linked - Institut kurde de Paris

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rescinded the order.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.
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