The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  Then they brought me to a man I knew, Jawad Zoubeidi, a building contractor. He had been so badly tortured, I hardly recognised him. Jawad said: “I know Dr. Hussain. He comes to the mosque and takes part in our religious activities.” For them, “religious activities” meant anti-government activities. They said to me: “Better tell us all or you’ll regret it.” Then they took me to the torture chamber in the basement. They blindfolded me and pushed me down the stairs into the chamber. It was a big room. My hands were tied behind my back and I was pulled up into the air by my hands. After five minutes, the pain was so severe in the shoulders that it was unbearable. Then they gave me shocks on sensitive parts of my body. By the end of the beating you are naked. There were shocks on my genitals and other parts of my body.

  After fifteen minutes they came to me and said: “Sign.” I was in a very cold sweat. They know you’ll faint. They brought me down and gave me a short rest. I fell asleep for a few minutes. But this went on day and night, day and night. It went on for twenty-two days and nights. Four of them did it, in shifts. Baraq, who had a Ph.D. in military psychology from Moscow, was standing there. At one point, he said: “Look, Dr. Hussain, I’ll tell you what your problem is—you think you are smart enough and we are stupid. You may be smart in your own field but we know what we are doing. Just tell us what you know and get this over.”

  I knew Saddam. He knew me. But this could happen to me. I remember once, Saddam said to me: “You are a scientist. I am a politician. I will tell you what politics is about. I make a decision. I tell someone else the opposite. Then I do something which surprises even myself.”

  The torture techniques in Baghdad were routine and varied in severity. The electric shocks could be everywhere. But sometimes they would burn people on the genitals and go on burning until they were completely burned off. They did the same with toes. They sometimes beat people with iron on the stomach or the chest. But with me, they were very careful not to leave any sign on me. I saw one man and they had used an iron on his stomach. They used drills and made holes in bones, arms and legs. I saw an officer, Naqib Hamid, and they dissolved his feet in acid. There was another torture where they would put sulphuric acid in a tub. They would take a man and start by dissolving his hands. Once, the founder of the Dawa party,41 Abdul Saheb Khail, was totally dissolved. Baraq said to me: “Have you heard about Khail—there is where we dissolved him.”

  In the final stages of torture, they have a table with an electrical saw. They can saw off a hand or a foot. The majority talk. The people who have refused to talk are exceptional. Adnan Salman, a head of the Dawa, refused to talk. He was brought in—I saw him—and by that time they had a lot of confessions by other men who had been tortured. Adnan Salman was a teacher. Adnan knew—he was prepared. He told them: “My name is Adnan Salman. I am in charge of the Dawa party and none of these people are responsible for our activities. These will be my last words to you. You will never extract a single word from me.” They brought three doctors and told them that if Adnan died under torture they would be executed. He didn’t utter a single word. Sometimes you would hear the doctors, so scared because they could not bring him back from unconsciousness. I was in another torture room and could hear everything. I was in Abu Ghraib prison when I heard Adnan had been executed. He had not died under torture.

  One prisoner told me he was seventeen and was the youngest prisoner and so they made him sweep the corridors of the internal security headquarters every morning at seven o’clock. He saw a peasant woman from the south with tattoos, he said, a woman from the marshes with a girl of ten and a boy of about six. She was carrying a baby in her arms. The prisoner told me that as he was sweeping, an officer came and told the woman: “Tell me where your husband is—very bad things can happen.” She said: “Look, my husband takes great pride in the honour of his woman. If he knew I was here, he would have turned himself in.” The officer took out his pistol and held the daughter up by the braids of her hair and put a bullet into her head. The woman didn’t know what was happening. Then he put a bullet into the boy’s head. The woman was going crazy. He took the youngest boy by the legs and smashed the baby’s brain on a wall. You can imagine the woman. The officer told the young prisoner to bring the rubbish trolley and put the three children in it, on top of the garbage, and ordered the woman to sit on the bodies. He took the trolley out and left it. The officer had got into the habit of getting rid of people who were worthless.

