In his 1970 Nobel lecture, Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who understood the nature of totalitarianism as well as anyone, said: "Violence does not and cannot exist by itself; it is invariably intertwined with the lie."
Regime of Lies
A man sells goods at his makeshift market in Basra, site of anti-government disturbances in 1999. (AP Photo/Jassim Mohammed) |
The central lie that Saddam Hussein has perpetrated is that he is a champion of the Iraqi and Arab people. To the contrary, he has championed only himself and his own power. He has brought only disaster, humiliation, and repression to the Iraqi people, war and invasion to his neighbors, and threats of mass killing to the world.
Far from championing any Arab cause, Saddam is the preeminent killer and tormentor of his own people. Far from being a unifier of the Iraqi people or builder of a strong Iraqi nation, he has ravaged the communities that make up Iraqi society and transformed what was once one of the most educated and prosperous nations in the Middle East into an international pariah that functions only as an appendage to Saddam's megalomania and repression.
In the words of Max van der Stoel, the United Nations' former Special Rapporteur on Iraq, the Baghdad regime is "the most ruthless dictatorship and totalitarian regime ever seen by the world since the Second World War."
Men sculpt a wax head of Saddam Hussein before it is cast in bronze. (AP Photo/Enric Marti) |
Beginning as a political operative and enforcer for Iraq's Ba'ath Party, Saddam Hussein has combined deviousness, ruthlessness, intimidation, and a willingness to employ brutality, torture, and murder in his rise to power. In many respects, Saddam's career parallels that of one of his principal role models, according to those who have studied him: the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin. Like Stalin, Saddam has consistently employed terror and killing as chief attributes of his rule. Like Stalin, he has concentrated absolute power within his own cult of personality. And like Stalin, he has imprisoned, tortured, and killed not simply individuals, but entire groups of people perceived as actual or potential threats.
Said Aburish, journalist and author of several books, including Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge, worked in several high-level government positions that brought him into close contact with Saddam:
Without any doubt, everything Saddam did had Stalinist overtones. In particular, the reliance on the security system rather than the armed forces. The jealousy of the generals in the armed forces. The use of criminal elements within the country, incorporating them into the security system. And those people were sort of semi-literate thugs whose loyalty was to Saddam — without whom, they were nothing. And so he brought them in, he depended on them, and they did him service. Anybody he wanted to get rid of he got rid of.
Violence and Torture
Empty beds at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, where Saddam Hussein released prisoners on October 21, 2002. (AP Photo/Jassim Mohammed) |
Iraq is a human rights disaster. By any accounting, the violence and brutality meted out routinely to dissidents, minorities, or those who have simply fallen out of favor is staggering. Human rights reports on Iraq, whether issued by the United Nations, foreign governments, or nongovernmental organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, are consistent in depicting the relentless machinery for torture and arbitrary execution without even the pretense of due process. Those executed include military officers accused of plotting against the regime, as well as religious clerics suspected of disloyalty. Many others are simply individuals accused of theft, smuggling, prostitution, or what in other countries would be considered little more than petty crime. These arbitrary killings — as many as 3,000 since 1997, according to the latest U.S. Human Rights Report on Iraq — also appear to be part of a program to "cleanse" Iraqi prisons that has been under way for the past several years.
According to Human Rights Watch: "The authorities also executed numerous inmates at Abu Ghraib, al-Makasib, and other prisons, including long-term untried political detainees and convicted prisoners."
Families of defectors and political dissidents are subjected to imprisonment, torture, and execution. In May 2001, for example, according to the U.S. Human Rights Report: "The government reportedly tortured to death the mother of three Iraqi defectors for her children's opposition activities."
Relatives of Iraqi prisoners unaccounted for after the amnesty decree demonstrate in Baghdad on October 22, 2002. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)(AP/WWP) |
Also in 2001, according to the report, the regime executed 37 political detainees for opposition activity. According to press reports, "Prominent Kurd writer Muhammad Jamil Bandi Rozhbayani was killed in March after a visit to his home by intelligence service personnel investigating his writings regarding the government's Arabization and ethnic cleansing programs."
