The Weight of a Mustard Seed

by Wendell Steavenson

  Kamel Sachet imposed his tenets of discipline, modesty and piety upon those around him and on the tone of his regime in Amara. His bodyguards, a separate (almost private) military unit made up of tribal relatives, were required to pray five times a day and he continually impressed upon them the need to adhere to the correct timetable for prayer. They grumbled about having to wake up for dawn prayer after a night on duty, but never to his face; his anger could extend through his fist in a heartbeat if he thought God’s word was being mocked. His office was piled with newspapers, books, papers and letters and petitions and overlooked by framed verses from the Koran that he had hung on the wall. He kept a prayer mat unrolled in one corner where he prayed, even interrupting meetings and delegations to do so. The men who staffed his office (there were no women; if a woman came to a meeting he respectfully declined to shake her hand) also prayed five times a day. Kamel Sachet did not directly order them, he did not need to, his authority was enough to make it clear that anyone in his orbit must follow his example. Even one of his staff, appointed by the Mukhabarat as an internal spy, was careful to pretend to be especially devout.

  Office hours ended at 4 p.m., but Kamel Sachet usually stayed until 6 or 7. Um Omar remained in Baghdad with the children, venturing to Amara only once or twice during her husband’s tenure. Omar or Ali joined their father during the summer holidays, learning the lessons of leadership and authority and responsibility by his example. When the boys were staying, he would try to leave his office earlier. He taught them how to aim a pistol carefully, using bottles and targets in the back yard. Sometimes the bodyguards would join in, full of male bravado and boasting and prideful good shots, and sometimes in the evening, one of them would cook kebabi over a brazier and they would all gather round to comment how good so-and-so’s kebabi was and how kebabi and mazgouf and tika were the barbecue province of men and that women were much better suited to the intricacies of dolma. Omar was a teenager when his father was away from town and he would take the car and drive around with girls in the passenger seat, vrooming and showing off. None of Kamel Sachet’s bodyguards ever told on him—they were scared to, wary of Omar’s anger as much as of Kamel Sachet’s.

  Kamel Sachet always discharged his duties with diligence. Twice a week he traveled to different towns and villages in the district and he would often stop his convoy to greet ordinary poor people and listen to their complaints. Once, one of his bodyguards recounted to me, they were returning from a visit to a certain village and came across an old woman lying in rags by the side of the road, waving them down. The convoy was stopped and Kamel Sachet himself got out and asked her what she wanted. It seemed that she was paralyzed and she asked for a wheelchair. Kamel Sachet wrote a letter for her which said that her family should come to his office and he would arrange for a wheelchair and a small pension.

  His time in Amara was full of these small incidents. A doctor from Maysan who worked in the same hospital as Dr. Hassan in exile in Abu Dhabi told me he often used to see Kamel Sachet in the hospital in Amara. He suffered sometimes from blood in his urine, he said as a complication of a bilharzia infestation when he was a boy. He liked doctors and enjoyed sitting with them; sometimes he visited sick patients late at night after their families had left.

  Abdul Qadir, his driver-nephew, told me that once his convoy had stopped at a red traffic light in Amara and the traffic policeman at the intersection halted the oncoming green traffic flow to let the governor’s car pass. Kamel Sachet was furious, upbraided the poor traffic policeman, and reported him to the traffic directorate recommending that he be fined a month’s salary.

  A Janabi Istikhbarat officer told me he had asked Kamel Sachet, as a friend, if it was true what he had heard: that he had rolled up his trousers and taken a shovel and helped to clear the main storm drain in Amara when it was flooded and blocked one winter. When Kamel Sachet confirmed the story, the Istikhbarat officer asked, “But how can you, a general, stoop in such a way?” Kamel Sachet replied, “Here I may have rank but with God there are no ranks nor positions.”

  PERHAPS HIS GOOD deeds were recompense, but they were also, in no small part, credits to be counted with God, banked against his judgment day. So many points for observing the timetable of prayer, so many points for taking care of the sick or the poor. He practiced mercy on a Shia saboteur sent from Iran who handed himself in. He went to pay his respects at the funerals of the poor and insignificant. He gave money to the needy. He thought of Allah and his kingdom of heaven and compensated his guilt with humility. When he held the hand of a frail old man dying in a hospital bed he would say to himself, “Ten credits.” He carried his own death very close. He was not afraid of it; his end, he knew and trusted, was already written and determined, but he must have guessed that the odds were against his own longevity. His system of credits, almost obsessive, was his preparation.

