Inhumane treatment for "King of Arabs"

Contributed by Al-Jazeera news

The humiliating images of Saddam Hussein's capture by US forces risk increasing Arab support for the Iraqi resistance and sharpening their appetite for revenge, analysts said on Monday.

"I felt extremely humiliated," said Egyptian writer Sayyid Nassar, who interviewed Saddam three weeks before the US-led invasion of Iraq on 20 March. "I felt it was not only a humiliation of Arabs but of all humanity.

"By shaving his beard, a symbol of virility in Iraq and in the Arab world, the Americans committed an act that symbolizes humiliation in our region, where getting shaved by one's enemy means robbing him of his will," he said.

"It's also a humiliation for all Arab leaders and a message telling them that he who does not enter the poultry yard of the Americans will experience the same fate," he said.


Saddam's arrest "will not destroy the Iraqi resistance against the US occupier," and will encourage "feelings of Arab solidarity with the Iraqi fighters," he predicted.

"On the contrary, the resistance will grow and change shape," he warned.

"There will be a kind of creativity in acts of resistance, which will diversify and intensify to wash away their shame," he said.

The Egyptian Islamist lawyer Muntasir al-Zayyat agreed that Saddam's capture would "open the door wide to the resistance."

"It is true that we all deplored the humiliating way Saddam was arrested and his capture added to the feelings of frustration. However, the positive side is that it will intensify the resistance," he said.


"All opponents of Saddam, who refused to fight the American occupier for fear of being counted among the former president's supporters, will no longer hesitate to join the resistance," Zayyat said.

"The image that former president Saddam Hussein gave during his arrest by American occupation forces is a painful and shocking image," said Ibrahim Nafie, the editor in chief of the Egyptian government daily Al-Ahram. "It's an image that no Arab wished for the president of one of the most important Arab states," Nafie wrote.

The Iraqi political analyst Ali al-Dabbagh, who lives in the United Arab Emirates, said Arabs were shocked and humiliated because of the "collapse of a myth" which forced "Arabs to face their sad reality and impotence.