  I was taken to the revolutionary court. Mussalam al-Jabouri was the judge and there were two generals on each side of him. They asked me my name and if I had anything to say. The charges were that I was a “Zionist

  stooge,” an “Israeli spy” and “working with the Americans” and “a collaborator with the Iranians.” They realised I wasn’t a member of the Dawa party. The court handed down a sentence they had decided before I was taken there—life imprisonment. My own defence lawyer called for my execution. He had only a written statement to make: “This person has closed the doors of mercy—give him the severest penalty.” I said to the court: “This Iraqi state which you are governing, we established it with our blood. My father was sentenced by the British, as for me I am president of the Palestinian Association in Toronto. A person with this background cannot be an Israeli agent.” The lawyer said: “So you are a Russian spy.” I said: “I have a family tree—from the Prophet Mohamed’s time, peace be upon him.”

  I was taken to Abu Ghraib prison and put in a small cell with forty people inside. By the time I left in May 1980, we were sixty people to a cell. I worked out that there were three death sentences for every prison sentence. So when a thousand people went to Abu Ghraib, that meant there were three thousand executions. That May, they took me to the Mukhabarat intelligence headquarters and now the torture was much worse. In the previous torture centre, they were allowed a 10 per cent death rate. Here they were allowed 100 per cent. The head was Barzan Tikriti, the head of Saddam’s human rights delegation to Geneva. Dr. Ziad Jaafar was brought there because he told Saddam that the nuclear programme couldn’t continue without me, without Dr. Shahristani. He said that Iraq needed Shahristani the chemist. Saddam took this as a threat. Jaafar was never shown to me. They tortured twenty people to death in front of him. So he agreed to return to work.

  Then one day they came and shaved me and showered me, brought me new pyjamas, blindfolded me, put cologne on me, put me in a car and took me to a room in what looked like a palace. There was a bedroom, sitting room, videos, a television . . . Then one day Barzan Tikriti came with Abdul-Razak al-Hashimi—he was to be Iraqi ambassador to France during the Kuwaiti occupation in 1990. He was a Baathist, a very silly man with a Ph.D. in geology from the United States. He was the vice president of the Atomic Energy Organisation and he stood by the door like a guard. I just sat there, lying down, both my hands completely paralysed. A man arrived. He said: “You don’t know me but we know you well. Saddam was extremely hurt when he heard you had been arrested—he was very angry with the intelligence people. He knows about your scientific achievements. He would like you to go back to your work at the Atomic Energy Organisation.” I said: “I am too weak after what I have been through.” He said: “We need an atomic bomb.” Barzan Tikriti then said: “We need an atomic bomb because this will give us a long arm to reshape the map of the Middle East. We know you are the man to help us with this.” I told him that all my research was published in papers, that I had done no research on military weapons. “I am the wrong person for the task you are looking for,” I said. He replied: “I know what you can do—and any person who is not willing to serve his country is not worthy to be alive.”

  I was sure I would be executed. I said: “I agree with you that it is a man’s duty to serve his country but what you are asking me to do is not a service to my country.” He replied: “Dr. Hussain, so long as we agree that a man must serve his country, the rest is detail. You should rest now because you are very tired.” After this, I was kept in several pal
aces over a number of months. They brought my wife to see me, once at a palace that had been the home of Adnan Hamdan, a member of the Revolutionary Command Council who had been executed by Saddam. But they realised I wouldn’t work for them and I was sent back to Abu Ghraib. I spent eight years there. I wasn’t allowed books, newspapers, radio or any contact with any human being.

  I knew I was doing the right thing. I never regretted the stand I took. I slept on the concrete floor of my cell, under an army blanket that was full of lice. There was a tap and a bucket for a toilet. I got one plate of food every day, usually stew without meat in it. I suffered from severe back pains from sleeping on the concrete. I made up mathematical puzzles and solved them. I thought about the people who had accepted the regime, who could have fought it when it was weak and did not. The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced I had done the right thing. I knew that my family would understand the reasons for it. I wished Bernice would take the kids and leave the country. That would have been much easier for me. She said that as long as I was alive, she would never leave the country.

