Saddam
Hussein, the arab hero and the murderous tyrant.*
Saddam Hussein, who was hanged on 30 December 2006 at
69, was as murderous a tyrant as any yet witnessed by history; for more than
two decades he ruled Iraq with a contempt for humanity that made him feared and
hated in equal measure.
He
survived wars, uprisings, attempted coups and assassinations with all the
instincts of a street fighter. A hero to some Arabs for his defiance of America
and Israel, Saddam was demonised by some of the western powers that had armed
and supported him in the 1980s as a bulwark against revolutionary Islamic Iran.
No
ideologue, Saddam owed his popularity to crude appeals to Arab nationalism and
Iraqi patriotism. Supported by a loyal band of "enforcers", including
his sons Uday and Qusay, he stopped at nothing to preserve his personal power
and the survival of his regime.
The name Saddam, means «he who
conforts»
The
name "Saddam" means "he who confronts", but his 12-year
defiance of the U.N. and refusal to co-operate with weapons inspectors resulted
in a U.S.-led coalition invading his country. Operation Iraqi Freedom, launched
on March 20 2003, was intent on achieving regime change.
After
the resistance of his army collapsed Saddam fled, prompting a huge manhunt
which ended with American troops finding him hiding in a foxhole near Tikrit in
December 2003. A year-long trial ensued, which Saddam attempted to turn into a
political platform; it ended in his being sentenced to death for the torture
and execution of 148 Shias.
Before
the war Saddam had consistently dared his enemies in the West to take action
against him. Offered the chance to seek refuge in another Arab state, he
refused to go into exile, declaring: "We will sacrifice our families
and our children before we surrender Iraq."
He
had already led Iraq into two disastrous conflicts: with Iran from 1980 to
1988, and with a US-led coalition that expelled Iraqi troops from Kuwait in
1991 after a brutal seven-month occupation. His disputes with the UN over
disarmament kept crippling UN sanctions in place from 1990; but he held the UN
at bay until weapons inspectors finally withdrew in December 1998.
The Operation Desert
Fox and the
alleged weapons
of mass destruction.
A
U.S.-British bombing blitz, Operation Desert Fox, followed; but Iraq did not
readmit the U.N. inspectors until November 2002, when the Security Council gave
Saddam a last chance to surrender any "weapons of mass destruction"
or face "serious consequences".
Saddam
underestimated the tenacity of President George W Bush, who claimed that the
Iraqi leader had links to Al Qa'eda and posed a deadly threat to the region,
the West and to his own people. The Bush White House stepped up its campaign
against Saddam after September 11, the President denouncing Iraq as part of an
"Axis of Evil". Bush was increasingly determined to go after
"the man who tried to kill my dad", a reference to an alleged Iraqi
plot to assassinate George Bush senior in Kuwait in 1993.
Saddam's
invasion of Kuwait, on August 2 1990, was an act of political desperation. Left
almost bankrupt by an eight-year war with Iran, and then further hit by a fall
in oil prices, in seizing Kuwait he had brought his troops the illusion of
glory and taken control of a fifth of the world's oil reserves.
But
five days after the invasion, the Security Council ordered a worldwide boycott
on trade with Iraq, including purchases of oil, sales of weapons and all other
forms of economic assistance. A united force of American, British, French,
Dutch, Soviet and Arab troops gathered in the Gulf and a deadline of January 15
1991 was set for his unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait.
The Operation Desert Storm and the Scud missiles
launched on Israël.
Just
before midnight on January 16 the Allied forces launched Operation Desert Storm
with an air strike on Baghdad and occupied Kuwait. The following night seven
Scud missiles were launched on Israel, as Saddam endeavoured to split the Arab
and Western alliance and to turn the Gulf conflict into a Holy War between
Arabs and Jews. Israel, however, stayed its hand; and, as the war continued,
Iraq took a formidable pounding.
Saddam's
nuclear and chemical warfare capacity was shattered; his centralised air
fighter command was destroyed; and his country suffered casualties running into
tens of thousands. Saddam's troops, meanwhile, set alight oil wells the length
of the Kuwaiti border. At dawn on February 24 the Allied ground offensive
began. Within 48 hours more than 25,000 Iraqi troops and 270 enemy tanks had
been captured. On February 26 Saddam ordered his army to withdraw. Twenty-four
hours later Kuwait City was liberated, and on the morning of February 28
President Bush Snr announced a ceasefire. Yet Saddam remained in power, owing
to a marked political reluctance to invade Iraq itself to finish off its
president.
