The setting was a government-sponsored seminar about farm
production, and the man in charge wouldn’t become Iraq’s dictator
for another five years. But we all knew Saddam Hussein was already
carving his path to power through blood and fear.
The 1974 meeting in a converted theater went on for weeks during
which one official after another was fired, ostensibly for not
meeting production goals, but in reality for failing to meet the
ruling Baath party’s loyalty standards. At one session I and other
reporters watched as Saddam berated an Agriculture Ministry
bureaucrat, blaming him for a shortage of potatoes and ordering him
dismissed immediately.
The setting was a government-sponsored seminar about farm production, and the man in charge wouldn’t become Iraq’s dictator for another five years. But we all knew Saddam Hussein was already carving his path to power through blood and fear.
The 1974 meeting in a converted theater went on for weeks during which one official after another was fired, ostensibly for not meeting production goals, but in reality for failing to meet the ruling Baath party’s loyalty standards. At one session I and other reporters watched as Saddam berated an Agriculture Ministry bureaucrat, blaming him for a shortage of potatoes and ordering him dismissed immediately.
As the man was leaving, a Saddam aide told him, loudly enough for others to hear, what we took to be the real reason for his dismissal: “You should say ‘Your Excellency, Sir’ every time you address his excellency.”
That was my first encounter with Saddam. He was then about 37 and deputy chairman of the ruling Revolution Command Council. Over the years, as he rose higher in the secretive power structure, I would see him from time to time, usually from a distance.
In 1978, at an Arab summit called by Iraq to punish the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat for talking peace with Israel, Saddam rose to propose expelling Egypt from the Arab League.
Then came what sounded like a personal threat to dissenters: Iraqis, Saddam warned, would “chase you into your bedrooms.”
Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, then Iraq’s president and the summit chairman, seemed embarrassed as several delegates looked to him to rein in his subordinate.
In the end, Egypt was expelled. A year later al-Bakr was forced to resign, and Saddam became Iraq’s all-powerful leader.
In February 1989, I had a rare opportunity to see Saddam up close and ask him a question. It was during his summit with Jordan’s King Hussein and Presidents Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen.
Iraq’s eight-year war with neighboring Iran had recently ended, and Saddam looked triumphant at having managed to summon three key Arab leaders to support Iraq in what he hoped would become a special four-party Arab council.
My question was, why was he setting up such a group? He glared at me before answering: “It is a platform of fraternity and solidarity.”
Last October, Mubarak revealed Saddam’s real intention: to build a military alliance for a war against his neighbors, especially Kuwait. He got no takers, but a year later invaded Kuwait anyway.
I last came face to face with the dictator on Jan. 6, 1991, 10 days before the U.S. war to expel the Iraqis from Kuwait got under way.
The occasion was a Palestinian ceremony in Baghdad. Saddam was in an olive-green uniform with holstered pistol, seated in the front row of an auditorium as Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat told a cheering audience that he would follow the “Iraqi knight (Saddam) on his white horse leading his army to liberate Jerusalem.”
“Thou shalt enter the mosque as thou did in the first time,” Arafat said, citing a passage from Islam’s Quran to suggest Saddam would join early Muslim heroes in heaven. He also called Saddam “the Saladin of our time,” referring to the Muslim warrior who recaptured Jerusalem from the Crusaders.
Saddam beamed. He liked the comparison to Saladin.
After the Gulf War, as the regime grew ever more repressive, my license to work as a journalist was revoked. Deprived of my livelihood, I became one of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in exile.
But that final experience of the “Iraqi knight” came to mind last weekend when Saddam’s unkempt, straggly bearded face flashed across the TV screen along with the news that he had surrendered without a shot.
This year I published a novel, “Edges of Hope,” about an Iraqi journalist living under Saddam’s brutal dictatorship. Its protagonist, Hussein al-Qassimi, tells one of his government tormentors that tyrants can take people’s lives but not their souls. “The moment will come,” he says, “when the cage will open and birds will fly as long as they have feathers.”
Associated Press reporter Salah Nasrawi was refused the right to work as a journalist in his native Iraq after his coverage of the first Gulf War. He has since reported from Tunisia and Egypt.
