Still Numb!!

By Jamal Laoudi

It has been a while since the late Saddam Hussein was executed and I still feel odd about that event and the circumstances surrounding it; Better yet, I am still confused and I cannot make sense of anything that happened night. 

Is it because it is an Iraqi matter ultimately and I am not affording myself the right to react in anyway?  Is it that I am still in a state of shock over how it was handled and therefore I am not ready to try and make sense of it? Is it because this matter is so divisive and emotional it is best left alone? It is in everybody’s mind but rarely anyone brings it up in casual conversation as they do other events.

The night it happened, I was at an event in a room full of Iraqis; Sunnies, Shiites, Kurds, and Christians.  No one knew about Saddam’s execution until after our event was over.  I knew about in the early morning hours the next day. 

When it happened, we were concentrating on our event, too busy to pay attention to the media as we had no prior indication that it were going to happen that night whatsoever.  It turned out that some people in the room knew about it as soon as it was made public through relatives and friends who were tuned to the various media outlets. 

I could not tell because there was no indication of feeling of joy or sadness on anyone’s face. 

During the few following days, you could hear conversations about what happened.

The consensus is that the timing was unacceptable.  To display those images on TV was also considered very offensive by many standards.  It was the eve of a Muslim religious holiday, Eid al-Adha.  What is the “real” motive behind showing it on TV?

What is debatable is whether or not he deserved the sentence.  There is a huge divide among the Iraqis for obvious reasons.

I wonder if the subject quickly dissipated into oblivion or is it that most are still numb!!

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