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Iranian press jubilant over “humiliating” capture of arch-enemy Saddam
Khaleej Times, (AFP)
15 December 2003
TEHERAN - The Iranian press was on Monday jubilant over the “humiliating” capture of Saddam Hussein, reviving sore memories of his eight year war against the Islamic republic that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iranians.
When the news was first announced on Sunday on state television, the female presenter was close to tears as she announced the arrest of “the dictator whose hands are covered with the blood of innocents” and the “most hated dictator on the planet”.
State television, more tuned to damning Saddam’s captors, said it hoped the news would “heal the wounds of the mothers who sent their children to be martyrs at the front” during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.
Such was the hatred reserved for Saddam here, even a daily paper dedicated to covering cinema news carried a front page image of the dishevelled former president.
“The man who ordered the chemical weapons attack on Halabja,” the Kurdish town gassed in 1988, “and who fired missiles at Iran can now understand humiliation, fear and what it is like to wear rags and have no power over his life or death,” the Etemad newspaper wrote.
However the paper stopped short of praising the US troops who captured him, given that most Iranians are quick to point out the support given by the US to Saddam when he was at war with revolutionary Iran.
Virtually all papers here, however, temporarily put aside their opposition to the US occupation of Iraq and plastered their front pages with the images of the scraggly-bearded ex-dictator released by the US.
And the conservative Tehran Times also reserved a front page spot for Iran’s late revolutionary leader and Saddam’s nemesis Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini -- together with his 1980 prediction that “Saddam is doomed to failure.”
Another hardline paper, Jomhuri Islami, could not resist juxtaposing the US triumph with the superpower’s past support of Saddam.
“At the time he was a university student in Cairo, he was already on the payroll of the CIA. In the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, he turned Iraq into one of the biggest prisons in the world, and committed the worst atrocities against Iran, Kuwait, religion and ethics,” the paper said.
“The United States was his accomplice, as was the former USSR and some European countries.”
His past supporters, the paper argued in an editorial, should stand trial alongside him.
“It was Americans who trained him. Ronald Reagan, Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush Senior helped by giving him chemical weapons so they are accomplices,” it said, concluding that “if he is tried by Americans, that would be the funniest prosecution in history.”
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