Dawn Crawford vs Dirty County Politicians and  Officials

By Emma Sabry

The first anniversary of Saddam Hussein’s execution may have passed in Iraq with scant mention by the government or the press, but it was marked by his loyalists who gathered at the ousted leader graveside on Sunday in his birthplace of Awja in central Iraq.

Ali al-Nida, chief of the Baijat tribe to which Saddam belonged, said the followers of the Sunni leader held a simple ceremony in Awja to remember him for his role in "maintaining the dignity" of the Iraqi people.

"We will observe this day every year as Saddam is in our hearts," said Ghalib Hammudi, a relative of the former president who was hanged in Baghdad at the age of 69 for crimes against humanity on December 30, 2006.

According to AFP, several posters of Saddam Hussein were posted in Awja, while loudspeakers played verses from the holy Qur’an.

In Tikrit, Saddam’s stronghold, walls were painted with slogans paying tribute to the late president. "We will take revenge for president Saddam Hussein," read one.

Saddam’s posters were also seen in Baghdad's Sunni district of Adhamiyah in the north of the capital.

Saddam and three aides were sentenced to death for the killing of around 140 Shias from the village of Dujail after a failed attempt on his life there in 1982. His half-brother Barzan Ibrahim and Awad Ahmed al-Bandar, the ex-chief of Iraq's Revolutionary Court, were hanged two weeks later over the Dujail case, with Saddam's deputy Taha Yassin Ramada also hanged in March 2007.

Others close to Saddam await the same fate, with Ali Hassan al-Majid -- nicknamed "Chemical Ali" -- sentenced to death for ordering gas attacks against Kurds in 1988. Majid was sentenced in June to hang but his execution has been delayed by a legal dispute.

• Still divided

According to an article on the BBC, the Iraqis are still divided one year after Saddam Hussein’s execution. While his supporters marked his death, Shias, who now lead the Iraqi government, celebrated.

Haider al-Jabiri, a member of powerful Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's office, said: "We are happy today because it was a day that justice came down from the heavens against Saddam Hussein… The homes of the people he made widows and orphans can be joyful.”

Those involved in Saddam’s execution claim that his death has helped reconciliation.

"Saddam's execution put an end to any hopes among his supporters that he might come back to power," said the Moneer Haddad, the final appeal court judge who took charge of the hanging and witnessed the execution.

But many analysts say that the execution further deepened the Shia-Sunni divide in the war-torn country. The hanging itself has outraged the world and embarrassed the Shia-led government after appalling images on a mobile phone camera showed Saddam’s executioners taunting him before his death.

This led many analysts to condemn the execution as a sectarian revenge killing.

Many Iraqis are still unable to come to terms with the manner in which the former Iraqi leader’s life came to an end, and think that Saddam’s regime was better than Iraqi Prime Minister Al Maliki’s rule. They complain of the U.S. occupation, the rising prices of commodities and a lack of security in the streets.

While many of Saddam's supporters have shunned the resistance against U.S. occupation forces, they are far from supportive of the present Shia-led government.

However, thousands of former Saddam loyalists have now joined forces with the Americans to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Butmany of them are still convinced that Saddam was executed for political reasons, and that his death didn’t help the country in any way, because Iraq today is more divided than what it was during the Saddam Hussein regime.

"Iraq's government is failing and Saddam's execution was part of that failure,” says Sheikh Ali Hatim Al Sulaiman, who leads the Dulaimy tribe in Anbar province that until recently was wracked with violence.

Many Iraqis share that view, saying that Saddam has been replaced by another tyrant.

"Saddam may have been a dictator," says Ali, a former member of the Baath Party - the political machine that kept Saddam Hussein in power. "But in comparison to the current leaders of Iraq he's innocent. Saddam was a great Arab leader and we felt very sad that he was executed."