  Hussain Shahristani eventually escaped from Abu Ghraib during an American air raid in February 1990 after friends helped him disguise himself as an Iraqi intelligence officer, and he made his way via Suleimaniya to Iran. Bernice remembered a visit to her husband in prison when she could not recognise his face. “I could only recognise his clothes,” she said. “But I knew it was him because I saw a tear running down his cheek.”

  Just two months after Dr. Shahristani’s mind-numbing transfer from Abu Ghraib prison to the palace in 1980, Saddam decided to deny what he had already admitted to Shahristani the previous year: his plan to possess nuclear weapons. I watched this typical Saddam performance, staged on 21 July 1980, in front of hundreds of journalists—myself among them—in the hall of Iraq’s highly undemocratic national assembly. Perhaps the chamber was just too big, because when he entered, the first impression was of a tiny man in an overlarge double-breasted jacket, a rather simple soul with a bright tie and a glossy jacket. He began not with the cheery wave adopted by so many Arab leaders but with a long, slightly stilted salute, like a private soldier desperately ill at ease among generals. But when Saddam spoke, the microphone—deliberately, no doubt—pitched his voice up into Big Brother volume, so that he boomed at us, his sarcasm and his anger coming across with venom rather than passion. You could imagine what it was like to be denounced before the Revolutionary Command Council.

  With an autocrat’s indignation that anyone should believe Iraq wanted to build an atom bomb—but with the suggestion that the Arabs were perfectly capable of doing so if they chose—he denied that his country was planning to produce nuclear weapons. He also condemned the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and U.S. military involvement in the Gulf, sneered at the Syrian Baathist leadership, accused British businessmen of bribery and belittled accurate reports of Kurdish unrest in Iraq. “We have no programme concerning the manufacture of the atomic bomb,” he said. “We have no such programme for the Israelis to thwart . . . we want to use atomic energy for peaceful purposes.”

  His argument was artful. “A few years ago, Zionists in Europe used to spread the news that the Arabs were backward people, that they did not understand technology and were in need of a protector. The Arabs, the Zionists said, could do nothing but ride camels, cry over the ruins of their houses and sleep in tents. Two years ago, the Zionists and their supporters came up with a declaration that Iraq was about to produce the atom bomb. But how could a people who only knew how to ride camels produce an atom bomb?” Iraq had signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, but no one asked if the Israelis were making atom bombs at their nuclear centre at Dimona in the Negev desert. “Arab nations are on the threshold of a new age and will succeed in using atomic energy. Millions of Arabs will be able to use this advanced technology.” Saddam kept using the word “binary” over and over again, as if Iraq had just split the atom.

  His statements were laced with references to the “Arab nation,” and the ghost of Gamal Abdel Nasser—whose name he invoked on at least three occasions— was clearly intended to visit the proceedings. Regarding his own regime as an example of the purest pan-Arab philosophy, he clearly saw himself as the aspiring leader of the Arab world. But he could not resist, just briefly, hinting at the truth. “Whoever wants to be our enemy,” he shouted at one point, “can expect us as an enemy to be totally different in the very near future.” He had made his point: if the Arabs were able to use advanced nuclear technology in the near future and if Israel’s enemy was going to be “totally different,” this could only mean that he was planning to possess nuclear weapons. It was no secret that Iraq’s Osirak reactor was expected to be commissioned in just five months’ time.

  Then came Iran. He believed, he said, in the right of the Iranian people to self-determination, but “Khomeini has become a murderer in his own country.” At one point, Saddam began to speak of the 35,000 Iraqi Shiites of Iranian origin whom he had just expelled from Iraq—he did not mention the figure, nor the fact that many of them held Iraqi passports—and he suddenly ended in mid-sentence. “We have expelled a few people of Iranian origin or people who do not belong to Iraq,” he began. “But now, if they want to come back . . .” And there he suddenly ended his remark. It was an oblique but ominous warning of the punishment Saddam intended to visit upon Iran’s Islamic Revolution.

