The trial of Saddam Hussein was resumed on Monday, November, 28, 2005, it has started after a very long delay six weeks earlier but was adjourned at the behest of the defense team who asked for a three months adjournment. The court only gave the defense team six weeks. The first session was essentially a ceremonial affair and did not involve a great deal of very serious trying, the most important feature of it was Saddam himself and his behavior during the few hours it lasted. The man was clearly defeated, but he was trying to project an image of power and control, he refused to accept the constitutionality of the court and its jurisdiction in his case, he refused to give his name but insisted that he was innocent.
The defense team which was representing him was a truly amazing mixture of local and foreign lawyers and behaved similarly, they refused to accept the court and claimed that they were given only a very short time to examine the tons of incriminating documents which were prepared against their client. A few days later two of their members were assassinated, they threatened to boycott the trial, but they seem to have since changed their minds and are coming back to defend their client.
The following is a severely abridged form of the reign of the beasts which is the 3rd part of the republic of terror the second section of my book on Saddam.
In 1939 as World War II began Albert Camus wrote "the reign of the beasts has begun and they sucked all the happiness from the place and they pervaded it with death and destruction." In Iraq the reign of the beasts began in 1979 when Saddam Hussein was on top alone. The Shah of Iran was toppled from the peacock throne by an Islamic Revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini who came to power on the crest of a popular wave of Islamic fervor and passion. The Ayatollah was old and tired, after a lengthy struggle against the Shah and his rule, he has grown very bitter and rigid, but he has triumphed and was now the ultimate religious and secular authority in Iran. Saddam has been actively preparing his armed forces for the last five years to revenge his humiliation in Algiers at the hands of the Shah in 1975.
The relations between the two Muslim neighbors, the Sunni ruled Iraq and the Shiite Iran have been very tense for a lot of reasons for a very long time. Iran has been ruled for the last three decades by Mohamed Reza Pahlevi who has from huge oil revenues and unlimited American support grown into a megalomaniac, the Shahinshah and the emperor of oil, having Saddam on his door steps was not a very welcome event. From very early days, the Shah was creating trouble for the Ba’athists including a very serious support to the Kurdish rebellion in Iraq which has been going on for a very long time. By 1975 it has grown into a real threat to the Ba’athists rule in Baghdad, so with American encouragement the then president of Algeria the late Houari Boumedien brokered a piece agreement between the two neighbors which stipulated the Shah ceasing his support to the Kurds and Saddam expelling from Iraq the Shah’s enemy the Ayatollah Khomeini who has been banished on the orders of the Shah for his serious agitation and political opposition. Saddam obliged and kicked out the old man to France, but Khomeini never forgot the insult and when he came back he started calling Saddam the infidel who responded by calling him the charlatan. The rhetoric escalated into border skirmishes which grew within a very short time into open hostility. War was inevitable, but by that time Saddam was ready, he had the backing of The Gulf States who were feeling insecure and worried by the vehemence of Khomeini’s threats and the tacit support of the Americans. At that time, the president in Iraq was al-Bakr who was very reluctant to engage in such an adventure. Also a solid body of high ranking Ba’athists were also against the coming adventure. These divisions over the impending war came very much to the surface during the RCC (revolutionary command council) meetings which preceded the actual flare up of the hostilities, but Saddam was not in a hurry, al-Bakr was shooed to a house nearby to die a bit later from thallium poisoning, and the whole charade was explained to the masses as a resignation because of ill health and that president was very happy to hand over power to the young and faithful comrade and friend Saddam. Saddam wanted nothing less than absolute backing for his adventure, the announcement of the resignation of the president and the election of Saddam was made on the tenth anniversary of the 17th July revolution with a lot of fanfare. A few days later, Saddam announced that he has unveiled a conspiracy against him and thus was started one of the most brutal and murderous campaigns in the whole history of the secret societies.
On the 20th of July, Saddam convened a conference of the in a hall near his palace, which was to be an ugly piece of business strongly reminiscent of Stalin’s show trials. The proceedings were videotaped. It was his intention to ensure that every Ba’athist should know who was now in charge the proceedings were videotaped, copies were sent to thousands all over the world, it is badly shot in black and white and the sound is of a very poor quality but nothing can hide the dramatic nature of what was taking place. The proceedings were opened by one of his thugs who announce the discovery of the plot and declares that all the conspirators were in the hall, a man who has until very recently been in charge of the presidential office and the secretary general of the RCC, but who has recently voiced some misgivings about the wisdom of the coming war came into the hall very slowly and speaking with difficulty, he makes a lengthy confession in which he condemns himself and accuses four other members of the leadership of participating in the plot which he blames on the president of Syria. Throughout all these events Saddam was sitting alone at a table on a slightly raised platform smoking one of his favorite 8 inch cigars, the smoke wreathing around the table as he listens. The delegates are nervous and trying to decide how to
react, then the leader stands up and start to read from a list of names in his hands, a name is read and the figure that has been mentioned is seen taken away from the hall by one of the security men who were encircling the delegates, another name is called and another doomed creature is taken a way and so on. It continues for sometime by the end of it Saddam has worked through a list of 60 names, there is a box of tissue near him when he reads some of the names he finds it difficult to stop a very strong stream of tears from his eyes!!! That same day a special court found 55 of the named men guilty and sentenced them to death by democratic execution a devise of Saddam’s creation which means that senior members of the party has to take part in the firing squads that ensures a no going back; responsibility is spread.
