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LONDON, Nov 7: British Prime Minister Tony Blair said on Monday he is against the death penalty for `Saddam or anybody else’, but remained otherwise tight-lipped on the sentence passed on the former Iraqi president.
In a sometimes tetchy press conference, he insisted that the year-long trial of Saddam Hussein had been `a very clear reminder of the total and barbaric brutality of that regime’. “The trial of Saddam gives us a chance to see again what the past in Iraq was: the brutality, the tyranny, the hundreds of thousands of people that he killed, the wars in which there were a million casualties.
“It also then helps point the way to the only future which ... is the one that Iraqi people want and is worth fighting for, which is a non-sectarian Iraq,” said Mr Blair.
On Monday, Saddam's lawyers launched his appeal. Under Iraqi law, if it fails he must be executed within 30 days.
But the verdict served only to deepen Iraq's bitter religious divide, with Shias celebrating it as a victory and some Sunnis protesting at this latest humiliation to the ousted government.
The European Union and the Italian prime minister also voiced their opposition to the death penalty.
Speaking at his monthly Downing Street press conference, Mr Blair was pressed several times on what he thought about the death sentence handed down on Saddam -- and repeatedly refused to comment.
“We are against the death penalty whether it's Saddam or anybody else,” was the furthest he went, declining to add anything more specific on the significance of a ruling which some hoped would be a turning point for Iraq.
On Sunday, Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett issued a statement saying Saddam and his co-defendants had been “held to account” for their crimes -- but also shied away from publicly backing the death sentences.
“Appalling crimes were committed by Saddam Hussein's regime. It is right that those accused of such crimes against the Iraqi people should face Iraqi justice,” she said.
On Monday she said the death sentence is unlikely to bolster his role as a martyr for ordinary Iraqis.
“I find it quite hard to believe that people who previously recognised the terrible crimes he committed .... will feel he has been a martyr,” she told BBC radio.
WITHDRAWAL RULED OUT: Mr Blair reiterated the US and British tactics in Iraq.
“Our strategy is to withdraw. .... but to do so when the Iraqi capability to handle their own affairs” is in place, he said.
Suggestions that Washington will be forced to change its tack have grown amid the mounting violence across Iraq, more than three years after the invasion of the country.
But Mr Blair insisted that the troops will not be pulled out too quickly.
“I think it's important that we stand the course and finish the job.”
Italian PM: Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi said here on Monday that his government was against former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein being executed.
Earlier his foreign minister, Massimo D'Alema, warned in Paris that executing Saddam would be an “unacceptable” mistake that could throw Iraq into a `veritable civil war’.
Mr Prodi, who was speaking in London following talks with his British counterpart, Tony Blair, was more general in his opposition.
“Italy is against the death penalty and so even in such a dramatic case as Saddam Hussein we still think that the death penalty must not be put into action,” Mr Prodi said.—Reuters/AFP
