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Tag: Saddam

Saddam’s Man

I am introduced to the new restaurant manager of the hotel. The man has a polite look about him and speaks good English. But he looks nervous. Within a minute of speaking to me he confides that he worked inside Saddam’s main palace in Baghdad for 28 years. He was responsible for organising all Saddam’s parties and formal engagements, as well as his daily meals.

What was Saddam like? I ask. The man shakes his head. “Did you like him?” “No… but what could I do, you cannot leave such a job. Anyway Saddam liked me. If he ever had a problem he would call on me personally and I would sit with him.” “Did he ever harm you?” “No not me but I saw him harm others.” “Who?” The man thinks for a moment. “During the war with Iran, I saw him shoot 4 Iranians with his own pistol in the grounds of the palace.”

A waiter passes. The new manager pauses, waits for the waiter to pass, then continues whispering to me. Our conversation has an eerie feel of the ‘Saddam days’ about it, days when it was impossible to speak freely. “When did you last see Saddam?” “He was sat with us in the palace when news came through that the Americans were 45 minutes from Baghdad. I remember, he said to his staff, ‘Stay inside here .. you will be safe .. I need to go and look after my people.’ Saddam left the palace and made his last public appearance on the streets of Baghdad surrounded by cheering crowds. He never returned to the palace.”

The new manager looks nervous as he tells me of his stories. On the one hand it isn’t something he is proud of, but on the other hand he is trying to show me, the British man from the BBC, that he was once ‘somebody’. There were thousands of Iraqi’s that used to work for Saddam, thousands of people that used to be ‘somebody’ who today are unemployed.

I imagine the status this man had in the ‘Saddam days’, when he was ‘somebody’, when he was effectively the President’s personal assistant, in charge of all the palace staff. He was well paid, had a big house, always carried 3 pistols, but now he has nothing to protect him. The man wipes sweat from his brow… “You know my family have received death threats.. I’m a target because of my work with Saddam. I really have to leave Iraq but it is hard. I have 5 children, the youngest is only 3.” “I’m too scared to go home, at the moment I am sleeping here, on the restaurant floor at night.”

This man is a shadow of his former self. Samir offers him a reassuring nod. For Samir knows what it is like to fall from grace, once Iraq’s most famous pianist, he now plays this empty hotel bar just to eek a living out of this newly liberated land.

When we were Kings

Iraq’s top doctors all meet on Fridays at our hotel pool, they drink big pints of beer, eat crisps and swim. They have a British look about them. A 1950’s English style. It is a look I always liked about Iraq.

Are you British? one of them asks me in the pool. “Yes..” I answer. The big burly doctor smiles. “I studied in south London, in 1986.. I lived in East Dulwich..” “So did I” I reply. “Why didn’t you stay there?” I asked, “I wanted to, but we are a big family here in Iraq, my father was a merchant, we inherited many properties, factories, businesses all over Iraq. I came back to look after them with my brothers.”

“What was business like under Saddam?” the doctor shakes his head. “We stopped all business because of Saddam, he didn’t care about business, he believed that this country was rich only in oil. Anyway it was dangerous to get into BIG business in Saddam’s time. Anything that threatened him would be cut.” So where you for the war?” I ask him. “No, but I’m pleased Saddam is gone.” Another doctor joins us… “It was the only way of getting rid of Saddam, the war was necessary.”

“What we Iraqis need to realise is that Iraq is a rich country, but that it is impossible for us to have this on our own. There is always someone who wants to share it. During theBritish rule we did well, so lets hope that the Americans get what they want, and maybe we can all do well again.” The other doctor looks at me, “Iraq was the envy of Middle East. We were living like kings while Jordan was still a piece of desert, Bahrain, Dubai.. they never even existed. Now they look at us as second-class citizens. That is Saddam’s fault. You know the people of Europe used to say that the Arab world should take it as a compliment that Iraqi’s consider themselves as Arabs.”