  PHOTOGRAPH. Kamel Sachet stands straight and impeccable in an elegant dark green uniform with a twist of red braid over one shoulder. His sleeves, however, are uncharacteristically rolled up to his elbow and he is holding out a carrier bag, in a gesture of charity and supplication, to a poor wretch wearing a filthy dishdasha with a clump of loose turban on his head and a twist of rag wrapped over his face. Several similarly limping, listing, disheveled figures are gathered in a disparate semi circle, hobbling, leaning on walking sticks, some apparently blind. Behind Kamel Sachet, several steps behind, as if recoiling in disgust, are a group of army officers and health officials.

  Kamel Sachet had learned of an old and long-neglected leprosy hospital in a far off place, near the Iranian border in a desolate region, forgotten under a wide spaced sky where eagles flew. The staff had been drafted during the Iran-Iraq war and never returned, the windows and door frames had been torn out by looters. The lepers who remained, crumbling and suffering, begged food where they could and stacked their dead in the basement because they had not the tools nor strength to bury them.

  When Kamel Sachet heard about the hospital he gathered municipal and health officials together, including the bald paunchy head of the Baath Party in Amara and the Head of the local Women’s Union (who he had insisted wear the hijab), and led the convoy without telling where they were going. The hospital had been so long abandoned none of them even knew of its existence.

  As the convoy arrived, the lepers came out to see this extraordinary sight but were afraid of the big cars and the important people and clung, timorous and curious, to the hem of their ruined building. The appalled officials, in clean dark green uniforms, stood out of obligation and dread and held their nose against the ragged white apparitions that confronted them. The outline of their humanity was blurred and deformed. Their heads were wrapped in loose turbans like bandages. Faces were concave, hollowed out, eaten blind, noseless. Some stretched a withered stump across their face in shame and attempted modesty. The women squatted in the dry earth, enveloped in dusty ragged tents of abaya.

  Kamel Sachet delved into the carrier bag he carried and walked forward and gave clean clothes to the patients with his own hands. He asked them how they lived and who they were. One man was a Kurd. Kamel Sachet asked him when his family had last come to visit. He said he had been at the hospital since 1957 and since that time he had received no visitors nor knew anything of the outside world.

  Kamel Sachet and Nejar helped to put the new clothes on the lepers who were too weak to do it themselves. The health officials recoiled and refused. The patients chanted surahs from the Koran because no illness can be caught if it is not God’s will. Soap, food and blankets were brought out of the cars. Kamel Sachet went into the building accompanied by Abdul Qadir.

  They found a woman bedridden in a room. She had been put there because she was contagious. Kamel Sachet pushed opened the creaking door. Abdul Qadir told me he had been scared and he stood in the doorway and retched. The room was dark because the glassless windows were boarded up with cardboard and a terrible smell came out, the strong sour stench of unwashed rag.
It was a summer day, the roof was corrugated iron, the heat beat in the room and was trapped there. Abdul Qadir inhaled the stagnant disease and it stuck in his throat. The woman was of indeterminate age and lay in a heap of straw with a cloth over her hair on a filthy rickety bed. Her whole body was swollen and her face, while untouched by leprosy and neither spotted nor collapsed, was a strange engorged dark blue color. Kamel Sachet greeted her respectfully, “Salam Aleikum,” and handed her food and clothing.

  Afterward Kamel Sachet redirected part of the healthcare budget and ordered a new hospital to be built for the lepers in Amara. He ordered the nurses who worked there to be paid double and the doctors who went once a week to check the patients to be properly remunerated. He persuaded army volunteers to clean the place, saying it was for the sake of humanity and for God.

  In Amara they called him “al-Calipha Omar Bin Abd al-Aziz,” after a great and famous eighth century caliph who shared a mix of Kamel Sachet’s monikers—Kamel Sachet was known as Abu Omar, father of Omar, to those close to him and his full name was Kamel Sachet Aziz, after his father. The Caliph had ruled with piety and munificence, refusing bribes, redistributing land, canceling taxes for converts to Islam, forbidding the practice of “cursing Ali” to foster greater unity between Shia and Sunni and humbling himself with simple cotton clothes and manual work—and so rebuffed the greed of the nobility that they had him poisoned.