  His press conference went on long into the night and into the early hours of the next morning. He spoke without notes and, although he would not regard the comparison as flattering, he often improvised his speech as he went along in much the same way that President Sadat of Egypt used to do. I noted in my report to The Times next day that “when the president smiled—which he did only rarely—he was greeted by bursts of applause from fellow ministers and Baath party officials.” When several of us were close to Saddam after his speech, he offered his hand to us. In my notes, I recorded that it was “soft and damp.”

  Two years later, Richard Pim, who had been head of Winston Churchill’s prime ministerial Map Room at Downing Street during the Second World War, used exactly the same words—“soft and damp”—when he described to me his experience of shaking hands in Moscow with Josef Stalin, upon whom Saddam consciously modelled himself. It was one of Stalin’s biographers who noted in 2004 that in the 1970s Saddam had dutifully visited all of Stalin’s fifteen scenic seaside villas on the Black Sea coast of Abkhazia, some of them Tsarist palaces; these were presumably the inspiration for the vast imperial—and largely useless— palaces which Saddam built for himself all over Iraq.42

  For the West, however, Saddam was a new Shah in the making. That, I suspected, was what his press conference was all about. He would be a Shah for us and a Nasser for the Arabs. His personality cult was already being constructed. He was a new version of the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid, it was said in Baghdad—he would soon become a far more disturbing version of an ancient Arab warrior—and his face now appeared across the country, in Kurdish dress, in Arab kuffiah, in business suit, digging trenches in guerrilla uniform, revolver tucked Arafat-style into his trouser belt, on dinar banknotes. He was, a local poet grovellingly wrote, “the perfume of Iraq, its dates, its estuary of the two rivers, its coast and waters, its sword, its shield, the eagle whose grandeur dazzles the heavens. Since there was an Iraq, you were its awaited and promised one.”

  Saddam had already developed the habit of casually calling on Iraqis in their homes to ask if they were happy—they always were, of course—and my colleague Tony Clifton of Newsweek was himself a witness to this kind of Saddamite aberration. During an interview with the president, Clifton rashly asked if Saddam was never worried about being assassinated. “The interpreter went ashen-grey with fear and there was a long silence,” Clifton was to recall. “I think Saddam knew some English and understood the question. Then the interpreter said something to him and Saddam roared with laughter and clapped me on the shoulder. He didn’t stop laughing,
but he said to me: ‘Leave this room now! Go out onto the street! Go and ask anyone in Iraq: Do you love Saddam?’ And he went on laughing. And all the people in the room burst out laughing. Of course, you couldn’t really do that, could you? You couldn’t go up to Iraqis and ask them that. They were going to tell you that they loved him.”43

  Saddam had inherited the same tribal and religious matrix as the British when they occupied Iraq in 1917. The largest community, the Shia, were largely excluded from power but constituted a permanent threat to the Sunni-dominated Baath party. Not only were their magnificent golden shrines at Najaf and Kerbala potent symbols of the great division in Islamic society, but they represented a far larger majority in Iran. Just so long as the Shah ruled Iraq’s eastern neighbour, its religious power could be checked. But if the Shah was deposed, then the Baathists would be the first to understand the threat which the Shia of both countries represented.

  Shiites have disputed the leadership of Islam since the sixth-century murder of Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet Mohamed, at Najaf and believe that Ali’s descendants, the imams, are the lawful successors of Mohamed. Their fascination with martyrdom and death would, if made manifest in modern war, create a threat for any enemy. The Sunnis, adherents of the sunnah (practice) of Mohamed, became commercially powerful from their close association with the Mamelukes and the Ottoman Turks. In many ways, Sunni power came to be founded on Shia poverty; in Iraq, Saddam was going to make sure that this remained the case. This disparity, however, would always be exacerbated—as it was in the largely Sunni kingdom of Saudi Arabia—by an extraordinary geographic coincidence: almost all the oil of the Middle East lies beneath lands where Shia Muslims live. In southern Iraq, in the north-east of Saudi Arabia and, of course, in Iran, Shiites predominate among the population.