“But you know the best period in Iraq in the last 400 years was between 1920 and 1985 when the British ruled us. Our economy grew, we had 3 Iraqi dinars to each dollar. The other doctor interrupts, “When Bremmer first arrived in Iraq we met with him. I told him, Iraqi people are not poor, we have food and enough to eat and live, but what you have to realise is that we are 5000 times poorer than we were.

The crippling inflation of the 1990’s with the UN imposed sanctions saw Iraq’s inflation rise 5000 fold. It will be along journey to restore such wealth, and for most who left their money in Iraq it is too late. Samir sits listening to the doctors. He shakes his head, “You know at the end of the 1980’s I had 200,000 dinars in the bank, about half a million dollars. It went to the wind, inflation, the sanctions. Now I don’t have the money to bury myself.”

The Piano Lesson

Samir is giving two children a piano lesson in their home. I sit talking with the parents. We get off to a slow start, they seem afraid to speak their mind. There is a sadness in the face of the children’s mother. She looks tired and I sense angry. I am curious to know how Iraqis feel about their life now, over a year after the fall of Saddam. They both look over to their children, “We are tired, tired of it all, you know each day we take our children to school, all day we wait outside in the heat for them to leave..” I know why. The kidnapping of children has been an underground industry in ‘new lawless Iraq’. Ruthless gangs even have offices on the main shopping street where you go to pay the ransom. The couple are dignified like all educated Iraqi’s, and although they have little money at the moment they want their kids to have their piano lessons. Culture has always been important to Iraqi’s. This house has two pianos and beautiful artwork all around. Samir teaches the kids as I talk and drink coffee with their parents.

“The sanctions have destroyed the Iraqi people, ‘they’ needed to do this to us so we could appreciate ‘their’ invasion, ‘their’ gift of freedom.” This couple were so happy a year ago, they were jumping with joy when Saddam fell. They never expected that 14 months later life would be worse than under the crippling days of the sanctions. Then, for 13 years they had no money and food to eat, now they do but without any security. “This is not freedom” the proud mother speaks. Like most parents they take their children to school each day and wait outside the gates all day. They both look at me, “Tell us what do you think? will thing gets better?”

I feel sad. I want to be optimistic but I can’t. I can’t lie to these people who’ve shown me such honesty. “We cannot speak like this to anyone.. we are afraid to express our opinions now. if we support the former regime we are a target and if we support the Americans we are also a target.” Some kind of freedom in new Iraq.

This couple worked together in UN headquarters narrowly missing death by 10 minutes when a suicide bomber blew the place apart nearly a year ago. They haven’t worked since. They have many job offers, as good English speakers they could earn big money with the Americans but they are too afraid. The daily targeted killings are the consequences of earning big bucks. “We have struggled for years now.. we are tired .. we need a break…” they want to visit family in Spain and are thinking of leaving Iraq. They know little of the struggles they will face in Europe. I look around their beautiful house, the great art, books, and pianos. How will these educated, cultured people fare in the west? I fear to think.

“Iraq is not like Afghanistan.. here we are educated, cultured.. we had everything in the 70’s and 80’s, the sanctions starved us and killed more Iraqi’s then all the wars put together. But it did something else – it starved us of books, periodicals.. We were isolated culturally and emotionally from the outside world for 13 years. a first world nation destroyed into the third world and kept there by these crippling sanctions. Saddam never felt the sanctions, he had everything.” Like all Iraqis they are pleased he has gone but cannot trust the future. It is held in foreign hands, hands that have betrayed them before and are capable of doing the same again.

