January 01, 2007	Monday	Zilhaj 10, 1427

PARIS: Sunday newspapers across Europe were largely pessimistic as to whether Saddam Hussein’s execution would solve any of Iraq’s problems.

The Sunday Telegraph in London said it would be “naive to think that his execution will end the growing sectarian violence that has gripped Iraq since the US-led invasion toppled Saddam in March 2003.” But it conceded that the hanging “might sow a necessary seed of separation between” loyalists of the secular Baath party that had ruled Iraq for three decades and the Islamist extremists.

“The execution has definitively robbed the former group of a symbolic figurehead and any hope of a recognisable Baathist revival,” the right-leaning newspaper said in an editorial.

The dictator’s death “may yet open up a tiny chink of hope,” it concluded.

The Independent on Sunday said execution defied moves worldwide in recent decades to scrap the death penalty and “can too easily be portrayed ...throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds as victor’s justice.” The Italian press also agreed that the execution had “divided the world” and would not “end the nightmare of the Iraqis”. The business daily Il Sole 24 ore said “this is not the beginning of a new Iraq,” while Il Messagero concluded that dialogue was urgently needed in Iraq but “the necessary conditions to do not exist, and that death of Saddam will not help this”. Only the Turin-based daily La Stampa saw Saddam’s death as “possibly a turning point for a country finally united by the disappearance of the person chiefly responsible for its ruin.” Spain’s respected daily El Pais said that in executing Saddam the Iraqi government “lamentably succumbed to an easy temptation”.

The government “may or may not gain greater public backing but the Arab country is no better off today, nor is its future more promising with the elimination of the man from Tikrit,” Sadam’s hometown.

“With the precipitate and quasi-clandestine hanging of the tyrant, Baghdad has not just lost an opportunity to show magnanimity that Iraq desperately needs if it is to have the least chink of home. It has also lost the chance to carry on judging Saddam for his crimes against humanity and expose to Iraqis the truth behind his appalling reign in all its gore.”

The German weekly Bild am Sonntag was similarly pessimistic, saying this was not a time for “joy or relief ...because Saddam’s death does not solve any of the problems that the military campaign against him created”. —AFP