Saddam : His Rise and Fall (29 page)

Saddam's rise to power was accompanied by a significant increase in the activities of the Iraqi security services. A subtle restructuring of Saddam's security operations was undertaken, with the creation of Amn al-Khass, or Special Security, which became the state's all-powerful security arm. Amn al-Khass replaced the Mukhabarat, which had its size and authority substantially reduced. In effect Amn al-Khass became Saddam's personal security force, reporting directly to the president's office, which itself expanded to absorb the all-encompassing responsibilities of the new president. At the end of the 1970s it was estimated that the Presidential Affairs Department, which included Amn al-Khass, had nearly fifty-eight thousand employees on its payroll.
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New prisons were built and torture techniques devised to ensure the regime of terror functioned effectively. Technically torture was banned in Iraq under Article 22(a) of the Iraqi Constitution and Article 127 of the Code of Criminal Procedures. By the time Saddam came to power, however, it was estimated that the regime had perfected 107 different methods of torturing its enemies. Manual torture took the form of beatings, hair pulling, bastinado (beating with a stick on the soles of the feet), and the twisting of limbs until they broke. Electric shocks were commonly applied to extract confessions, and a wide range of psychological torture was also implemented. The standard form of torture was to place the victims in solitary confinement for long periods. Some prisoners were left in cold cells until their limbs froze, while on other occasions parts of the prisoners' bodies were set on fire. Another particular Iraqi specialty was to rape relatives of those detained—male and female—while the accused were forced to watch. Saddam's torturers could also make use of a variety of machines that were available for removing human limbs, from fingers to legs.

In a report issued in 1981, Amnesty International summarized the testimony of fifteen Iraqi exiles—twelve men and three women—who had been tortured by Saddam's security officials. All of them had been subsequently examined by physicians in London who found that in each case “the tortures described were consistent with the subsequent symptoms and the signs found during the physical examination.” The Amnesty report provided a grueling account of the suffering inflicted on one of the Iraqi victims. “During the first two days he was taken to different rooms and beaten with fists, rods and a whip…. In one room he was caressed and sexually fondled, before being taken out and beaten and kicked. The torture then became more systematic, taking place every one or two hours. His head was whipped and beaten so
hard that he lost consciousness…. After regaining consciousness on one occasion he was aware that his trousers had been removed and realized that he had been raped. He was then made to sit on a cold bottle-like object which was forced up his rectum. He was also burned with a hard object about the size of a pencil.”
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As the apparatus of institutionalized torture became more widespread, so Saddam's security officials became less discriminating about their choice of victim. Another Amnesty investigation detailed the case of an Iraqi mother who went to the Baghdad morgue in September 1982 to collect her son's body. The boy had been arrested in December 1981 and held without charge or trial, and without his family knowing his whereabouts. When the woman entered the morgue, she could not believe her eyes. “I looked around and saw nine bodies stretched out on the floor with him…but my son was in a chair form…that is a sitting form, not sleeping or stretched. He had blood all over him and his body was very eaten away and bleeding. I looked at the others stretched out on the floor alongside him…all burnt…I don't know with what…another's body carried the marks of a hot domestic iron all over his head to his feet.”
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The detention of women and children was a common tactic used by Saddam's security forces, particularly when they were unable to capture the menfolk. There were well-documented cases of women being tortured in front of their families, or of husbands or children being tortured in front of their wives and mothers. When a female Iraqi journalist was detained, her inquisitors deprived her baby of food in an attempt to put pressure on her. Another female survivor of Saddam's torture chambers has recounted how sexual torture was commonly used against both women and children, and of children being placed in sacks with starving cats.
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By the mid-1980s the Iraqi authorities officially acknowledged that there were a total of twenty-four offenses that carried the death penalty: ten under the heading of offenses prejudicial to the external security of the state, ten for internal-security offenses, and the remainder for “offenses constituting a danger to the public.” The definition of these capital offenses was deliberately vague so that any unauthorized disclosure of information could be interpreted as treason. Article 177 of the Iraqi penal code, for example, authorized the death penalty for “the disclosure of a state secret” by a public servant “in time of war or in furtherance of the interests of a foreign state.” Almost all information in Iraq on government, the economy, and society was considered a state secret, and the disclosure of virtually any information to a foreign
diplomat or journalist could be deemed a treasonable offense. The militant anti-Zionism of Saddam's regime was also reflected in Article 201 of the penal code, which specified the death penalty for “any person who propagates Zionist or Masonic principles or who joins or advocates membership of Zionist or Masonic institutions.” In addition the death penalty was also applied to a range of civil crimes, such as murder, rape, arson, armed robbery, and sodomy. In the 1990s any Iraqi found to be suffering from the AIDS virus was subjected to summary execution.

