From the International Herald Tribune:
The execution of Saddam Hussein, however, has stirred feelings in this part of the world as nothing else has since the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal.
East Asians have no particular brief for Saddam. He was not a great friend of any government in this region, and his passage here has not been mourned. Yet in each of the area’s two most powerful countries, Japan and China, the handling of Saddam’s trial, and particularly his violent and unseemly end, have left a bad and perhaps lasting taste.
In China, where the government works hard to control the flow of information, official accounts of the execution left no doubt about how to interpret the news. [Full text]
