Son of death

Anyone who felt overcome by sympathy at the sight of the humbled tyrant undergoing his medical examination might like to test their sympathy against a reading of this report by Matthew Campbell. Be warned that it isn’t pleasant reading. At the end of Campbell’s piece we are given the view of Hamid Faraj Hafof, of the Iraqi Political Prisoners’ League:

[He] was wary of echoing Bush’s call for Saddam to receive the “ultimate penalty”, or execution. “He should be made to suffer,” said Hafof. “He should be put in prison for the rest of his life. That is much more painful than death.”

(See also the views collected here.) I am reminded by Hafof’s statement of these lines from Primo Levi’s poem For Adolf Eichmann:

Oh son of death, we do not wish your death.
May you live longer than anyone ever lived.
May you live sleepless five million nights,
And may you be visited each night by the suffering of everyone who saw,
Shutting behind him, the door that blocked the way back,
Saw it grow dark around him, the air fill with death.

It should not be inferred from this that Levi was opposed in principle to the death penalty for crimes on the scale of Eichmann’s or Saddam Hussein’s. He wasn’t.