January 25, 2010. Report from Al Jazeera’s Tarek Bazley. Ali Hassan al-Majid, the cousin of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, has been executed in Iraq for crimes against humanity.
Later recognised as one of the president’s most feared military leaders, al-Majid’s rise to power came only after his cousin became president. It was under Saddam that Majid became a general, defence minister and trusted member of the president’s inner circle, and forged a reputation as a strongman.
But it was during the government’s campaign against the Kurds in northern Iraq that Majid’s most notorious crimes took place.
January 25, 2010. Dave Knight. As readers of The Duck Shoot blog already know I am totally opposed to the death penalty in all circumstances. It hasn’t always been that way, I once thought that the death penalty should be applied selectively.
Chemical Ali would have been one such exception. He is, without doubt a monster. A cold-blooded killer of innocent men, women and children.
His list of crimes include bombing Kurdish villages with mustard gas, sarin, tabub and VX between 1987 and 1988. It was at this time that up to 5000 Kurds were gassed to death. When the Kurdish resistance continued his troops destroyed thousands of villages and killed an estimated 180,000 Kurds.
In 1983 after an assassination attempt on Saddam Hussein in the town of Dujail he meted out collective punishment on the townspeople. He had scores of local men killed, deported thousands of inhabitants and had the town razed to the ground.
After Iraq’s defeat in the Gulf war he was tasked with the crushing of opposition from the Shi’ites in the south as well as the Kurds in the north. Many thousands were killed possibly as many as 100,000 Shi’ite Muslims in the south alone.
So why shouldn’t Ali Hassan be executed? The death penalty is barbaric and renders executioners and supporters barbarians as well. The death penalty is morally wrong because it deprives a human being of the ‘right to life’*.
What is more the process of law is not perfect and this has led to an untold number of innocent people being executed. It is this one fact that leads me to oppose the use of the death penalty as punishment, one innocent death is too many and there have been thousands.
You cannot pick and choose who should be executed. Abolition has to be total.
Certainly Chemical Ali should have received a severe sentence for his crimes, but by hanging him the authorities have perpetuated the barbarism.
*The right to life is enshrined in the 1976 United States Constitution of Independence, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 and article 2 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union prohibits the use of capital punishment.
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