Thoughts on Hussein's Death and the Future of Genocide

It's weird, it's really weird - I've pretty much devoted my life to fighting against genocide and recovery after the fact (so much as there can ever be recovery), but yet - Saddam was just executed, and I feel terrible. I mean, my folks and I were talking about it last night, and we were all pretty sad. Weird, you know, because in March 1988, he gassed Hallabja (a Kurdish city in Iraq) - they called it the 'Kirdish Hiroshima'. Loads of things, thousands of people, kids, perished in incidents like that, at his command. He was put to death for war crimes, for the murder of 147 boys and men. He was still on trial for genocide when they killed him. I was saddened, then, on a couple of levels. The most fundamental level is that we should not be killing anybody. My life is greatly dedicated to ousting people like Hussein from power, so that genocide can't continue, but he was imprisoned: he could not kill anyone anymore, and there is absolutely no justice in taking one's life when not directly defending someone else's. 'Good or bad, he's still a person'. Ah, Care Bears wisdom which will never leave me. Good or bad, he was still a person.

Secondly, though, they killed him in the middle of his genocide trial. They rushed his execution, and that is just nonsense. Firstly, we know I think he shouldn't have been killed anyway. It was murder in the cold blood, but it was an eventuality, unfortunately. So if I must come to grips with that terrifying fact that we're going to murder someone, I have to say that they needed to wait until he was tried for genocide. This is a terrible defeat for humanity and for Raphael Lemkin. Now, it is impossible to have a truly revealing trial: now, they cannot learn who helped him, they cannot show the world definitively that this is what happens when someone commits genocide. International courts will charge you with your crime when you are guilty of genocide: this message has now been lost, forever hanging in the same noose as Saddam Hussein, the horrible man who was once a child.