There was precious little chance that those who found themselves accused of capital offenses might receive a fair trial. While the structure of religious, civil, criminal, and military courts remained intact, they were only allowed to deal with the more mundane cases. Any case that had a political dimension was likely to be referred to the Revolutionary Court in Baghdad, which had been established in 1969 and was made up of either three military or three civilian judges. Sentences passed by this court were final and not subject to appeal. Then there were the temporary special courts, which were run directly by the president's office. These courts did not require the services of professional lawyers but were drawn from members of the Revolutionary Command Council. It was courts such as these that were set up to try those involved in various coup attempts, and Saddam never had any difficulty securing the required verdict.
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Amnesty International had the names of 520 people executed for political offenses between 1978 and 1981, and there were more than 300 executions in 1982.

In those cases where, for one reason or another, the security forces were unable to bring political opponents to trial, poison was used. Thallium was the most favored method, because it is odorless, colorless, and tasteless. From 1980 onward there were a number of reports of Iraqi activists being poisoned with thallium. In May 1980 two dissidents who had been in detention in Iraq made their way to London. They were examined by doctors and found to be suffering from thallium poisoning. One of them, Majidi Jehad, testified shortly before he died that he believed the poison had been given to him in an orange drink he was offered at the Baghdad police station where he went to pick up his passport.
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With the media firmly under government control, freedom of expression was not tolerated. From 1968 onward the Baath Party had set itself the goal of bringing the media under its control and making it an instrument for propagating Baath ideology. But in a report published in 1974, the party conceded
that it had not yet reached these objectives, and lamented the fact that there were still too many “reactionary elements” lurking in the media and too few “competent and revolutionary executives.” During the late 1970s these shortcomings were rectified, with membership of the Baath Party youth organization made a condition for entry to journalism school. Finally in 1980 Saddam established the General Federation of Academicians and Writers, and all journalists, writers, and artists were required to join, and any independent cultural and literary organizations that were still in existence were abolished. Saddam brought all artistic production, including music, under strict control and subjected it to government censorship. “For those who conform,” a human rights activist wrote of Iraq in 1981, “there are excellent rewards…. For the first time in the country's history, poets can be found among the wealthy few.” The price of conformity, however, was “to write verse for official occasions and festivities, praising the ruling Baath Party and its leaders…singing the praises of Saddam Hussein.” Failure to do Saddam's bidding often resulted in imprisonment and torture, frequently ending in death, for hundreds of Iraqi writers and intellectuals.
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A petition signed by Arab intellectuals and published in the Lebanese newspaper
As Safir
in December 1986 stated that in Iraq “more than 500 creative writers and thinkers have been subject to questioning and torture in order to extort avowals or to oblige them to modify their opinions.”
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With the judiciary and media controlled directly by the government, the only redress open to Iraqi civilians was through the ranks of the Baath Party. But with Saddam's security forces monitoring all activity, the only criticism that was tolerated was that which glorified the achievements of the Iraqi leadership. The Baath was organized on classic Marxist-Leninist principles of hierarchy and discipline, and by the time Saddam assumed power the Baath had become a state within a state. It had its own training facilities, or “preparatory schools,” where young members went to study ideology, economy, and politics. The party maintained “bureaus,” which were run in parallel with government departments to ensure conformity and loyalty to Baathist principles. Other bureaus were charged with organizing and indoctrinating key groups of workers, such as the military, laborers, farmers, and professionals. Along with the military, the teaching profession was a prime target for Baath Party recruitment as the Baathists were determined to ensure the continuing indoctrination of young Iraqis. In 1979 all teachers were required to join the party, and those who refused, or were deemed ineligible,
were fired. The party ran its own private militia, the Popular Army, as a counterbalance to the military establishment, which, despite all the purges that had been conducted over the years, was still viewed with deep suspicion by the Baathists. Saddam was particularly attracted to the concept of the Popular Army and in the first year of his presidency it more than doubled in size from 100,000 men to 250,000.

