The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  There weren’t many good moments in this war—or any other—but here, just for a moment, an angel’s wings brushed past us, the spirit of Raoul Wallenberg in the Budapest railyards, handing out Swedish passports to the doomed Jews of Hungary. No, this wasn’t the Second World War. Let us have done with such obscene parallels. But these Iraqis would die if they were forced to turn back and the sergeant had disobeyed an order so that they might live. Just as an equally young officer on the Somme seventy-three years earlier had refused to execute another soldier. The American sergeant had refused to obey. Would that Bush and Cheney and Schwarzkopf and John Major had shown his courage now.

  In Basra, the Independent’s correspondent, Karl Waldron—bravely clinging to his assignment until the last moment of escape on 6 March—now described the results of their betrayal with frightening simplicity:

  It was almost over by 2.00 am. The T-72s of the Medina unit of the Republican Guard deployed from the centre of Basra, crashing their way through barricades in the narrow streets . . . Small nests of resistance, mainly Shia groups such as the “Brothers of Atiq”—the liberated—maintained their fire until they were overrun or forced to withdraw by the advancing heavily armed infantry . . . on Nassr Street, the last remnants of a cadre, the day before proudly in uniform, red bandannas tied round sleeves and heads in the universal image of revolution, were now in mufti . . . There was ammunition aplenty here but it was the wrong calibre for their Soviet rifles; what was left that would work was now in the ammunition clips of the sentries watching for the Guard’s advance. The squeak of tank tracks . . . signalled that they were closing in and the group fell back, its numbers gradually dwindling as men disappeared into the night with their treasonable loads. As we ran south, hopping the low fences round the apartment blocks, the noise of other tracks was audible, this time ahead of us . . .

  The refugees who now streamed down to Safwan told in horrifying detail of what happened behind those Iraqi tanks. They had seen rebels hanged from tank barrels, tanks driving over corpses; some said that Baath party officials participated in the mass lynching of civilians. Iraqi troops who had gone across to the insurgents were now being hanged, their bodies riddled with bullets.

  In Basra, Haidar al-Assadi, the seventeen-year-old who had listened to the Voice of America calling upon Iraqis to stage the uprising against Saddam, now fled the city for the Shatt al-Arab and the doubtful refuge of Iran.148 Many of the surviving rebels did the same, along with Waldron:

  It became clear that the only way out was back to the [river], a scramble over the rubble of recent allied air attack, where we hoped the tanks would not go, praying that the Iranian on the boat on the other side had not lost his nerve. When we found it at last, there were two others returning to Khorramshahr. One man in his late twenties, the other a little older, sat shivering in the prow of the small boat, taking cover from the wind and rain under a fish box tarpaulin. As they recovered, the muttered trickle of condemnation increased to a torrent: Saddam, Bush, Fahd, Mitterrand, formed an unholy alliance in the flow of curses. “Why didn’t they come? Why did they let them come?” asked the younger man. He said the resistance groups had

  heard of the liberation of Kuwait, had expected allied support or at least that allied troops would prevent Iraq deploying its heavy armour into Basra province, much of which must have been seen by American satellites and must have passed within the range of allied guns. The spectre of the allies having won their war and now fearing the emergence of a Shia block in the northern Gulf, abandoning the people of Basra, will not go away. Even worse, the allies tolerating or encouraging the survival of the Saddam regime.

  The Iraqi Shias were correct. “Better the Saddam Hussein we know than an unwieldy weak coalition, or a new strong man who is an unknown quantity,” an American diplomat would later be quoted as saying. Those who survived Saddam’s fury drifted semi-conscious to the American checkpoints in Iraq with further tales of mass executions—4,000 a day, they said, especially in the smaller Shia cities north-west of Basra or south of Baghdad where the population had no chance of fleeing to Iran. In many cases, the evidence of their testimony—which was all true—would not emerge for another twelve years. Only in 2003, for example, would I discover what happened in the town of Musayeb when at last—after the Anglo-American occupation—the mass graves began to be opened.

