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Revue de Presse-Press Review-Berhevoka Çapê-Rivista Stampa-Dentro de la Prensa-Basln Ozeti Saddam thought he would rule Iraq forever By Neil MacFarquhar For decades, it seemed that Saddam Hussein's unflinching hold on Iraq . would endure. The tyrant who oppressed Iraq for more than 30 years - unleashing dev~stating regi~n~l wa.rs and reducing hlS once proml~lUg,
Revue de Presse-Press Review-Berhevoka Çapê-Rivista Stampa-Dentro de la Prensa-Baszn Ozeti stuff of gory public soap operas. Saddam once sentenced his eldest son, Uday, to death after Uday beat Saddam's food taster to death in front of many horrified party guests; he later rescinded the order. The husbands of his two eldest daughters, whom he had promoted to important military positions, were gunned down after they defected and then inexplicably returned to Iraq. Saddam was born in 1937in a mud hut on stilts near the banks of the Tigris River near the village of Tikrit, 160kilometers, or 100 miles, northwest of Baghdad. He was raised by a clan of landless peasants. His father apparently deserted his mother before his birth. (Government accounts said the father had died.) "His birth was not a joyful occasion, and no roses or aromatie plants bedecked his cradle," his officiaI biographer, Amir Iskander, wrote in "Saddam Hussein, the Fighter, the Thinker and The Man," published in 1981. Saddam told his biographer that he had not missed his father while growing up in an extended clan. But persistent stories suggested that Saddam's stepfather had delighted in humiliating the boy and had forced him to tend sheep. Eventually Saddam ran away to live with relatives who would let him go to school. Saddam's first role in the rough world of Iraqi politics came in 1959,at age 22, when the Baath Party assigned him and nine others to assassinate Abdul Karim Kassem, the despotie general who ruled Iraq. Violence was a quick way for a young man who had grown up fatherless in an impoverished village to advance himself; bloodshed became the major theme ofhis life. During the failed assassination, Saddam suffered a bullet wound in the leg. The officiaI version portrayed Saddam as a hero who had dug a bullet out ofhis own leg with a penknife; the other version suggested that the plot had failed becausè Saddam had opened fire prematurely. Saddam sought asylum in Egypt, where President Gamal Abdel Nasser nurtured the region's revolutionary movements. Soon after retuming to Iraq, Saddam married his first cousin and the daughter ofhis political mentor, Sajida Khairallah Tulfah, on May 5,1963.The couple had five children including two sons, Uday and Qusay, and three daughters, Raghad, Rana and Hala. Saddam had mistresses, including several pro minent Iraqi women, but he never flaunted them. Saddam's wife, three daughters and about a dozen grandchildren are still alive. Uday and Qusay, along with Qusay's teenage son, Mustapha, died in July 2003 during a fierce gun battle with U.S. forces in a villa in the northern city of Mosul. Denounced by an informant, theyhad been the two most wanted men in Iraq after their father. The first years of Saddam's marriage coincided with politieal tumult in Iraq with at least six coups or attempted re~ volts erupting between the assassination of King Faisal II in 1958 and the putsch in July 1968 that brought the Baath Party to power. Saddam's main role while he was still in his early 30s was organizing the party's militia, whieh became the seed of the dreaded security apparatus. By November 1969, he had eliminated rivaIs and dissidents to the extent that President Ahmad Hassan Al-Bakr appointed him vice president and deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, as the cabinet was known. Saddam remained head of the intelligence and internaI security agencies, in effect controlling Iraq. The Arab Baath Socialist Party, whose name means "Renaissance" in Arabie, had been formed in the 1930s to promote a secular, socialist creed as the ideal path to achieving Arab unity. But that dogma proved a sinister excuse for the imprisonment, exile or execution of all potential rivaIs. No other Arab despot matched the savagery of Saddam as he went about bending all state institutions to his whim. Hi~ opening act, in January 1969, was hangmg about 17so-called spies for Israel, as many as 13of them Jews, in a central Baghdad square. Hundreds of arrests and executions followed as the civilian wing of Baath gradually eclipsed the Iraqi military and the era of coups ended. Saddam invariably made sure that those around him were complicit in his bloody acts, which he identified as patriotism, making certain that there wo~l~ be no guiltless figure to rally op- POSItiOn. ln an authoritative account of Saddam's regime called "Republic of Fear: The Polities of Modern Iraq," a self-exile~ . Iraqi architect, Kenaan Mikiya, wntmg under the pseudonym Samir Al- Khalil, estimated that at least 500 people had died in the purge that consolidated Saddam's power. Saddam's titles reflected his status as an absolute ruler modeled after'one of his heroes, Josef Stalin of the former Soviet Union. They included president of the republic, commander in chief of the armed forces, field marshal and prime minister. ln addition, the state-owned press referred to him repeatedly as the Struggler, the Standard Bearer, 'the Knight of the Arab Nation and the Sword of the Arabs. The eight-year war that he undertook against neighboring Iran, beginning with an invasion in 1980, resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths on both sides. His invasion of Kuwait in 1990 brought an overwhelming military response from a broad coalition of other countries. ln keeping with a ruling technique that used violence to achieve and sustain power, Saddam's biggest investments were in his military. He ended the Iran-Iraq war with one million men underarms. By then Iraq had embarked on extensive projects to acquire a homegrown arsenal of nuclear, chemical and biologieal weapons. Iraq had become a regional power, and Saddam expected to dominate the Arab world much as his hero, Nasser, had done in the 1960s. During the 1990s, Saddam repeatedly took Iraq to the brink of renewed warfare by refusing UN weapons inspectors the unfettered access they required to catalog and destroy what was believed to be an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, as specified in the cease-fire agreement after the ejection of the Iraqis from Kuwait. The United Na~ions maintained strict economic sanctions against Iraq until 1996, when some oil exports were allowed to pay for food, medicine and war reparations. The sanctions, devastating to ordinary Iraqis, proved a boon to Saddam and his henchmen. The Government Accountability Office in the US. Congress estimated that the Iraqi leader had siphoned at least $10 billion from the program by ma king oil trades off the books and demanding kickbacks. Still, in an effort to end sanctions, Baghdad over the years offered at least five different "full, final and complete" weapons disclosures, whieh the United Nations dismissed as woefully incompIete. During his presidency, each of Saddam's 20 palaces was kept fully staffed, with meals prepared daily as if he were in residence to conceal his whereabouts. Delicacies like lobster, which were imported for him, were first dispatched to nuclear scientists to test them for radiation and poison. Saddam was particularly phobie about germs. Even top generals summoned to meet him were often ordered by his security guards to strip to their underwear and their clothes were then washed, ironed and X-rayed before they could get dressed to meet him. They had to wash their hands in disinfectant. Saad al-Bazzaz, an Iraqi writer and editor, said that Saddam, having risen so far beyond the village and cheated death so many times, believed that God had anointed him. Iraq under Saddam had a stifled quality. Imprisonment, torture, mutilation and execution were frequent occurrences, at least for those who chose to dabble in anything vaguely political. Simple information like the weather report was classified. There was no freedom of expression - even foreign newspapers were banned - and no freedom to travel. Contact with foreigners was proscribed. There were widespread reports that Saddam himself periodically carried out the torture or even execution of those he felt had crossed him. Saddam often tried to draw parallels between himself and the famous leaders of Mesopotamia, one of the earliest civilizations in the region, as well as Saladin, the 12th century Kurdish Muslim military commander who expelled the Crusaders from Jerusalem. What preoccupied him, Saddam said, was what people would be thinking about him 500 years from now. 72
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