Torture, which is categorically prohibited by law and the Iraqi Constitution, is standard practice faced by many of those arrested, both as punishment and to extract information. In its 2001 report, Amnesty International describes the methods used by Iraqi torturers:
Torture victims in Iraq have been blindfolded, stripped of their clothes, and suspended from their wrists for long hours. Electric shocks have been used on various parts of their bodies, including the genitals, ears, the tongue, and fingers. Victims have described to Amnesty International how they have been beaten with canes, whips, hosepipe, or metal rods and how they have been suspended for hours from either a rotating fan in the ceiling or from a horizontal pole, often in contorted positions, as electric shocks were applied repeatedly on their bodies. Some victims had been forced to watch others, including their own relatives or family members, being tortured in front of them.
Disappearances and Prison Releases
According to Amnesty International, Iraq has the worst record of unaccounted disappearances of any country in the world. Yet the authorities have simply refused to respond to inquiries and pleas from international organizations and neighboring countries about the fate of thousands of individuals. The majority of the "disappeared" belong to the Kurdish peoples of northern Iraq, followed by large numbers of southern Iraq's Shi'a community. Members of other minority groups, such as Assyrians, Turkmens, and Yazidi, are also among the long-term missing.
An Iraqi official motions for a photographer to stop taking pictures of demonstrators whose loved ones were unaccounted for following Saddam Hussein's October 21, 2002, amnesty decree. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay) |
Baghdad has ignored repeated inquiries from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia about their citizens who were imprisoned during the occupation of Kuwait in 1990-91. Of 609 known cases of missing Kuwaiti citizens, for example, only three have been resolved. Baghdad continues to refuse to resolve the issue of an American pilot lost over Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War.
Saddam's unprecedented "amnesty" of thousands of prisoners in Baghdad on October 21, 2002, only dramatized the regime's cruelty and brutality in the treatment of its own citizens. Many were freed, but many families were left alone, weeping and pleading with authorities to account for loved ones who never emerged from inside the prison gates.
What occurred at some of the prison gates, witnessed by international reporters just before they were ordered to leave Baghdad, was reminiscent of the human yearning manifest before the fall of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
New York Times correspondent John Burns described the chaotic scene at one Baghdad prison:
The crowd that gathered outside the gates built up to several thousands probably... within two hours 10,000 or 15,000. By mid afternoon, it was probably 50,000 or more. And they broke down the prison gates before the actual release had begun. They then stormed the cell blocks within the prison, and the most remarkable scenes developed. In my view what happened that daywas that the people of Iraq who have been subjected to considerable oppression became sovereign at the moment [before] those gates. They stormed the prison blocks, and as dusk fell, a situation developed in which the prisoners inside the prison began to panic attempting to get out.
They reached a cinder block wall with thousands of relatives outside. The relatives picked up large pieces of steel tubing from a construction site [and] began to break the cinder block wall down. At that point, an extremely frantic situation developed where you had prisoners climbing out through part of broken wall and being assisted by some of the guards, and at another breach in the prison wall other guards with other links of steel tubing trying to beat prisoners back — a complete panic.
Human Rights Wasteland
Where the regime rules, freedom of speech, religious practice, political association, privacy, due process under law are all fundamentally nonexistent.
President George Bush (center), Secretary of State Colin Powell (left), and European Union Foreign Policy Adviser Javier Solana at the opening session of the NATO Summit in Prague on November 21, 2002. (AP Photo/Laurent Rebours) |
Baghdad's newspapers and broadcast media, for example, are owned by the government, the Ba'ath Party, or persons close to Saddam himself. They basically operate as propaganda outlets. Two details illustrate the degree of control of the press in Iraq: criticism of Saddam is punishable by death; and Saddam's son, Uday Hussein, as head of the Iraqi Union of Journalists, dismissed hundreds of members in 1999 for not praising his father sufficiently or frequently enough.
Even one's personal or ethnic identity is subject to arbitrary attack: as part of its long-standing campaign to "Arabize" parts of northern Iraq, especially predominately Kurdish areas around the oil-rich cities of Kirkuk and Mosul, entire communities have been displaced and thousands of individuals forced to adopt new "Arab" identities. (Ironically, their new identification cards classify the converts as "second class Arabs," so authorities immediately know their original ethnic identity anyway.) The regime has also worked to undermine the minority Christian (Assyrian and Chaldean) communities.
