The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  Nasser, a moustachioed man with dark glasses, a black shirt and carefully creased lounge trousers, spoke slowly and with obvious forethought when he outlined his group’s reaction to the killings. “We will take our vengeance,” he said, “because now our second enemy is England.” He claimed that he had been sentenced to death in absentia in Iran. But his arrival for the conference in the heavily upholstered interior of the Iraqi Information Ministry made it clear that the Baghdad government fully supported his cause and must have been behind the seizure of the embassy in London. A senior official of the ministry acted as interpreter thoughout Nasser’s resentful peroration against Britain and Iran.

  The Arabs of Khuzestan had been seeking autonomy from Khomeini’s regime, and many Arab insurgents in the province had been executed or imprisoned, Nasser said. It was to demand the release of the jailed men that the gunmen had attacked the embassy in London. Nasser agreed that there was a “link” between the insurgents and the Iraqi Baath party and we should have questioned him about this. “Iraq’s Arab Socialist Baath Party’s motto—one unified Arab nation—is a glorious motto and we are Arabs,” he said. “We follow this motto.” What did this mean? On reflection, we should have grasped its import: Saddam was preparing a little Sudetenland, another Danzig, a piece of Iran that he might justifiably wish to liberate in the near future.

  But of course, we asked about the siege in London rather than the implications of Iraq’s support for the rebels. “When we went to the embassy in London, our aim was not to kill,” Nasser said. “We were not terrorists. We selected the British government as our negotiator because Britain is a democratic country and we wanted to benefit from this democracy. The British knew—all the world knew—that we did not intend to kill anyone . . . But for six days, they did not answer our requests or publicise our demands. They cut off the telex and the telephone . . . They did not have to kill our youths—they could have taken them prisoner and put them on trial.” Nasser blamed Sadeq Khalkhali, the Iranian judge, for the torture of Arabs in Khuzestan—“he employs torturers who break the legs and shoot the arms of prisoners before knifing them”—and claimed that Arabs in the province had first accepted the Iranian revolution because “it came in the name of Islam” but that they now wanted autonomy “just like the Kurds, Baluchis and Turks.” When we asked how the Arabs in the Iranian embassy had brought their weapons into Britain, Nasser replied: “How did the Palestinians get guns into Munich? How do Irish revolutionaries bring guns to Britain? We are able to do the same.” Again, no one thought to ask if the guns reached Britain in the Iraqi diplomatic bag. Nasser himself came from the Iranian port of Khorramshahr, for which he used the Arab name “al-Mohammorah.” So was al-Mohammorah going to be Danzig?

  Britain, however, made no protest to Iraq over the siege—or over the extraordinary press conference so obviously arranged by the Iraqi government in Baghdad. It was an eloquent silence. Of course, there were those who questioned Britain’s cosy relationship with Iraq. There was an interesting exchange in the House of Lords in 1989—a year after the end of the Iran–Iraq War and shortly after the arrest in Baghdad of Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft and his friend, the British nurse Daphne Parish—when Lord Hylton asked how the British government “justify their action in guaranteeing new credits to Iraq of up to £250 million in view of that country’s detention of British subjects without trial, refusal to release prisoners of war following the ceasefire with Iran and its internal human rights record.” For the government, Lord Trefgarne replied that “the Iraqi Government are in no doubt of our concerns over the British detainee, Mrs. Parish, and over Iraq’s human rights record . . . we are a major trading nation. I am afraid that we have to do business with a number of countries with whose policies we very often disagree . . . we do not sell arms to Iraq.” Hylton’s response—that “while I appreciate that this country is a trading nation . . . is not the price that we are paying too high?”—passed without further comment.

  Bazoft, who was Iranian-born and held British identity papers but not citizenship, had visited the Iraqi town of Hilla in Parish’s car in a hunt for evidence that Iraq was producing chemical weapons. He was arrested as he tried to leave Baghdad airport, accused of spying and put on trial for his life, along with Parish. A month later, Foreign Office minister William Waldegrave was noting privately of Iraq that “I doubt if there is any future market of such a scale anywhere where the UK is potentially so well placed if we play our diplomatic hand correctly, nor can I think of any major market where the importance of diplomacy is so great on our commercial position. We must not allow it to go to the French, Germans, Japanese, Koreans, etcetera.” He added that “a few more Bazofts or another bout of internal repression would make it more difficult.” Waldegrave’s words were written only months after Saddam’s gassing of the Kurds of Halabja. Geoffrey Howe, the deputy prime minister, decided to relax controls on the sale of arms to Iraq—but kept it secret because “it would look very cynical if so soon after expressing outrage about the treatment of the Kurds, we adopt a more flexible approach to arms sales.”

