Photograph: Erik de Castro/APQuestion: what makes a dictator? The online Oxford English Dictionary answers in the usual active sense - "ruler or governor whose word is law; an absolute ruler of a state."
The judge in Saddam Hussein's trial over the late 1980s Anfal campaign in the Kurdish areas of Iraq, has proposed a more passive - even touchy-feely - definition. He today told Saddam: "You were not a dictator. People around you made you [look like] a dictator."
He seems to suggest people become dictators because others allow themselves to be dictated to (one common justification for dictatorship, from dictators and their supporters, is that a country needs a strong man) or, quite bizarrely, that "dictator" is just another label and whoever carries it is themselves a victim of circumstance.
Of course, it helps here if you forget Saddam's bloody purge of the Ba'ath party on taking the Iraqi presidency in 1979 (among other executions of opponents and rivals) and the vast palaces and statues of himself he errected in his time in power.
"Thank you," was Saddam's response to the judge's political theorising, though seeing as the chief prosecutor was only yesterday complaining judge Abdullah al-Amiri was too lenient towards the former, well, dictator it perhaps won't be overall that helpful to his case.
