us relatively few instances of absolute rulers being deposed, tried and executed all the talk after the hanging of Saddam Hussein suggests that we viewers thought there was some greater codification of the protocols and proprieties than was apparent in the mocking scene that unfolded. Certainly the hanging of Saddam and the shooting of the Ceausescus lacked the decorously scripted quality of the beheading of Charles I in 1649, which from trial to scaffold might have lent a template. It had "a deliberate air of formality and solemnity," said Jason Peacey, a lecturer at University College London, who has studied the regicide. There were "rival ideas about how to go about putting the king on trial," he said, but it was decided to "not do things in the dark and in the corner and behind closed doors." The British monarch never recognized the legitimacy of his judges but still played his role elegantly, even reaching an accommodation with his executioner. "Stay for the sign," Charles reminded him as he laid his neck on the block. The executioner did, swinging the ax only after Charles spread wide his arms in a kind of benediction. Peacey and his colleagues discussed the "remarkable similarity" of the Saddam trial to Charles's in one regard: The appearance of legality was deemed important. But events have a way of overtaking such considerations. Trotsky favored a trial for Czar Nicholas II of Russia, a step that "would have shown the population all of Nicholas's alleged crimes and thus served as both public political education and a ritual of humiliation and thus desacralization of a ruler who claimed divine sanction," said Mark Steinberg, a professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has written on the czar's fall. But somebody, perhaps Lenin, was in a hurry, Steinberg said, and "whoever ordered it, what resulted was a brutish affair secret, in the middle of the night, in a basement, with not only the czar and czaritsa killed but also children and servants." Those who did the killing encountered a hitch. The family members "were wearing what amounted to jeweled bulletproof vests," Steinberg said. When the bullets ricocheted off corsets and gems, the firing squad resorted to bayonets and rifle butts. Is there an optimal way to execute a deposed ruler, then? If speed is paramount, "by far the best is the guillotine for dispatching anyone," said Geoffrey Abbott, author of "Execution: The Guillotine, the Pendulum, the Thousand Cuts, the Spanish Donkey and 66 Other Ways of Putting Someone to Death" and a former yeoman warder at the Tower of London. Points may be awarded there, then, for the executions of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette ("Pardonez-moi," she said to her executioner as she trod on his foot, assuring that at least some niceties were observed). Abbott would not say which of the 70 ways might have suited Saddam, but if the idea is to "pay the penalty untinged by revenge," then "I would say firing squad," he said. "The thought of a military execution is more honorable than a crude hanging." Emperor Maximilian of Mexico got the firing squad in 1867; Zulfikar Ali Bhutto of Pakistan the hanging in 1979. In recalling Bhutto's execution, a jailer wrote: "On the other side of the jailhouse's wall, in the prime minister's house, Bhutto Sahib used to get anything he wished for, from anywhere in the world. And today he could not even fulfill his simple wish of having a cup of tea."