The
cyanide of “Chemical Ali” to eradicate 5.000 Kurdish
insurgents.
Hopes
were pinned instead on a widespread internal revolt that broke out soon after
the end of the war. Saddam lost control of the Kurdish-held north of Iraq in
1991, but used his security agencies and tribal patronage networks to hold on
to the rest of the country. Though the Iraqi military was in tatters, his
secret police and personal army had survived the war largely unscathed. Used to
repressing dissent, he was soon using chemical weapons on insurgent Kurds in
the north of the country and on Shi'ite rebels in the south.
Troublesome
ethnic minorities had long been a favoured target of Saddam, who had previously
crushed the Marsh Arabs by draining their natural habitat; and in 1988 he had
demonstrated his willingness to use weapons of mass destruction by gassing
5,000 Kurds with cyanide at Halabja.
It
was these weapons that increasingly became the focus of the U.N.'s concern. At
the end of the Gulf War, the Security Council had ordered Iraq to destroy its
chemical, biological and nuclear capability, and had set up a U.N. Special
Commission (U.N.S.C.O.M.) to verify the process. Seven years after the end of
the Gulf War, Saddam's grip on Iraq was as strong as ever, his hold in part
financed by his family's control of the lucrative black market in goods that
had evaded the U.N.'s embargo. The sanctions made life miserable for the
ordinary citizens of Iraq, but Saddam prospered to the extent that, in 2000,
Forbes magazine rated him the 55th richest person in the world, valuing him at
$7 billion.
Where was the ability of Saddam's nuclear and chemical warfare?
Emboldened
by his sustained hold on power, and having recently survived a bungled coup
sponsored by MI6 and the C.I.A., in December 1997 Saddam barred the
U.N.S.C.O.M. inspectors from visiting his presidential palaces. He had built
eight new ones since the Gulf War, one of them reportedly larger than
Versailles, and the inspectors believed that they concealed large parts of
Saddam's biological arsenal.
America
and Britain responded to the ban on the inspectors by moving forces into the
Gulf in the hope of forcing Saddam to back down. But Russia, France and China
did not support the Anglo-American stance at the Security Council, and the Arab
world had sympathy with Saddam.
With
Iraq intransigent, and American air-strikes on Iraq imminent, in February 1998
the U.N. Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, travelled to Baghdad to try to broker a
settlement. To general relief and
surprise, Saddam agreed that U.N.S.C.O.M. could now visit the prohibited sites,
although the terms of the deal remained vague, particularly on the contentious
matter of the length of time allowed for the inspections.
In
December 1998 the U.N.'s chief weapons inspector, Richard Butler, accused
Saddam of failing to co-operate. A four-day bombing campaign by America and
Britain, authorised by President Bill Clinton, was intended to degrade Iraq's
ability to produce or deliver weapons of mass destruction, and the diplomatic
stand-off continued until November 2002, when weapons inspectors under Hans
Blix were once again admitted to Iraq. By then America was on a countdown to
war.
Saddam
Husein al-Majjed
al-Tikri, a poor bastard
tormented by a stepfather thief.
Saddam
Hussein al-Majeed al-Tikriti was born on April 28 1937 in the village of
al-Quja, a poor farming area near Tikrit, about 100 miles north of Baghdad. He
was taunted as a child for being illegitimate, and also tormented by a bullying
stepfather. Big for his age, the young Saddam quickly learnt how to defend
himself. The jibes stopped when, at the age of 10, he acquired his first
pistol.
Saddam's
stepfather forced him into a life of petty crime, stealing chickens and sheep
to be sold, but he was more influenced by his uncle, Khaytallah Tulfah, a
schoolteacher in Baghdad who nurtured a deep sense of grievance against the
Iraqi monarchy. It was he who sent Saddam to school and after Saddam had, aged
14, committed his first murder by shooting a relative, it was his uncle who
offered him shelter. Saddam abandoned his job as a ticket collector on the
Tikrit-Baghdad bus route and set out for his uncle's home in the capital.