  Bazoft was sentenced to death on 10 March 1990. The Observer attacked Saddam over the conviction—not, perhaps, a wise decision in the circumstances— and British foreign secretary Douglas Hurd offered to fly to Baghdad to meet the Iraqi president. Saddam, according to the Iraqi Foreign Ministry, “could not intervene while under political pressure.” But by then, a grim routine had begun, one of which my own research back in Beirut had made me painfully aware. Back in 1968, convicted Iraqi “spies” would confess their guilt on television. Then they would be executed. In 1969, the lord mayor of Baghdad had confessed—on television—to “spying” and he had been executed. And Bazoft had appeared on television, and confessed to spying—only later did his friends discover that he had been tortured with electricity during interrogation. In February 1969, before the execution of eight “spies,” Baghdad radio had announced that the Iraqi people “expressed their condemnation of the spies”—they were then put to death. In May 1969, the farmers’ trade union delegates had applauded President al-Bakr’s decision to “chop off” the heads of a CIA “spy ring.” They were duly put to death. Now, on one of his interminable visits to Iraqi minority groups, Saddam asked in front of a large group of Kurds if they believed that the “British spy” should hang. Of course, they chorused that he should. It was the same old Baathist technique; get the people to make the decision—once they knew what it should be—and then obey the people’s will.

  On the morning of 15 March 1990, Robin Kealy, a British diplomat in Baghdad, was informed that Bazoft was to be executed that day. He arrived at the Abu Ghraib prison to find the young man still unaware of his fate, still planning a personal appeal for his life to Saddam. It was Kealy’s mournful duty to tell Bazoft the truth. Kealy declined an invitation to be present at the hanging. Eight days later, four Heathrow luggage handlers heaved Bazoft’s coffin off a regular Iraqi Airways flight to London. No Foreign Office representative, relative or friend attended at the airport. The coffin was taken to a cargo shed to await burial. His friend Daphne “Dee” Parish was given fifteen years. Bazoft’s last words to Kealy were: “Tell Dee I’m sorry.”

  Throughout the early years of Saddam’s rule, there were journalists who told the truth about his regime while governments—for financial, trade and economic reasons—preferred to remain largely silent. Yet those of us who opposed the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003 were quickly accused of being Saddam’s “spokesmen” or, in my case, “supporting the maintenance of the Baathist regime”—this from, of all people, Richard Perle, one of the prime instigators of the whole disastrous war, whose friend Donald Rumsfeld was befriending Saddam in 1983. Two years after Rumsfeld’s initial approach to the Iraqi leader—followed up within months by a meeting with Tariq Aziz—I was reporting on Saddam’s gang-rape and torture in Iraqi prisons. On 31 July 1985, Wahbi al-Qaraghuli, the Iraqi ambassador in London, complained to William Rees-Mogg
, the Times editor, that:

  Robert Fisk’s extremely one-sided article ignores the tremendous advances made by Iraq in the fields of social welfare, education, agricultural development, urban improvement and women’s suffrage; and he claims, without presenting any evidence to support such an accusation, that “Saddam himself imposes a truly terroristic regime on his own people.” Especially outrageous is the statement that: “Suspected critics of the regime have been imprisoned at Abu Ghoraib [sic] jail and forced to watch their wives being gang-raped by Saddam’s security men. Some prisoners have had to witness their children being tortured in front of them.” It is utterly reprehensible that some journalists are quite prepared, without any supporting corroboration, to repeat wild, unfounded allegations about countries such as Iraq . . .

