It is possible that the world is a calmer place since Hitler’s suicide, since Milosevic’s detention and strange death and, even, since the capture and the hanging of Saddam. But shall the world be free and safe while the defenders of peace rise themselves in unfruitful contend? While part of humankind is amputated under the look that ignores the rest? While a dictator, that didn’t allowed his people to breath peacefully, a dictator that killed thousands, that eliminates members of his own family in cold blood is killed by a pseudo juridical system, also in cold blood?
The world will only live in peace when – by fair, neutral and impartial means – people like Saddam Hussein (and so many others that are out there freely) are taken to international justice, demonstrating that international community does not tolerate their actions. Humankind will only give the next step ahead when the means of justice show to all dictators, that they are not judged because they have lost international prestige or power, but because they didn’t fulfill the most basic human rights. Humankind will only progress when she no longer gives the opportunity to people like Saddam Hussein to convert themselves into martyrs, making others responsible for their current situation, dying with a Koranic prayer and the religious comment – “God is great” – another patriotic – “The nation shall be victorious” – and, at last, the ultimate political comment – “Palestine is Arab”.
Thus, the memory of Saddam Hussein walks towards two sides: to the pantheon of the infamies assassins, dictators and genocides, at the same time that he strives the path of the saint and holly man, the martyr of Iraq and of an auto-proclaimed Islam. Once he tortured, killed, slaughtered; and yesterday he claimed the union between all Iraqis, for an Iraq free of the occupation forces. Sentenced for only one of his most atrocious crimes (the extermination of 148 Shiites), Saddam shall never see the light of an impartial court that makes him responsible for the million lives lost during the war with Iran or for the 180 thousand Kurdish exterminated.
He overused his last days for his last clamor: for the union amongst Sunnites and Shiites, amongst Arabs and Kurds, saying, on the lecture of his unchangeable sentence: “I call you not to hate because hate leaves no space to the person to be fair and blinds you and closes all the doors of thought”.
With his death announced, he raised his head and dreamed for himself the position of a martyr for his cause. Humankind helped him in his conversion into a hero of the post-war. And, one day, this same humankind will wake up and the father of the modern psychology, Freud, shall say it was nothing but a strange dream; a dream where there was the unconscious need to destroy, afraid to love – because, perhaps, humanity must have never learned how to love.
Sam Cyrous
(published in Psicologia Actual, Portugal, January 2006).
Labels: battle-war, death, fear, Freud, human nature, human rights, leadership, violence, world citizenship, world unity