The situation in Iraq under Saddam's presidency was summed up by a group of moderate opposition writers living in exile, who wrote in a memorandum submitted to the United Nations:

“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 control over the regular army, People's Army, police and 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 Baath Party and a number of insignificant, obsequious organizations. Trade unions do not exist. Membership in 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, omnipresent, and enjoys unlimited powers.”

By 1980 every Iraqi institution, every government department, every aspect of public, private, and individual endeavor existed simply to glorify the achievements of Saddam Hussein. The deliberate attempt by Saddam to develop a cultlike status throughout Iraq had been under way since the mid-1970s. But after he was installed in the Presidential Palace, the cult of Saddam took on a life of its own. The cult of the leader under Saddam surpassed anything seen elsewhere in the Arab world or, with the possible exception of North Korea, beyond it. The glorification of the Iraqi president became one of the main enterprises of the country's press, radio, and television, and a thriving industry developed for the manufacture of posters, pictures, and other representations of the “father” of the revolution. Foreign journalists who were invited to cover the 1980 “election” for the National Assembly were struck at the number of posters of Saddam that adorned the offices of even the most mundane Iraqi officials. Every day the newspapers carried a front-page picture of President Hussein, regardless of whether there was a story to go with it. By the early 1980s some two hundred songs had been written in adulation of Saddam. Every night the evening television news
would commence with what Iraqis called “the Saddam song,” which was presented against a background of victorious soldiers and bursting fireworks by a smiling figure who chants:

For those who dared to oppose Saddam there was the institutionalized horror of the torture chambers; for those who saluted him there was the promise of a share in the glory and success of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Every action undertaken by the government was publicized as one of Saddam's personal initiatives. Saddam cleverly devised various material inducements to increase his popularity, such as awarding pay raises to selected groups of workers, including the armed forces. Frequently Saddam would make surprise visits to factories, schools, hospitals, and farms, and the entire proceedings would be filmed and shown on Iraqi television. Numerous public places were named after him, and it was at this time that authorized biographies of his life were written, in which particular attention was paid to glorifying the deeds of his youth, such as his involvement in the botched assassination of General Qassem in 1959. Even at this early point in his presidency Saddam had a highly developed sense of his own destiny. He told one of his biographers that he was not concerned so much with what people thought at the time but with “what people will say about us 500 years hence.”
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A special edition of the Baghdad newspaper
al-Jamhuriyya
was devoted to his life story, and a permanent exhibition dedicated to his life was established in Baghdad. Much was made in the Iraqi press of Saddam's devotion to his family, and his everyday involvement with his children. Iraqis learned about his hobbies, such as fishing and gardening. In everything he said and did Saddam presented himself as the role model for all Iraqi families. The hysteria surrounding Saddam even made its way to the United States when his propagandists, to celebrate his first year as president, took out an advertisement in the
New York Times
of
July 17, 1980. The advertisement claimed that, under Saddam's leadership, Iraq was on the verge of repeating “her former glories” and compared Saddam to the great warlords of the early Islamic period, the Abbasid caliphs al-Mansour and Harun al-Rashid.