  At home, Kamel Sachet wore a simple dishdasha with a red and white headscarf draped over his head without the honorific black band, the agal, in the manner of a simple farmer. In his right hand he held a plain string of black plastic prayer beads. He did not absently thumb the beads, as most men did, a calming tactile rhythm to play away the days, but automatically and meditatively counted each bead and stretch of gap between each bead, each one an individual prayer followed by a breath of respect. As governor, he paved roads, ordered a canal to be dug to drain the flooding rainwater into the river and repaired the sewage system that had been damaged since the Iran-Iraq war. He made sure that the profits from the big state farms in Maysan were directed into accounts for the refurbishment of mosques and into a fund for the zakat, the fifth pillar of Islam as prescribed by the Koran, a charitable tithe to be distributed to the poor. He set up a committee to listen to petitions from ordinary people and offer stipends to students for university and the disabled. He distributed land to war widows and local civil servants and when he toured villages he took sacks of grain and rice for poor families. He set up an office where women could make complaints of violence and drunkenness against their husbands. He kept an open office on Tuesdays so that ordinary people could come with their concerns (although in practice the office manager often turned people away); once an old man came in to plead for his four sons who had been sentenced to execution, and Kamel Sachet looked into the case and had them all released. He was always careful to couch his orders with reference to the President. He would say, “Saddam says that we must increase the salaries for teachers because too many teachers are leaving our schools for the private sector.”

  And, most infamously, he closed all the bars and liquor shops in the province.

  Arshad Yassin, Saddam’s cousin, brother-in-law and former chief of the presidential bodyguards, came to Amara for a semi official visit. Kamel Sachet tried to avoid these Baghdad Baathies and any kind of official frippery—once he refused to meet the head of the Iraqi Association of Art (he had no time for the arts or entertainers) who had come expressly to see him. Arshad Yassin, however, was too close to the President to put off, no matter how distasteful he found him. Kamel Sachet met him in his outer office. Tea was poured by the office manager; outside two sets of bodyguards sized each other up.

  Arshad Yassin chided Kamel Sachet, “Abu Omar; you’ve created a mini Islamic state here!” Several officials from the Amara branch of Uday’s Olympic Committee as well as the head of the Baath Party in Maysan, a toady drunkard called Aziz Salih Numan who Kamel Sachet knew and disliked from the time in Kuwait, had complained of his religious excesses in presidential earshot. Arshad Yassin had come to broker conciliation.

  “Let them at least keep the bar that’s still open on the Baghdad road, Abu Omar—”

  But Kamel Sachet answered him, “There is a bar that remains open? Well, I will close it immediately!”

  For the time being Saddam backed him, but inevitably those Baathies who had expected to be automatically awarded large tracts of government farmland and construction contracts felt their toes pinched and bitched at Kamel Sachet’s welfare measures and his religious zealotry. Aziz Salih Numan was his most prominent adversary.

  No one I ever talked to had a good word to say about Aziz Salih Numan, who apparently suffered from diabetes, gouty legs and a terrifying temper. He had been one of the triumvirate ruling Kuwait and he and Kamel Sachet had already established a mutual dislike. He was an apostle of Saddam, a facsimile with a smug jowly grin, black military beret and mustache, a Mini-Me tyrant who groveled in front of his master, a Shia who compensated for this political insecurity by making himself a trusted implement of Saddam’s torturous crackdown of the Shia South. His brother had been assassinated, and he maintained a reasonable paranoia of the same fate; it was said that there was a Kuwaiti bounty on his head. He spent most of his time in Kut, but kept a house in Amara that was built like a castle fortress with towers surrounded by a high fence and covered in marble. It was rumored there was a prison in the basement. Kamel Sachet refused to give contracts to Numan’s relatives, but insisted on putting them out to public tender, and would not allocate his business interests to certain government buildings that he requested. Numan complained to Ali Hassan al-Majid and to Hussein Kamel, spread rumors in Baghdad, called Kamel Sachet a Wahhabi, and wrote reports accusing him of leniency against those who had cursed the President.