  “Extremely one-sided,” “without presenting any evidence,” “outrageous,”

  “utterly reprehensible,” “wild, unfounded allegations”: these were the very same expressions used by the Americans and the British almost twenty years later about reports by myself or my colleagues which catalogued the illegal invasion of Iraq and its disastrous consequences. In February 1986, I was refused a visa to Baghdad on the grounds that “another visit by Mr. Fisk to Iraq would lend undue credibility to his reports.” Indeed it would.46

  So for all these years—until his invasion of Kuwait in 1990—we in the West tolerated Saddam’s cruelty, his oppression and torture, his war crimes and mass murder. After all, we helped to create him. The CIA gave the locations of communist cadres to the first Baathist government, information that was used to arrest, torture and execute hundreds of Iraqi men. And the closer Saddam came to war with Iran, the greater his fear of his own Shia population, the more we helped him. In the pageant of hate figures that Western governments and journalists have helped to stage in the Middle East—peopled by Nasser, Ghadafi, Abu Nidal and, at one point, Yassir Arafat—Ayatollah Khomeini was our bogeyman of the early 1980s, the troublesome priest who wanted to Islamicise the world, whose stated intention was to spread his revolution. Saddam, far from being a dictator, thus became—on the Associated Press news wires, for example—a “strongman.” He was our bastion—and the Arab world’s bastion—against Islamic “extremism.” Even after the Israelis bombed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981, our support for Saddam did not waver. Nor did we respond to Saddam’s clear intention of driving his country to war with Iran. The signs of an impending conflict were everywhere. Even Shapour Bakhtiar, the Shah’s last prime minister, was helping stoke opposition to Khomeini from Iraq, as I discovered when I visited him in his wealthy—but dangerous—Paris exile in August 1980.

  It had been the bright idea of Charles Douglas-Home, the foreign editor of The Times, to chase the remains of the Shah’s old regime. “I’m sure Bakhtiar’s up to something,” Charlie said over the phone. “Besides, he knows a lot—and his daughter is stunningly beautiful!” He was right on both counts, although Bakhtiar—so Francophile that he had joined the French army in the Second World War—looked more impressive in his photographs than he did in person. Newspaper pictures portrayed him as a robust man with full, expressive features, his eyes alight for the return of Iranian democracy. In reality, he was a small, thin man, his cheeks somewhat shrunken, his clothes slightly too large for him, a diminutive figure sitting on a huge sofa with seven heavily armed gendarmes outside to protect him.

  Even in his Paris apartment, with the noise of the city’s traffic murmuring away outside and the poplar trees swaying in the breeze beyond the sitting-room window, you could feel the presence of the Iranian assassination squads that Tehran had ordered to kill Bakhtiar. When they had called two weeks earlier under the command of a twenty-nine-year-old Lebanese Islamist called Anis Naccache, they left behind a dead woman neighbour, a murdered French policeman and a bullet-smashed door handle, a souvenir of bright, jagged steel that lay beside the little table next to Bakhtiar’s feet.

  This had not served to dampen Bakhtiar’s publicly expressed hatred of Khomeini or his theocratic regime. He admitted to me, uneasily and only after an hour, that he had twice visited Iraq to talk to officials of the Baath party—an institution that could hardly be said to practise the kind of liberal democracy Bakhtiar was advocating—and had broadcast over the clandestine radio that the Iraqis operated on their frontier with Iran, beaming in propaganda against the regime. “Why shouldn’t I go to Iraq?” he asked. “I have been in Britain twice, I have been to Switzerland and Belgium. So I can go to Iraq. I contacted people there. I was invited to deal with the authorities there. I have a common point with the Iraqi government. They, like other Muslim countries, are against Khomeini by a large majority. It is possible to work together. This radio that is on the border with Iran is broadcasting what the Iranian people like to listen to. It has broadcast my statements on cassette. That is the only possible way when a dictatorship is established somewhere.”

  Bakhtiar, like many Western statesmen, suffered from a Churchill complex, a desire to dress himself up in the shadow of history. “When Khomeini arrived in Iran, I said we had escaped from one dictatorship [the Shah’s] but had entered an even more awful one. Nobody believed me. Now, they have plenty to complain about but they do not have the courage to say it. So why do people talk about a coup d’état? I know that I have people on my side in the army . . . I remember when I was a student in Paris, there was an English leader by the name of Winston Churchill who saw the dangers of dictatorship. Other people were very relaxed about it all and wanted to do deals with Hitler. But Churchill told them they were on the point of extinction. In the same way I knew that Mr. Khomeini could not do anything for Iran: he is a man who does not understand geography, history or the economy. He cannot be the leader of all those people in the twentieth century, because he is ignorant about the world.”

