Word: shying
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...unrelenting sectarian violence in daily Iraqi life soon turned the trial into a televised sideshow. For those who bothered to watch anymore, the sight of Saddam in court sometimes had the exact opposite effect than officials expected - it evoked nostalgia for a time when, under the tyrant's yoke, Shi'ites and Sunnis were not at each other's throat. Although viewership spiked today, interest in the proceedings will quickly subside again...
...What will not subside is the violence. Far from being collective therapy, the trial has only helped widen the sectarian divide. While Shi'ites celebrated the verdict, many of Saddam's fellow Sunnis protested. In his hometown of Tikrit, over 1,000 people staged demonstrations in defiance of the curfew. In Baghdad's mainly Sunni Adhamiya district, several mortars landed near the Abu Hanifa shrine, the most revered Sunni mosque in the country...
...Maliki and his predecessor Ibrahim al-Jaafari are both members of it. That meant the trial was always going to have political overtones, which tarnished its credibility with many Iraqis. The trial's first top judge resigned halfway through the proceedings of the Iraqi High Tribunal (IHT), complaining that Shi'ite and Kurdish political leaders were leaning on him for being too lenient toward Saddam's courtroom antics. The judge who was due to succeed him was blocked by Shi'ite officials because he had been a member of the Ba'ath Party. It didn't help that three defense...
...Maliki's government, on the other hand, could scarcely conceal its triumph. In a statement, the Prime Minister, a Shi'ite, said the "justice handed out to [Saddam] is a response to the call from thousands of sons and sisters of those sentenced and executed by [him]." President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, declared that the trial was fair, because the defendants "had the full right to say what they intended." If the review panel upholds the sentence against Saddam, Talabani must sign off on the execution. Although he has said he is on principle opposed to the death sentence...
...There was a memo dated June 16, 1984, with Hussein's signature approving the death sentences of 148 Iraqi Shi'ites from Dujail, where gunmen tried to kill Hussein in 1982 with an attack on his motorcade.? There were the death certificates of some 100 Dujail villagers whose families were sent to a desert prison.? Some of the documents were hand written, like the lists showing vehicles that carried 399 detainees from a Baghdad jail to what amounted to a concentration camp in southern Iraq in 1984. Some of the prisoners sent to the camp were children below...