There
he continued his education, but his poor grades meant he was rejected by the
national military academy, so limiting his chances of advancement. This failure
was a blow to his self-esteem that he took care to correct when he later came
to power: the academy's record was altered to show that he had passed out as a
star pupil.
His
political crime of learning:
assassinate of General Abdul Karim Kassem.
By
the age of 17 Saddam had enrolled at law school and had become an avid
supporter of the secular, nationalist Ba'ath Party. In 1956 he took part in
their attempted coup against King Faisal II and, though the plot failed, it
marked the beginning of the Ba'athists' rise to power.
The
Republic of Iraq was established two years later by a group of army officers,
after a coup in which the king and his prime minister were killed. The army
leader, General Abdul Karim Kassem, installed himself as prime minister but
soon ran into trouble with the Ba'athists by wooing their rivals, the Iraqi
Communists.
The
next year, when the Ba'athist opposition struck at Kassem, Saddam was among the
10 men chosen to assassinate him. They ambushed Kassem's car, killing the
driver and an aide, but Kassem escaped. Saddam, who was supposed to be giving
covering fire, became carried away by the excitement and rushed in; he was hit
in the leg, but managed to limp off as his companions were rounded up. He later
claimed that he had cut out the bullet with a knife and hobbled off to find
sanctuary in his home village. In fact, he had been helped by a sympathetic
doctor (whom he was to execute in 1997). Saddam then fled to Egypt.
Why
did Colonel
Abdel Nasser
help him?
When
his part in the attempt on Kassem became known, Saddam was taken under the wing
of President Nasser, who supplied him with funds to help him continue his
studies. Saddam was spellbound by Nasser's oratory, and much influenced by his
grandiose plans for an independent community of Arab nations.
In
1963 Kassem was overthrown and executed by the Ba'ath, and Saddam returned to Baghdad
as head of the civilian wing of the party. He began to place family members in
key posts, only to see the Ba'athists ousted by another military coup within
nine months.
In
1966, he
escaped from prison
and pursued his Law degree.
Saddam
was hunted down and bravely refused to surrender until his ammunition ran out.
He was jailed, but escaped from prison in 1966. Once in hiding, he formed his
own militia and, in July 1968, launched the bloodless coup that put the Ba'ath
government of General Bakr in office. Within a year Saddam was deputy chairman
of the Revolutionary Command Council (R.C.C.).
To
mark his ascent to power, and to lay the foundations for his own personality
cult, Saddam had his family tree rewritten to show descent from the Prophet Mohammed.
He also pursued his Law degree, ensuring his success in the final examination
by turning up for his viva voce with four bodyguards and a pistol in his belt.
Bakr
and Saddam quickly showed that they had no intention of sharing power with
others. Several coup attempts were crushed in bloody fashion, and mass
executions and incarcerations became part of life in Iraq.
In
the early 1970s Saddam began to nationalise the Iraq Petroleum Company, a
consortium of British, European and American firms that made Iraq the Middle
East's second largest supplier of oil. When oil prices rocketed in the
mid-1970s, much of the new wealth found its way into the hands of Saddam's
family.
With
Bakr increasingly a peripheral figure in the regime, by the late 1970s Saddam
had become an astute diplomat, trading on the anxiety of both the West and the
Soviet Union to secure him as an ally. In 1972 he visited the Kremlin, signing
a 15-year treaty of friendship and co-operation. Large amounts of Soviet
weaponry were soon being sent to Baghdad.
He
also took steps to improve relations with his more immediate neighbours, most
notably settling Iraq's long-standing dispute with Iran over the river boundary
between them, the Shatt-al-Arab waterway.
Under the mantle of dictatorship, he embarks on
a purge of his opponents.
In
July 1979 a special closed session of the R.C.C. decided to depose President
Bakr and transfer his powers to Saddam. But the putsch was not universally
popular within the Ba'ath hierarchy, prompting Saddam to embark on a purge of
his opponents. On July 22, five days after his inauguration as president,
Saddam called a special meeting of senior Ba'ath Party members at a conference
centre opposite the presidential palace. Most of the 1,000 delegates were unaware
of the drama that was to unfold. Sixty-six alleged conspirators against the
government were denounced by Saddam from the podium before being taken away and
shot.