  The Shah had died in a Cairo hospital six days before my interview with Bakhtiar, although Bakhtiar seemed quite unmoved at his former king’s departure. “The death of a person does not give me happiness. I am not the sort of man who dances in the streets because someone is dead and I am alive—I did not even do that when Hitler died. And God knows, I am an anti-fascist as you know yourself. The king was a sick man, a very sick man—and I think that even for him, death was a deliverance, morally and physically.” What Bakhtiar wanted was a provisional government “which would go to Iran and which, under the 1906 constitution, would call for a constituent assembly, calmly and without emotion, and would study the different constitutions for Iran.”

  Bakhtiar was already painfully out of touch with Iran, unaware that Khomeini’s revolution was irreversible, partly because it dealt so mercilessly with its enemies—who included Bakhtiar himself. Naccache and his Iranian hit squad had bungled the first attempt to kill him.47 Just over eleven years later, on 8 August 1991, more killers arrived at Bakhtiar’s home. This time they cut his head off. Accused of helping the murderers, an Iranian businessman told the Paris assize court that Bakhtiar “killed 5,000 people during his thirty-three days in power. Secondly, he was planning a coup d’état in Iran . . . thirdly, he collaborated with Saddam Hussein during the Iran–Iraq war ...”48

  Just as Saddam was planning the destruction of the Iranian revolution, so Khomeini was calling for the overthrow of Saddam and the Baath, or the “Aflaqis” as he quaintly called them after the name of the Syrian founder of the party. After learning of Bakr Sadr’s execution and that of his sister, Khomeini openly called for Saddam’s overthrow. “It would be strange,” he wrote on 2 April 1980,

  if the Islamic nations, especially the noble nation of Iraq, the tribes of the Tigris and Euphrates, the brave students of the universities and other young people turned a blind eye to this great calamity inflicted upon Islam and the household of the Messenger of God, peace be upon him, and allowed the accursed Baath party to martyr their eminent personalities one after the other. It would be even more strange if the Iraqi army and other forces were tools in the hands of these criminals, assisti
ng them in the eradication of Islam. I have no faith in the top-ranking officers of the Iraqi armed forces but I am not disappointed in the other officers, the non-commissioned officers or their soldiers. I expect them to either rise up bravely and overthrow this oppression as was the case in Iran or to flee the garrisons and barracks . . . I hope that God the Almighty will destroy the system of oppression of these criminals.

  OPPRESSION LAY LIKE A BLANKET over the Middle East in 1980, in Iraq, in Iran, and in Afghanistan. And if the West was indifferent to the suffering of millions of Muslims, so, shamefully, were most of the Arab leaders. Arafat never dared to condemn the Soviet Union after its invasion of Afghanistan—Moscow was still the PLO’s most important ally—and the kings and princes and presidents of the Arab world, who knew better than their Western counterparts what was happening in Iraq, were silent about Saddam’s deportations and tortures and executions and genocidal killings. Most of them used variations of the same techniques on their own populations. In Syria, where the “German chair” torture was used to break the backs of opposition militants, the bloodbath of the Hama uprising lay less than two years away.49

  In Iran, the authorities turned brutally against members of the Bahai faith whose 2 million members regard Moses, Buddha, Christ and Mohamed as “divine educators” and whose centre of worship—the tomb of a nineteenth-century Persian nobleman—lies outside Acre in present-day Israel. By 1983, Amnesty estimated that at least 170 Bahais had been executed for heresy among the 5,000 Iranians put to death since the revolution. Among them were ten young women, two of them teenagers, all hanged in Shiraz in June of 1983. At least two, Zarrin Muqimi and Shirin Dalvand, both in their twenties, were allowed to pray towards Acre before the hangmen tied their hands and led them to the gallows. All were accused of being “Zionist agents.” Evin prison began to fill with women, some members of the Iraqi-supported Mujahedin-e-Khalq—People’s Mujahedin of Iran—others merely arrested while watching political protests. They were ferociously beaten on the feet to make them confess to being counter-revolutionaries. On one night, 150 women were shot. At least 40 of them were told to prepare themselves for execution by firing squad by writing their names on their right hands and left legs with felt-tip markers; the guards wanted to identify them afterwards and this was often difficult when “finishing shots” to the head would make their faces unrecognisable. But Bahais were not the only victims.