Throw out Saddam and free my nation
The Independent, 19/9/2002
I left Iraq 22 years ago. There was no way I could live any longer under the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein. The Iran-Iraq war was just beginning and I, luckily, managed to get a visa to come to Britain as a student. I remember thinking that I would have gone anywhere, India, Rwanda, even Afghanistan, to get away from Saddam. It was a huge struggle, financially and mentally. I know that many people tried to leave after me; few succeeded. Saddam Hussein has destroyed my family and effectively sent me into exile.
When I was recently asked by the Fabian Society to give a talk about the nature of the threat that Saddam Hussein represents, I didn’t know where to start. Should I begin by describing how Saddam committed his first murder at the age of 15? Should I talk about how he and his party took over Iraq in 1968, killing innocent businessmen and confiscating their property, before moving against the ethnic and religious minorities?
Maybe the place to begin was his launching of a chemical attack at Halabja in March 1988 that slaughtered at least 5,000 civilians? What about the the time when he killed 180,000 Kurds in the infamous Anfal operation, many of whom were buried alive?
Perhaps the best place to start is with the present threat of weapons of mass destruction, which the world now fears, and to explain why the United Nations’ plans for weapons inspection will never work.
The threat does not stem from the possession of these weapons alone. Many countries in the world possess these weapons, but few people feel threatened by them. The threat comes from the nature of Saddam Hussein himself. Since his rise to power he has had three obsessions: secrecy, security and weapons. He was lucky to have been able to achieve all three, but at a huge cost to Iraq’s people, to its neighbours and to the environment. History stands as a witness to this cost.
Saddam’s ultimate solution to any problem is physical elimination. And that does not stop at Iraq’s borders. When he didn’t like the Algerian foreign minister mediating between him and Iran in 1982, he ordered his airplane to be shot down over northern Iraq, killing the Algerian minister and everyone else with him.
When an Iraqi airplane was hijacked in 1986, instead of trying to sort out the problem by peaceful means, he ordered the plane to be destroyed, killing the innocent passengers as well as the hijackers, of course. When Iran occupied Iraqi territory at the tip of the Gulf and took Iraqi soldiers as prisoners of war, he ordered the army to use chemical weapons, killing thousands of Iraqi and Iranian soldiers indiscriminately.
He orders executions on a daily basis and carries out many executions personally. He once killed his minister for health at a cabinet meeting and carried on with the meeting afterwards, with the minister’s body lying next door.
Two weeks after he took over the Iraqi state in a military coup, he ordered the arrest of his partners in the coup and expelled them, only to hunt them down later, one in London and the other in Kuwait. When he felt that his brother-in-law, whom he had appointed as defence minister, was getting a bit too popular among army officers, he ordered that his plane be shot down.
The list of crimes goes on and on. He signed an agreement with Kurds under the leadership of the late Mustafa Barzani, in 1970. A year later he sent Barzani a “religious” delegation, and one of the “clergymen” concealed a bomb under his clothes. The bomb exploded and some of the innocent clergymen died – but Barzani survived, by sheer luck.
When Saddam is weak he becomes a dove, and signs agreements; when he feels strong, he tears them up claiming they were unjust and signed during the time of weakness.
He hates anyone he thinks is better than him in any way, with revenge being visited upon them even after a long time has passed. That vengeance is not limited to individuals; it extends to towns such as Halabja, which was wiped out by chemical weapons, and Addijail, which he had demolished after someone shot at his motorcade as it was passing by the town.
The prominent Iraqi writer and intellectual, Hassan al-Alawi, who was part of Saddam’s inner circle for 12 years, wrote a book called Iraq: The State of the Secret Organisation. The book stated that Saddam runs Iraq’s affairs in total secrecy, not wanting anyone – not even those in the party leadership – to know what he is doing. What we think we know about Saddam and his weapons is by no means the full story.
Saddam will never give up two things: his weapons and the secrecy in which he conducts his own affairs. That is why inspection won’t work. He will never co-operate fully. The Iraqi people have been suffering in silence for over three decades. The West has always sought to befriend dictators and despots in the Middle East in the past; now it has an opportunity to gain the friendship of a whole people for a change.
Almost every Iraqi I meet in exile here in Britain wishes to return to Iraq one day. Personally, I will be on a plane the day after Saddam falls.
The writer is an Iraqi writer and journalist living in Britain