  EACH NEW MASS GRAVE produces some extra helping of wickedness, some tiny incremental addition to cruelty. In the oven-grey desert west of the Tigris, it was a gleaming steel rod amid a heap of brown bones and a rag of cheap cloth that symbolised Saddam’s rule: a hip replacement. A gravedigger gently tapped at the leg of the decomposing corpse beside it; there was a ghostly, hollow sound. The murdered man had a wooden leg. On the day of their death, they were hospital patients.

  Body number 73—they are numbered by the diggers according to the chronology of their discovery—even had a hospital tag still tied to a bone. If they had their identity papers—and Saddam’s executioners seemed to care little about such matters—their names were written in crayon onto the white shrouds in which their remains were wrapped. Thus these men’s lives were revealed in a stranger’s hand. “Abdul Jalil Kamel Badr” was written on a heap of bones, hair and decaying flesh. “Student at Kufa University Educational College—Arts Department.” Somehow the “arts department” bit made one draw in one’s breath.

  They lay in their white shrouds—more than eighty of them—under the midday sun like dead sheep, just as others were lined in rows, 470 at the latest count, in the school basketball stadium back in Musayeb, the scruffy town on the Tigris where all of them—Shia Muslims to a man—obeyed the order of Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law, twelve years ago to assemble for a “meeting.” Every man over seventeen had to be there and the few women who watched them gather in their thousands said that at least forty lorries were waiting for them on the first night, 5 March 1991. The Muslim Shia rebellion in this area had just been crushed. The executioners were already waiting at the desert killing fields at Joufer Safa. The name means “beach of rocks.”

  Many of the just-discovered dead still had their hands—or at least bits of their hand bones—tied behind their backs. Ahmed Kadum Rassoul had been bound in this way. So had Rada Mohamed Hamza from Hilla, and Ali Hassouni Alwan and Ibrahim Abdul Sadr. So had the unidentified male “wearing dark green military clothing and shoulder patches” who was obviously a deserter from the army who had taken up arms for the Shia uprising. “There are many other sites all round here,” a farmer, who was helping in the excavation, told me wearily. “Some of us heard the shots at the time and saw the bulldozer. It was very ‘ordered,’ very routine. We were told that if anyone spoke of it, they would immediately be shot.” He pointed to patches of disturbed land to the south—you could see the revetments left by the bulldozers once the deeds were done—and it was only then that the truth became obvious. There were thousands murdered here. Once a mass grave was closed, Saddam’s killers simply dug another one.

  You imagine a neat hole in the back of the skull. But as the Iraqi villagers in the grave pit brushed away at the grey desert soil, the heads that emerged were cracked, the bullet having broken open each skull. Nor did the earth always give up its dead so willingly. One gravedigger tugged for minutes at a great rock until it suddenly came away and a skull with dark hair and a shirt with bones spilling from it sprang towards him.

  A clutch of American soldiers, a U.S. Rangers officer, two British forensic scientists and a bossy man from USAID were watching the exhumations. The soil was littered with cheap plastic sandals and sometimes—it was oddly moving— tufts of hair, like a child’s on the floor of a barber’s shop. Many of the bodies were in dishdash white domestic robes, the clothes they must have been wearing when they were ordered from their homes. Another corpse had a wristwatch whose date had stopped at 9 March; it had resolutely ticked away on its dead owner’s wrist for another four days in the earth.

  But mass graves are p
olitical as well as criminal affairs. Hussein Kamel Hassan, Saddam’s son-in-law—the man who ordered this slaughter—is the same Hussein Kamel who fled to Jordan and gave away Iraq’s chemical weapons secrets. Before he returned to Iraq—to be murdered, of course, by Saddam— Kamel Hassan talked to the CIA about Iraq’s chemical weapons. Did he talk about this too, about the desert killing fields, about the fate of the men of Musayeb? In the children’s stadium, the shrouds lay in military lines. Just over 170 had been positively identified. “These people are the victims of Saddam,” Riad Abdul Emir—one of the mass grave investigators—said as he walked slowly along the rows of dead. “But they are also victims of the Arab regimes who cooperated with Saddam, and of the West which supported him—because our 1991 intifada could have succeeded were it not for the interference of the American administration. They let Saddam do this because it was in their interests at the time.”

