The Great War for Civilisation (34 page)

Baathist officials made this point repeatedly. All the Iraqis of Iranian origin had already been expelled from Najaf—“if only you had telephoned me yesterday,” Khadi said irritatingly, “I could have given you the figures”—and the message that Shia Islam is a product of the Arab rather than the Persian world constantly reiterated. Had not Saddam personally donated a set of gold-encrusted gates to the Najaf shrine, each costing no less than $100,000? The governor stalked into the bazaar across the road. Because it was Ramadan, the shutters were down, so hot they burned your skin if you touched them. But a perfume stall was still open and Khadi placed his mighty frame on a vulnerable bench while the talkative salesman poured his over-scented warm oils into glass vials.

“Ask him if he enjoys living in Najaf,” the governor barked, but when I asked the salesman instead if he remembered Khomeini, his eyes flickered across the faces of the nearest officials. “We all remember Khomeini,” he said carefully. “He was here for fourteen years. Every day, he went to pray at the mosque and all the people of Najaf crowded round him, thousands of them, to protect him—we thought the Shah would send his Savak police to kill him so we stood round Khomeini at the shrine.” There was a moment's silence as the perfume seller's critical faculties—or lack of them—were assessed by his little audience.

“But here's a little boy who would like to tell you his view of Khomeini,” said the governor, and an urchin in a grubby yellow
abaya
shrieked, “Khomeini is a traitor,” with a vacant smile. All the officials acclaimed this statement as the true feelings of the people of Najaf. Khadi had never met Khomeini but confidently asserted that the imam had been a CIA agent, that even Grand Ayatollah Abolqassem al-Khoi of Najaf had sent a telegram to Qom, blaming Khomeini for killing the Muslim Kurds of northern Iran. Al-Khoi may have done that—his fellow teacher, Ayatollah Sahib al-Hakim, had been executed by the regime—but this did not spare his family. In 1994, just two years after al-Khoi's death, his courageous thirty-six-year-old son Taghi was killed when his car mysteriously crashed into an unlit articulated lorry on the highway outside Kerbala. He had been a constant critic of Saddam's persecution of the Shia and told friends in London the previous year that he was likely to die at Saddam's hands. At the demand of the authorities, his burial—and that of his six-year-old nephew who died with him— went without the usual rituals.

Four years later, Ayatollah Sheikh Murtada al-Burujirdi, one of Najaf's most prominent scholars and jurists, a student of the elder al-Khoi and another Iranian-born cleric, was assassinated as he walked home after evening prayers at the shrine of Ali. He had been beaten up the previous year and had escaped another murder attempt when a hand grenade was thrown at him. Al-Burujirdi had refused government demands that he no longer lead prayers at the shrine. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the principal
marja al-taqlid
—in literal Arabic, “source of emulation”—was still under house arrest and the Baathists were promoting the more pliable Sayed Mohamed Sadiq al-Sadr, cousin of the executed Sadiq. But Sadiq al-Sadr himself was assassinated by gunmen in Najaf nine months later after he had issued a fatwa calling on Shiites to attend their Friday prayers despite the government's objection to large crowds. Al-Khoi's son Youssef—Taghi's brother—blamed the Baathists, and rioting broke out in the Shia slums of Saddam City in Baghdad. But the history of Shia resistance did not end with the fall of Saddam. It was Sadiq al-Sadr's son Muqtada who would lead an insurrection against America's occupation of Iraq five years later, in 2004, bringing U.S. tanks onto the same Najaf streets through which Saddam's armour had once moved and provoking gun battles across Sadr City, the former Saddam City whose population had renamed it after the executed Bakr Sadr.

