Saddam Hussein was hanged at 8.30 am India time yesterday and this inspired a range of reactions including people dancing on streets and people planting bombs killing about 80 odd people. There may be more cases of violence but I very rarely follow news so closely to know more about it.
Last night I was watching a news channel that was interviewing a veteran Indian journalist Saeed Naqvi. He said that showing the hanging of someone in paper of TV is not in accordance to Indian values. He said that the Christians, Jews and Muslims are at fight since time immemorial and showing the pictures of execution of the other is what they do. I never really thought about it earlier but what he said was very true. There have been so many people who have been hanged in India and never a picture or video of that was shown. The most I remember is the picture of the man who hanged the rapist of Hetal Parekh in Calcutta.
Coming back to the hanging of Saddam. I don't know if his hanging was right or wrong. He has got a lot of people killed so an execution is justified but is the way he was executed justified. George Bush attacked Iraq claiming that they had weapons of mass destructions including nuclear weapons and he also held them responsible for the world trade center while everyone know who is to be blamed for it.
George Bush dragged UN in this personal fight for the control of oil reserves in the world and made them pay the bill for the fight as well. Since UN is not a country with any real power and balls, it unwillingly did what Dubya wanted it to do. Now the war is over and Saddam is captured and the teams from "UN" have inspected a million sites in Iraq but have they found any weapons that Bush was accusing them of having?
Saddam was controlling one of the world's biggest oil supplies and he even was trying to provoke the rest of the gulf countries not to be the puppets of Bush. This is what used to outrage Bush and he attacked Iraq. Now Bush is not only controlling that oil reserve, he is awarding contracts for "rebuilding" the nation to US companies and milking more money from there.
I am not saying that Saddam was a nice person and he was a very kind ruler, on the contrary he killed a lot of his own people. In the news I heard that he even killed his minister for suggesting a cease-fire with Iran in the early 80s "Let's discuss this separetly between overselves" he told the minister and led him to a room where he was shot. Saddam's fault was that he showed his middle finger to someone a lot stronger and lot more manipulative then himself. We know that Bush was not there to liberate the people of Iraq. If he was so much concerned about the human rights, why he never thought of liberating the Chinese people under a communist rule? Because he always knew that there was no oil at stake and he would get his arse seriously kicked if he attempts to do that.
Even after defeating and capturing Saddam, Bush was scared of him. He knew that in April Saddam will turn 70 and can't be hanged after that and as long as he is alive, he will be a threat to USA. Saddam was undergoing a lot of other trials but they didn't wait for those to be decided and just hanged him while they could.
Another thing that I am very disappointed with is the response of India. A person has been hanged and either that is right or wrong. Instead of reacting to that, he government was busy analyzing how it affects India and what to say.
Even when Daddy Bush attacked Iraq in the 90s, India agreed to refuel US planes but then changed it's decision when Iraq objected and reminded us that they have always been with us whenever Pakistan tried to attack India in UN and tried to get the support of other Muslim countries in Gulf. The leadership of India could never made up its mind about what it wanted and where it wanted to go and this started with Pundit Jawarlal Nehru right after we gained freedom.
He couldn't figure if he wanted to be with the Soviets or Americans. He started the non-aligned movement that became quite popular later on but harmed us as a nation as we could never made up our mind if we wanted to be socialist or a capitalist country. Since we were never committed to either, we failed in both and the kind of progress we have made is much smaller than what it could have been.
The same Nehru allowed the Tibetan to form a government in exile in India and allowed them to stay here but could never oppose the occupation of Tibet by China. By trying to be friendly with both you are actually not being faithful to anyone.