The massacre was continued around the country and hundreds more were democratically executed individuals who were imagined to represent trouble or possible danger to his rule. It was ugly and barbaric, but it was the beginning and it earned Saddam his newest title “The Butcher of Baghdad”. Saddam emerged from this purge as the unchallenged leader of the party and government. Those who remained around him were servants, a semi educated rabble who were now elevated to very high positions which they owed to him. All of the institutions and state establishments or whatever has remained of them lost their meaning and influence. Saddam was now free to proceed with his plans and schemes which ultimately drowned the country and its people in a hell which lasted more than three decades. Saddam started his revenge and fury on the Iranians and their leader under the pretext of defending the eastern frontier of the Arab world against Khomeini by unleashing on September 22, 1980 his army which has grown by now into one of the world’s most powerful military machines hoping that he would finish his stubborn adversary in a week but it was a bloody miscalculation. The Iranians absorbed the onslaught, and the war stalemated into one of the 20th century’s most bloody and destructive conflicts which lasted for 8 years. At the end of which hundreds of thousands of young men had died on both sides of the war, many cities laying in ruin with the loss of billions dollars and when the end came he has achieved nothing, the blitzkrieg failed and the dream of successes never materialized.
As the months followed each other with no end to the war, there were signs of agitation and unrest amongst the Iraqis which was posing a potential threat to the dictatorship to which Saddam responded in a typical tyrannical fashion. By now Saddam has succeeded in controlling the country through a very “efficient” intelligence network very elaborate and complex, the various intelligence arms were employed not only as watchers of the people and detectors of plots and to prevent coups but more and more as repressive instruments instructed and trained to keep a restive population under control. To keep the people in control, it had not only to find dissidents and plotters the subversives and the discontented it also had to mete out punishment to wreak vengeance when necessary and to always bring home to the citizens that there was a high price to pay for any action against the regime. The result was a real monster a police state par excellence, with an elaborate system of watchers and informers in every village in every factory school or hospital or a religious place.
Fear was dominant it pervaded all aspects of society, Saddam knew that his survival required that everyone was to see the consequences of making mistakes, dissent is stifled, torture was routine and opponents were removed, and rather than attempting to conceal his atrocities he made sure that everyone knew about them. The authorities always returned the bodies of the victims of torture or those recently executed with the marks of torture for everyone to see, the bodies would be dumped in the streets so a much bigger audience would be guaranteed, he has established a list of crimes unknown even in the jungle, a whisper against the leader is punishable by death and the numbers of executions were steadily rising for crimes that ranged from accusations of espionage and conspiracy against the state, against members of certain parties and treacheries of bath party members and deserters. The sole evidence in such cases would be a “freely” signed statement by the accused which was always accepted by the abiding courts as very satisfactory evidence, there was no appeal and those condemned were usually imprisoned in some very notorious places under extremely inhumane conditions. This situation was summed up by a group of Iraqi intellectuals in exile which included the Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani in a memorandum to the UN they wrote and I quote:
The dictatorship of Saddam Hussein is one of the harshest most ruthless and most unscrupulous regimes in the world. It is a totalitarian one party system based on the personality cult of Saddam Hussein. This man and his family and relatives have full control of the army the people’s army police and the security services. All news media are under the strict control of the regime and there is no opportunity for freedom of expression. Political organization is limited to the Ba’ath party and A number of insignificant obsequious organizations, trade unions do not exist. Membership of any opposition party is punishable by death. Any criticism of the president is also punishable by death. Torture is the norm. The security system is all-powerful and enjoys unlimited powers.
When the Iranians counterattacked in 1982 they opened a front in Kurdistan, seeing an opportunity to be rid of Saddam the Kurds joined the Iranians in fighting the Iraqi army which continued on and off until 1987 when Saddam appointed his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid as governor of northern Iraq. Al-Majid was a sadist, a murderer and a thug he owed every thing to Saddam who has elevated him from of a policeman to that of a Lt. General with an honorary degree from the war college, he would soon become very famous as “Chemical Ali”. Ali was not given any specific orders but he knew what was expected of him, and in less than six weeks he was able to subdue the Kurds and get back the control of the area. He used chemical weapons to wipe out whole towns in the area where Jalal Talabani’s headquarters were located. The following year with the Iranians threatening key Iraqi towns chemical Ali unleashed the al-Anfal campaign. Al-Anfal is a twisted reference to a verse in the Quran, al-Anfal was a campaign of incredible brutality, Iraqi forces began clearing areas of Kurdish residents with massive bombardments of chemical weapons and high explosives followed by army sweeps that killed anyone left alive and razed to the ground anything that was left standing. On March, 16, 1988, al-Majid conducted his most famous attack swamping the Kurdish
town of Halabja with several varieties of chemical weapons killing at least 5,000 Kurdish civilians.
Halabja is a relatively small town in Iraqi Kurdistan had a population of about 40,000, it is situated in one of the most fertile valleys in northern Iraq. Halabja was attacked on that fateful day of August by waves of Iraqi warplanes showering it by chemical agents who resulted in the immediate death of at least 5,000 men, women and children, and left another 15,000 people injured. Today after these years a large part of the town remains in ruins, the basic health, and education and the other essential services are still in a very bad state. Congenital abnormalities are at least four times more common than in non-exposed areas, other health problems like blindness, cancer and many others continue to overwhelm the community; dealing with them is proving very disappointing since there is no known treatment for multiple exposures and all the efforts by local and foreign organizations have been constantly hampered and frustrated by Saddam. The attack on Halabja was not the only incident when these terrible agents of death were employed against the Kurds, independent studies by international specialists indicate that almost 10% of the Kurdish population has been exposed to one chemical agent or another between April 1987 and August 1988. The world knows very little about these attacks, the world was Stunned by Halabja because of the scale and the immensity of the catastrophe, but the world did very little to help the massacred place. They should at least remember the tragedy and remember Saddam’s fascination with the weapons of mass destruction which he was never prepared to part with it and was continuing to work on it to his last day.
Dr. Najeeb Hanoudi
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Amman/Jordan
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