Avenge the Past, Meet Today’s Burning Needs

What follows are excerpts from interviews conducted in mid-November by Commentary Page Editor Nicholas Goldberg on the subject of justice, blame and punishment in Iraq, and how members of Saddam Hussein’s regime should be dealt with.

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Jabar Abdulzara, an unemployed Shiite from the village of Abisiyeh, near Najaf:

My son was killed by the Baathists on April 30 of this year. They destroyed my life when they shot him. This is what’s left of my house. It was burned by the Baathists in 1991, at the time of the uprising. I was handcuffed and they burned it in front of me. They burned more than 1,000 homes in Abisiyeh. Now I live elsewhere, but I pay monthly rent and cannot buy another house. I used to have nine children, but now I have eight. I am fed up from chaos and war and problems.

They are criminals. Saddam Hussein is a criminal. We are Islamic, and according to Islam, there is a penalty for this. Whatever is done, you must do it to them. If he has killed, he will be killed. Recently, a criminal Baathist was caught here. The coalition caught him. He supervised murders during the uprising, but the coalition let him go after 10 days. He tried to come home, but he felt the danger from us.... He would have been killed if he had stayed. I am 100% sure of it.

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Abdel Qader al Gemawe, chief of the special committee for investigation of regime crimes in Najaf:

The judge was killed a few days ago. This is how it happened. Usually the public prosecutor would come in a car to the judge’s house to pick him up. But on this day they were waiting for him. When the judge opened the [prosecutor’s car] door ... they rushed and attacked him, hitting him with pistols. They took both men away. They told the judge that the order had come from Saddam: “You must be killed.” They said, “You have been sentenced to death by Saddam.” And he was killed. They threw his body on the side of the road with a bullet in his head. He was a thin, 60-year-old man. He was the chief of courts in Najaf and all the towns here. Everybody knew him. I don’t know if he was killed because of his role in capturing and punishing criminals from the regime of Saddam Hussein.

All of us who are doing this work have been threatened by telephone. We’ve had bullets left on our desks. On the telephone, they told us, “It is not good for you to work against the Baathists.” If we’re going to go after these people we need protection, weapons, guards, more authority, more security. I don’t think the regime will come back, but the Americans could make a mistake and put somebody in with 100 faces -- somebody with a different face, but who is really the same.

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Khalil al Wadi, a 23-year-old Sunni resident of Baghdad. He was standing near a wall with graffiti reading: “Long Live the Hero, Saddam Hussein”:

You know we never supported Saddam. When he was toppled, we were happy that the Americans were here. But now we’re not so sure. Saddam was able to fix the infrastructure in two months after the first Gulf war, but in six months the Americans have done nothing, even though they are so much richer and advanced. We have no democracy, we want elections, but the Americans aren’t bringing it to us. They’re giving us a Governing Council that is really a dictatorship. And we still do not have 24-hour electricity. How can the U.S. transport 10 tons of explosives that hit the heads of the people, but they can’t bring generators to light Baghdad?

They’re pushing us to be pro-Saddam again. All of us young men -- whether Shiite or Sunni -- are waiting for word from our clerics, and we will join the jihad. I will too, inshallah. It’s not terrorism; we’re supporting our rights. We did not support Saddam, but they’re creating us.