Catharsis

The road to a stable democracy is messy and often violent. We are seeing this in our own country, which is still classified as an emerging democracy 60 years after the end of US colonial rule.

Our democratic institutions are weak, condemned to backsliding in the few areas where reforms manage to succeed.

Across the country murder is regarded as a political tool and a way of going around the notoriously slow, inefficient and often corrupt judicial system. Clan feuds and political scores are settled through bomb attacks and ambuscades.

Citizens of more stable democracies like to remind us of that often-quoted observation of Winston Churchill about democracy being the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

It’s cold comfort when you feel that the system is breaking down. We are turning into a poster boy for the perils of freedom without responsibility, used by our Asian neighbors as the best argument for why democracy is not for everyone.

The problem, magnified a thousand times, is evident in Iraq. But even developments in that country can be a source of frustration for Filipinos. The Iraqis at least have punished the despot who oppressed them for over two decades.

Our homegrown despot, on the other hand, died in peace, in exile in scenic Honolulu. And we have no idea what we plan to do with another former president who is on trial for plunder.

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By now you must have seen the gruesome video, apparently taken from a cell phone videocam. The low-resolution footage is shaky, but good enough considering that the camera was supposed to be hidden from authorities.

There was a lot of shouting, both from the Shiite mob that was allowed into the execution chamber and from Saddam Hussein himself, who was defiant to the end.

Give the man credit for nerves of steel; not even for a fleeting moment could you catch fear or uncertainty in Saddam’s eyes as he faced the hangman’s noose.

That nerve allowed him to rule a country like Iraq with an iron fist for 24 years.

Saddam tortured, maimed and massacred his own people. He used brutal force to suppress dissent and religious fanaticism.

The result was a secular state in a region dominated by Islamic fundamentalists, a country where women enjoyed such high levels of education they could become nuclear physicists and molecular biologists working for the Saddam regime.

As in other authoritarian states, peace and order reigned on the surface in Saddam’s Iraq, giving the country the secure environment needed for economic growth. Development was fueled by petrodollars in a country that sits on the world’s second largest oil reserves.

That peace and order of course came at a steep price. It was a society that lived in fear, with the minority Sunni Arabs to which Saddam belonged ruling over the majority Shiites.

The taunting shouts heard on the video footage, widely available on the Internet and broadcast on cable news, reportedly came from Shiites who were allowed into the execution chamber by at least two guards.

The presence of the unauthorized audience at what was supposed to be the implementation of a court order sending Saddam to the gallows made the proceedings look like the handiwork of a lynch mob.

There was no real justice in Saddam’s Iraq, but justice remains elusive in the country that is struggling to recover from the ruins of his regime.

With Iraq descending into the chaos of civil war, Saddam’s Sunni Arab followers long for the good old days of his strong-arm rule.

The danger for those who had put such high hopes on turning post-Saddam Iraq into a democratic model for the Arab world is that the opposite will happen and the Sunni Arab perception will prevail.

The failed Iraqi state will then serve as a model for the perpetuation of authoritarian and Islamic fundamentalist regimes in the Middle East.

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In a region where the language of brute force is often more effective than gentle persuasion, Saddam’s gruesome execution may at least provide catharsis for his victims and send a strong message that those who commit genocide will pay for it.

Yesterday a report from Iraq said two jail guards had been arrested for allowing unauthorized people to witness the execution.

This was after Iraq’s national security adviser himself was accused of taking the video footage and releasing it to the world.

Punishing those guards could support the US-backed Iraqi government’s efforts to project the execution as a triumph of justice rather than an act of sectarian revenge.

Some people who watched the video footage, inured to violent scenes thanks to people like Quentin Tarantino, thought Saddam got off lightly considering his crimes against humanity.

They thought Saddam should have been killed with a chainsaw, like in the movies, slowly so he could feel pain, with pauses in between breaths and blood spurting all over.

Still, even the quick execution was better than the way Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic managed to escape conviction and punishment for his campaign of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia.

Followers of Milosevic, who died of a heart attack while in prison, still suspect that he was murdered. Only time will tell if his death helped ease tensions in the land that his ethnic cleansing tore apart.

And only time will tell if Saddam’s execution, recorded on videocam, will deepen the ethnic divide in his country or allow Iraqis to move on.

Saddam’s punishment gave his victims catharsis and a sense of justice, though no one thinks his death will end the violence in his country.

We have been unable to move on — not from the ghosts of the martial law years or the excesses of the Estrada administration, and now the ghosts of endless unsolved murders.