  The presence of eight Egyptian bodies—apparently truck-drivers working in Iraq who may have tried to fight on the Shia side or merely been freed from prison in the initial days of the uprising—suggested that other foreigners might soon be found. Where, for example, were the more than 600 Kuwaiti prisoners who never returned from Iraq in 1991? Mohamed Ahmed was vainly searching through the corpses for his brother’s remains. “These dead people had rights,” he said. “But how can we ensure that they get their rights?”

  BUT THE DEAD HAD NO RIGHTS in Iraq. Nor the living. In Beirut, twenty-three Iraqi opposition groups were brought together in mid-March 1991 under the auspices of Syria, a great mass of arguing, pleading, angry men—some of them Shia preachers, many others defectors from Saddam’s regime—to demand help from the Americans so that they could set up a new and free nation amid the ruins of Iraq and the Baath party. It was pitiful. In a coffee shop opposite the Bristol Hotel, a Shia delegate looked at me with exhaustion. “What are the Americans up to?” he asked as dozens of his fellow Shias and Sunnis, Kurds and communists thronged the lobby. “The American army allowed the Republican Guards to pass down the road to Basra to attack our fighters there. Why did they do that? I thought the ceasefire agreement said there should be ‘no movement of forces.’ Do the Americans want Saddam to stay?”

  I drank so many coffees that day. Scarcely a soul did not ask about America’s intentions in Iraq, although the Beirut conference which began on 10 March—the area around the Bristol Hotel infested with Syrian troops and plain-clothes intelligence men with pistols in their belts—was supposed to agree on a common political goal for the post-Saddam era. There was even talk of a government-in-exile, although it was discreetly referred to in Baath-speak as a “joint command,” an instrument of power in Baghdad after Saddam’s demise which would ensure that a new nationalist and democratic Iraq would emerge from the ashes. But not a single American observer attended the conference.

  It seemed to have a supreme irrelevance. I had driven from Kuwait via Saudi Arabia for Bahrain, where I picked up MEA’s resumed service to the Gulf and flew home to Beirut. We travelled over Iran and at dawn over Turkey I looked east and saw the black oil clouds from Kuwait and Iraq hanging high over the frosts of Ararat, darkening even the sacred mountain of ancient Armenia and that country’s own long-hidden mass graves. When I landed at Beirut and drove home and stood on my balcony in the cool morning air, I looked out over the Mediterranean and there in the distance was that same smudge of black rime on the horizon. Some of the Iraqis at the Bristol would walk down to the sea and notice the same grim mark of their country’s fate.

  Amid desolation, they searched for hope. They listed the Iraqi cities they claimed Saddam had lost. They insisted the mere fact that 325 Iraqis from such different faiths and factions could meet together was in itself a victory. The banner strung across their conference hall announced that “our unity is a guarantee of our salvation from dictatorship.” No one, they told us, wanted to force an Islamic republic on Iraq—already they realised that this was the American and Kuwaiti and Saudi nightmare—but it was left to Ayatollah Taqi al-Mudaressi to express their fears. “Some Iraqis are beginning to think that the Americans prefer Saddam,” he said. “They are wondering if America prefers Saddam without teeth to an Iraq without Saddam.”

  All the Iraqis in Beirut talked in code. When they proclaimed their desire for popular elections and a democracy, they were trying to assuage American fears that an Iran-style Islamic republic would be set up in a post-Saddam Iraq. When they talked of unity, they were attempting to convince each other that Iraq would not be divided into a Shia state, a Sunni state and a newly-born Kurdistan. And when they condemned the presence of foreign forces on Iraqi soil—for which read American troops—they were denying that they were Western stooges. “We will not accept foreigners on the sacred banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates,” one of the delegates shouted from the platform. At which point, the Americans lost interest in this display of democracy.