These were just the most prominent of the tens of thousands of Iraqis who would be murdered during Saddam's nearly twenty-four-year rule. Kurds and communists and Shia Muslims would feel the harshest of the regime's punishments. My Iraqi files from the late seventies and early eighties are filled with ill-printed circulars from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, from Iraqi trade unions and tiny opposition groups, naming thousands of executed men and women. As I thumb through them now, I come across the PUK's magazine
The Spark
, an issue dated October 1977, complaining that its partisans have been jointly surrounded by forces of Baathist Iraq and the Shah's Iran in the northern Iraqi village of Halabja, detailing the vast numbers of villages from which the Kurdish inhabitants had been deported, and the execution, assassination or torturing to death of 400 PUK members. Another PUK leaflet, dated 10 December 1977, reports the deportation of 300,000 Kurds to the south of Iraq. Yet another dreadful list, from a communist group, contains the names of 37 Iraqi workers executed or “disappeared” in 1982 and 1983. Omer Kadir, worker in the tobacco factory at Suleimaniya—“tortured to death”; Ali Hussein, oil worker from Kirkuk—“executed”; Majeed Sherhan, peasant from Hilla—“executed”; Saddam Muher, civil servant from Basra—“executed” . . . The dead include blacksmiths, builders, printers, post office workers, electricians and factory hands. No one was safe.

This permanent state of mass killing across Iraq was no secret in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet the West was either silent or half-hearted in its condemnation. Saddam's visit to France in 1975 and his public welcome by the then mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, who bestowed upon the Iraqi “my esteem, my consideration, and my affection,” was merely the most flagrant example of our shameful relationship with the Iraqi regime. Within three years, agents at the Iraqi embassy in Paris would be fighting a gun battle with French police after their diplomats had been taken hostage by two Arab gunmen. A French police inspector was killed and another policeman wounded; the three Iraqi agents claimed diplomatic immunity and were allowed to fly to Baghdad on 2 August 1978, just two days after the killing. U.S. export credits and chemicals and helicopters, French jets and German gas and British military hardware poured into Iraq for fifteen years. Iraq was already using gas to kill thousands of Iranian soldiers when Donald Rumsfeld made his notorious 1983 visit to Baghdad to shake Saddam's hand and ask him for permission to reopen the U.S. embassy. The first—and last—time I called on the consulate there, not long after Rumsfeld's visit, one of its young CIA spooks brightly assured me that he wasn't worried about car bombs because “we have complete faith in Iraqi security.”

Iraq's vast literacy, public health, construction and communications projects were held up as proof that the Baathist government was essentially benign, or at least worthy of some respect. Again, my files contain many Western press articles that concentrate almost exclusively on Iraq's social projects. In 1980, for example, a long report in the Middle East business magazine
8 Days
, written with surely unconscious irony, begins: “Iraqis who fail to attend reading classes can be fined or sent to prison where literary classes are also compulsory. Such measures may seem harsh, but as Iraq enters its second year of a government drive to eliminate illiteracy, its results have won United Nations acclaim.”

In 1977, the now defunct Dublin
Sunday Press
ran an interview with former Irish minister for finance Charles Haughey in which the country's human rights abuses simply went unrecorded. It was not difficult to see why. “An enormous potential market for Irish produce,” it began, “including lamb, beef, dairy products and construction industry requirements was open in Iraq . . . Charles Haughey told me on his return from a week-long visit to that country.” Haughey and his wife Maureen, it transpired, had been “the guest of the 9-year-old socialist Iraqi government” so that he could inform himself “of the political and economic situation there and to help to promote better contact and better relations between Ireland and Iraq at political level.” Haughey, who had met “the Director General of the Ministry of Planning, Saddam Hussein,” added that “the principal political aspect of modern Iraq is the total determination of its leaders to use the wealth derived from their oil resources for the benefit of their people . . .” The Baath party, the article helpfully informed its readers, “came to power in July 1968 without the shedding of one drop of blood.”

The British understood the Iraqi regime all too well. In 1980, gunmen from the “Political Organisation of the Arab People in Arabistan”—the small south-western corner of Iran with a predominantly Arab population, which is called Khuzestan— had taken over the Iranian embassy in London; the siege ended when Special Air Service men entered the building, capturing one of the men but killing another four and executing a fifth in cold blood before fire consumed the building.
⁴⁵
Less than three months later, however, on 19 July 1980, I was astonished to be telephoned at my Baghdad hotel and invited by the Iraqi authorities to attend a press conference held by the very same Arab group which had invaded the embassy. Nasser Ahmed Nasser, a thirty-one-year-old economics graduate from Tehran University, accused the British of “conspiring” with Iran against the country's Arabs and demanded the return to Iraq of the bodies of the five dead gunmen.

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.”