Fighting Faith
Saddam Hussein inspects a model of the Basra Gate–a birthday gift in 2002 from the Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party. (AP Photo/Iraqi News Agency) |
Saddam Hussein has attacked and exploited religious communities in Iraq as ruthlessly as he has any other individual, group, or institution that attempts to assert a measure of independence from the regime.
As documented in the human rights reports of official and nongovernmental organizations, Baghdad has conducted a sustained campaign of murder, intimidation, harassment, and arbitrary arrest against the country's Shi'a communities, especially in the southern part of the country. According to the 2001 U.S. Human Rights Report on Iraq:
The government has for decades conducted a brutal campaign of murder, summary execution, and protracted arbitrary arrest against the religious leaders and followers of the majority Shi'a Muslim population. Despite nominal legal protection of religious equality, the government has repressed severely the Shi'a clergy and those who follow the Shi'a faith.
The Iraqi regime's campaign against the religious leaders and followers of the Shi'a Muslim population has been brutal and sustained. According to the U.S. Department of State's 2001 International Religious Freedom Report:
Since January 1998, the killings of three internationally respected clerics and an attempt on the life of a fourth have been attributed widely to government agents by international human rights activists, other governments, and Shi'a clergy in Iran and Lebanon. Grand Ayatollah Sheikh Murtada al Borojourdi, age 69, was killed in April 1998. Grand Ayatollah Sheikh Mirza Ali al-Gharawi, age 68, was killed in July 1998. Ayatollah Sheikh Bashir al Hussaini escaped an attempt on his life in January 1999. Grand Ayatollah Mohammad al-Sadr, age 66, was killed in February 1999.
Following the 1999 killing of al-Sadr, whose sons were also killed, protests broke out in Shi'a sections of Baghdad and cities with Shi'a majorities, such as Karbala, Nasiriyah, Najaf, and Basra. The authorities retaliated with a campaign of savage repression, killing hundreds. More died when the government prohibited a funeral for al-Sadr and security forces attacked spontaneous gatherings of mourners. As summarized in the U.S. Human Rights Report on Iraq:
Authorities continued to target alleged supporters of al-Sadr. In February 2000, security officials reportedly executed 30 religious school students who had been arrested after al-Sadr's killing. In March 2000, numerous Shi'a who fled the country in 1999 and 2000 told Human Rights Watch that security forces interrogated, detained, and tortured them. In May 2000, six additional students who were arrested following the killing were sentenced to death.
The regime has continued its policy of harassment and heavy pressure on the southern Shi'a community, forcing populations living in the marsh areas to relocate to cities or other areas and arresting or detaining individuals of the Shi'a faith in the thousands. The authorities, according to the State Department 2001 religious freedom report, also use food and other goods under the Oil-for-Food Program to reward supporters and intimidate or punish opponents — notably in the southern provinces of Nasiriyah, Basra, and Amarah. As a result, the humanitarian condition of the Shi'a in the south continues to lag behind the rest of the population — despite recent increases in the volume and distribution of goods under the Oil-for-Food Program.
Baghdad consistently politicizes and interferes with religious pilgrimages, both of Iraqi Muslims who wish to make the Hajj to Mecca and Medina, and of Iraqi and non-Iraqi Muslim pilgrims who travel to holy sites inside the country such as Najaf and Karbala. Baghdad, for example, repeatedly rejected U.N. offers to provide vouchers or arrange for third-party payments to permit Muslim pilgrims wishing to make the Hajj or for other religious travel.
Baghdad has refused all such proposals that did not involve direct payments to the government. Instead, the regime has imposed a variety of schemes to squeeze money out of religious pilgrims and travelers by requiring them to pay fees directly to the Iraqi Central Bank. Estimates vary considerably, but it is clear that Iraq is exploiting religious travel and observances in ways that bring in millions of dollars annually.
An incident that appears in the September 2002 report of the Coalition for International Justice illustrates Baghdad's cynical manipulation of religion for cash. After refusing yet another U.N. plan to fund travel for the Hajj in 1999, Baghdad bused some 18,000 Iraqi pilgrims to the Saudi border, where they were encouraged to demonstrate and demand that the Saudis release frozen Iraqi funds to pay for their trip.
Instead, King Fahd welcomed the Iraqi pilgrims and promised that Saudi Arabia would provide all arrangements free of charge. With no prospect of Saudi payments to the government from frozen funds or other sources, Saddam ordered the pilgrims back to Baghdad.
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