  This wasn’t the only reason. For while the Islamic parties were largely Shia groups, the Sunnis who constituted about 40 per cent of the population were not represented by a single political organisation. Nor could Christians and communists have taken much inspiration from the start of the conference, at which delegates listened to a long reading from the Koran. Lebanese Shia leaders were closely linked to some of the Iraqi movements. Ayatollah Mohamed Bakr al-Hakim, the man believed to be behind the Basra insurrection—who would be assassinated in a massive bomb explosion in Najaf during the American occupation twelve years later—was the first cousin of Sayed Mohamed Hussein Fadlallah, regarded as the spiritual adviser to the Lebanese Hizballah movement and the secret inspiration of the Iraqi Dawa party. Hakim’s mother was from the Lebanese Bazi family.

  But there was one small feature of the make-up of this conference that went unmentioned. We all knew that among the Iraqi parties were the seventeen who made up the “Joint Action Committee for Iraqi Opposition” which had met in Damascus in December 1990 to seek a new and democratic Iraq. They included the Dawa, the Islamic Council—the most important of the pro-Iranian groups with close links to Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, the former Iranian minister—the Iraqi Communist Party, and at least four Kurdish parties and two groups, the “Islamic Movement” and the “Independent Nationalists,” supported by Saudi Arabia. But the Saudis also insisted that Salah Omar al-Ali’s “Nationalist Iraqi Constitution” and Saad Saleh Jaber’s “Free Iraq Congress” participate in the conference. And Salah Omar al-Ali was the very same former Baathist who had issued that devastating, fateful call for an uprising over the CIA’s radio station on 24 February.

  In days to come, these American-organised appeals for an insurgency against Saddam would be compared to the Soviet demands for a Polish uprising against the Germans in Warsaw in 1944, when Russian troops reached the eastern suburbs of the city and appeared ready to liberate the Polish capital once the insurrection began. In the event, the Poles obeyed the call to rise up against the Nazis—and the Soviets waited until the Germans had annihilated the rebels, efficiently destroying the Polish nationalist forces that would have opposed communist rule. The Iraqis working for the Americans and the Saudis had now done much the same. They appealed for an insurrection and watched Saddam annihilate the rebels, thus destroying any chance of an Islamic republic—or any other kind of state—in Iraq. Later—twelve years later—they would take Baghdad and appoint their own “interim government,” much as the Soviets did in postwar Poland.

  In Beirut, I interviewed Ayatollah al-Mudaressi, who agreed that Basra had probably fallen but claimed that Amara, Nasiriyah, Diwaniyah, Samara, Najaf and Kerbala were still holding out against Saddam’s forces. While the Americans might be tempted to support a toothless Saddam out of fear that an Islamic republic might take its place, he told me, the United States should realise that the Iraqi rebellion focused on the rebuilding of Iraq, not on revolution:

  This fear the West has is directly linked to Iran. The West does not have good relations with Iran—so it is worried about what
happens now in Iraq. But this is a misjudgement. The uprising did not take place during the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq. It has happened because of what Saddam has done. You cannot copy a revolution from one country to another. I think we must ask the people what kind of republic we want. Personally, I would like an Islamic republic—but not by force. If the people choose this road, I am with them. If they choose another road, I am with them. But Iraqis will not forget America’s lack of support when they overthrow Saddam.

  But within twenty-four hours, the Iraqi opposition was admitting what we all knew: that the Shia insurgency was collapsing. The most convincing evidence of this came from Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, brother of Ayatollah Mohamed Bakr al-Hakim, who acknowledged that Najaf and Kerbala were no longer “in the hands of revolutionaries.” Even the communists admitted that the uprising now faced “serious difficulties.” Only the Kurdish delegates were able to encourage the conference with claims that their own guerrillas were still capturing villages north of Kirkuk.149

  The most dignified figure in Beirut was that of old Mohamed Mahdi Jawahiri, Iraq’s finest living poet. Ninety years old, he sat on the dais in a crumpled jacket with a soft cap on his bald head, speaking in the language of verse. “I didn’t expect to participate in this conference,” he said:

  The children of Iraq are smiling at this moment, old men too. Our people under the regime of Saddam Hussein are suffering—all of us are suffering—execution, torture and deportation. But we are patient and united. My heart is with you. My hand is in yours. The intifada in Iraq needs your help . . . There is a limit to everything and for every crime there is a punishment . . .