  Kamel Sachet and Aziz Salih Numan avoided each other as much as possible but an incident occurred on a feast day held to commemorate the date of a previous visit by Saddam to Maysan. Aziz Salih Numan arrived and due to a mix up in timing and communication, was kept waiting for fifteen minutes before Kamel Sachet came to greet him. He was furious at such a failure of protocol and disrespect and he shouted at Kamel Sachet in front of several other officers:

  “Why were we not greeted properly? Are we fools?”

  “If you know what you are, why are you asking?” Kamel Sachet retorted, angry, and reached for his gun. Aziz Salih Numan bristled and moved his own hand over the holster on his hip and continued to rant.

  “You don’t deserve such a position. I am the representative of the President! I will take my measures after this insult!”

  The following day an informal peace meeting was held between the two at which Nejar (sometimes bodyguard to Aziz Salih Numan) officiated. There was tension and three Pepsis on the table.

  Aziz Salih Numan leaned forward and asserted himself as a lecturing superior:

  “You are the Governor. You have a high rank in the army. Your relationship with Saddam Hussein is strong. But listen. Nejar is a witness to what I will say to you: Don’t behave like this, whether something is right or wrong—Your trust in Saddam Hussein is 100 percent, but Saddam needs the party more than he needs the army. He needed you as an army commander during the Iran-Iraq war, and he gave you cars with golden keys and he needed you in Kuwait. I know you are honest in your dealings with Saddam. But don’t trust him 100 percent. We know that if I told Saddam that I, as his representative, was kept waiting and Kamel Sachet did not greet me, it’s an insult to who? To him! You would be executed!”

  Kamel Sachet knew what he said was true, but kept his pride: “I have done nothing to be executed for. It was an administrative mistake.”

  KAMEL SACHET SPENT a little over two years as Governor of Amara before the reports piled up against him, too many complaints from too many different quarters, and he was reassigned back to Baghdad, back home, to an administrative position in the Presidency in Baghdad, selling government
cars. He was recommended for the job by Khalid al-Janabi, the sheikh of the Janabi tribe and then Mayor of Baghdad. It was a position which suited Saddam, it sidelined this recalcitrant and independent extremist, while keeping him occupied in a useful position, close by. Indeed, to Saddam it was a good fit, the office of selling government cars was always fraught with nepotistic deals but he could trust the unimpeachable reputation of his war-hero general to act without favoritism (Kamel Sachet would not even allow his own sons to buy one of the government cars he was responsible for—a piece of incorruptibility which greatly frustrated his sons) while detaching him from any military duties and separating him from the officer corps who revered him.

  NEJAR WAS EAGER to describe Kamel Sachet’s great qualities, his bravery and his goodness. But he made it clear, slanting his gaze, that he would protect Kamel Sachet’s memory and reputation. “Don’t go into personal details,” he warned me. “I came up with Kamel Sachet, he did me many favors and I am loyal to him and I tell you to avoid these things. Many times I was in his house, many times, and I never met his wife or his daughters.” He looked me straight in the eye, trying to discern if I knew about the scandal. I returned his stare. Eventually he broke off his drilling and resumed the general’s résumé.

  “Kamel Sachet asked for retirement several times. I advised him not to take his request directly to the President, because the President would calculate this request and suspect it. This was one of his mistakes.” Nejar paused. “He wasn’t afraid of Saddam Hussein. He was honest with him, he believed Saddam was his friend and trusted him and did not believe that he would betray him.”

  The next time I saw Major Nejar we met in the coffee shop of my hotel. He seemed distracted and nervous. His swagger had sharpened into aggression. It was now mid April 2004 and Fallujah had blown up and Moqtada’s Shia were revolting in Kufa and no one could pretend any more that the violence was just teething problems at the beginning of a new era of democracy and prosperity. Nejar no longer wanted to reminisce about incidents from Amara and talk about Kamel Sachet’s achievements there. He had been driving a taxi to make ends meet but he was running out of money and the situation was not good enough for his pride or his pocket; he needed something that conferred a certain status. Without much preamble, he asked me if I could help him get a position in the new Iraqi Mukhabarat.