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Hussein buried in simple coffin in his home village

By WASHINGTON POST
Published January 1, 2007

BAGHDAD - Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was brought to his home village early Sunday in a simple wood coffin for burial, less than 24 hours after his execution. A few hundred mourners paid their respects in the predawn darkness for a man who led their nation over 24 years of fear, brutality and war.

"The execution of Saddam was a cowardly act," said Hameed Salman al-Majeed, one of Hussein's cousins, as he greeted mourners next to Hussein's temporary grave dug into a marble-floored social center in Ouja, 120 miles north of Baghdad and a few miles south of Tikrit.

"We feel proud that he stood at the gallows proud and upright," Majeed said.

Across Iraq, there was a relative lull in the bombings and assassinations. Police reported finding 12 bodies dumped in Baghdad on Sunday as well as 12 other violent deaths nationwide, both relatively low numbers by recent standards.

Hussein's burial was a bookend to six grim days that began with Iraq's highest court upholding Hussein's death sentence and ended with his hanging to jeers and condemnations from Shiite witnesses, whose community his regime ruthlessly oppressed.

Even as late as Saturday night, it was unclear where Hussein would be buried, as Iraqi politicians grappled with concerns over security and allowing Hussein's resting place to become a shrine for his loyalists. Only after U.S. pressure did the government agree to release Hussein's corpse to his tribesmen.

The simplicity of the aftermath, without a state funeral or mourning masses, was in sharp contrast to Hussein's life and aspirations. An avid student of history, he cultivated his image with his legacy in mind. He lavished billions of his country's oil dollars on palaces, monuments and statues to invoke the ancient glory of Babylon.

In death, Hussein, a Sunni Arab, returned to the hardscrabble village of his early life.

Hussein's final resting place is expected to be in his family's cemetery, where his sons Uday and Qusay, killed by U.S. troops two months after the invasion, are buried. The cemetery is about 2 miles from where Hussein was buried Sunday.

[Last modified January 1, 2007, 00:23:17]