Saddam
rapidly assumed the mantle of dictatorship, surrounding himself with henchmen
from his home town and placing members of his extended family in all the key
positions of government. Opponents were exterminated (one wavering minister was
shot dead during a cabinet meeting). Those spared a firing squad were subjected
to videos showing the execution of their friends. Among the forms of torture
common in Baghdad's military prisons were the amputation of sexual organs, the
hammering of nails into the body and the dissolving of limbs in vats of acid.
Even his closest relations were not safe. In 1996 Saddam had two of his
sons-in-law killed for defecting to Jordan, having lured them back to Iraq with
a false pardon.
His
two sons:
murderers and
off-the-law.
Saddam's
relationship with his two sons, Uday and Qusay, was turbulent. Uday was once
sentenced to death for murder; he was later reprieved and banished to
Switzerland before being allowed to return home. Qusay was given the task of
supervising Iraqi intelligence and the security services. Both sons were
eventually killed by American troops at Mosul in July 2003.
As
rising oil sales brought prosperity in the late 1970s, Saddam poured money into
government construction projects, as well as into municipal housing
developments and facilities for higher education. He arranged free medical care
for the poor and made generous donations to the Third World. Iraqi women were
allowed, by Middle Eastern standards, comparative freedom.
The Iran-Iraq
war and the current situation in
Baghdad.
After
the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini called on the Shi'ite
Muslims of Iraq to rebel against Saddam, a member of the rival Sunni Muslim
sect. Saddam responded by expelling 40,000 Shi'ites, arresting thousands more
and executing many others.
Fearing
that a volatile Iran would herald American intervention in the Gulf, in 1980
Saddam ordered the invasion that developed into the Iran-Iraq war, a conflict
of attrition in which the death toll eventually rivalled that of the First
World War. Both sides were covertly supported by America and Britain in the
hope that they might provide a check to each other's ambitions.
Both
Iran and Iraq were slowly weakened by the continual drain on their economic and
human resources, and in 1988 the U.N. managed to broker a cease-fire. Yet despite
Saddam's failure to destroy Iran, and his appalling disregard for the rights of
his people and his atrocities against the Kurds, he was still regarded by the
West as the best bulwark against Islamic fundamentalism. British and American
firms vied with one another for Iraq's plump rearmament contracts, and by the
end of the 1980s Saddam's army was the fourth largest in the world. He had an
arsenal of Scud missiles, a sophisticated nuclear weapons programme under way
and chemical and biological weapons in development.
When the author
of the drama turns into a playwright
Saddam
fostered his cult of personality by publishing two novels, one of which was
turned into a play entitled Zabibah and the King and was about a lonely monarch
who falls in love with a commoner. He was obsessed with grandiose building
projects: one of the biggest was the Umm Al-Maarik, or the "Mother of All
Battles" mosque in central Baghdad, which was completed in 2001. The
minarets were designed to resemble Scud missiles on launch pads.
Saddam
rarely slept in the same place on successive nights, and used body doubles to
confuse potential assassins. Often he would rise at 3 am to go for a swim. His
vanity was such that he dyed his hair and moustache, and avoided wearing his
thick glasses whenever possible. He enjoyed western confectionery (especially
Quality Street) and western films, particularly thrillers such as The Day of
the Jackal; his favourite film was The Godfather.
Twice
married, he never
sleeps in
the same bed.
Saddam
Hussein married, in 1958, his cousin Sajida, the daughter of his uncle,
Khairallah Tulfah. In addition to their two sons they had three daughters.
When
Uday was four, his father took him to watch dissidents being tortured in
prison. Saddam imposed little discipline on his "cubs", allowing them
to terrorise their school and teachers.
The
marriage to Sajida ended after Saddam ordered the murder of her brother, Adnan.
An official separation was arranged whereby she acquired the title "Lady
of Ladies", and she remained unchallenged as his official companion.
Saddam had meanwhile married a teacher, Samira Shahabandar, who soon afterwards
took the title "First Lady".
Saddam
continued to have affairs, especially with blondes. Parisoula Lampsos was a
mistress for three decades. He is also said to have taken as a third wife a
dancer, Nedhal al-Hamdani.
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*Published by The Telegraph on January 1, 2007.