Freedom

I was filming the road at night, surprised that it was so busy when we missed our turn off to Samir’s home, something you don’t do on Iraq’s most dangerous road… the road to the airport. It’s a one-way road so we crept nervously along until we arrived at 4 narrow aisles heading to the airport checkpoint. We took the second aisle and drove down and found ourselves facing the bright headlights of a U.S tank. I was waving my BBC card frantically.. ‘BBC… don’t kill… don’t kill…’ I know how these tanks had squashed numerous civilian cars in the past year, but luckily these kind soldiers let us pass. We made a U-turn and were on the road back. Samir said a prayer. We held our breath, and hoped for the best, and drove the same dangerous road back. Difficult to know danger on an empty road at night. Samir was scared, I knew that because he wasn’t speaking. He spoke only to shut me up. “The danger is out there, it is around us always Sean. You just don’t realise it.” I couldn’t see anything. On each side of the road were the remains of houses and palm trees that had been hacked down by the American’s after the resistance had hidden and fired from there.

We get home safely to Samir’s and hit the whiskey. He was panicking. “Do you realise what could have happened there? We could have been killed by both sides.” Samir worries a lot in this dangerous troubled land. We relax and he opens up to me about his past. He tells me horror stories of his time on the front line in the war with Iran. He still has nightmares, waking up screaming in the night. He cannot forget the face of the young Iranian man he killed. The young mans eyes are still vivid in Samir’s mind, as he sliced open his throat. “Imagine a pianist doing such things. I want to make the world more beautiful with my music not kill people.” On the news we hear that a Bulgarian man has been beheaded by his captures. Another beheading is planned tomorrow.

Saga, Samir’s daughter enters the room looking distraught. Her lovely aunty, Samir’s ex-wife’s sister, has breast cancer. It starts Samir ruminating over his own possible cancer, but he is too afraid to have it checked out. He lights a fag from his 3rd packet of the day. We smoke, eat, and drink whiskey. Saha is flicking through the satellite channels, surfing the 200 readily available stations. I try to imagine the Saddam times when there was only two state channels. “It must be so much better now?” I ask. Saha shakes her head, “No, there are 200 channels but there is nothing to watch, only some music and a food channel.” Samir sits up, “This morning I turned the television on, it was the erotica channel, I couldn’t believe it, there were two men having sex! What is this?” “Freedom?” I suggest. Saha sits up, “No .. this is not freedom, this is dangerous, it is going to devalue our society… Saddam protected it.”

“But surely the Saddam channels were just propaganda?” Saha agrees. “Yes of course they were, they were there to protect him, but they also protected our culture, and the values of our society. Who will protect that now?” Saha flicks through the channels shaking her head. “I will never allow my children to watch this. That is why my sister Rita, will not send her children to school in America. She says it is like a jungle there. Is that freedom?”

“But surely it is better than before?” Saha shakes her head. “Not for me it isn’t. Before I had a job. Now I don’t. Before I had security, could go visit my friends, wander the streets whenever I liked, now I can’t.” Saha sits down opposite me. “Saddam was a dictator but we knew the rules. If you obeyed the rules you could do almost anything you liked. I never needed to have a gun in those days either. In a way that was freedom to me.”

Suddenly the electricity goes out, we continue the conversation in the dark. “Look, they’ve been here for more then a year now and we still don’t have electricity for more then 6 hours a day.” The bedroom is hot and sticky without any power for the air conditioning, the temperature was 50c+ in the shade. Over breakfast we hear a big bomb blast, later we find out it was a suicide-bomber, aiming for the Americans, but killing more innocent Iraqi’s. Saha looks at me. “So this is freedom is it?” “No it isn’t freedom. Freedom takes time.” I reply. Saha looks at me smiling, “Freedom takes time.. Look how long the Americans
been waiting..”

IRAQI’S NEED ANOTHER SADDAM

“Hide that camera will you..” Samir screams. “I told you my area is full of insurgents, they will kill us both. These bastards are destroying everything now. They should kill them all.” I pull the camera down, we continue driving to Samir’s, listening to Mozart on the stereo, the baking heat making us both drip with sweat. Samir’s air conditioner in the car is broken, he doesn’t have enough money to buy a new radiator, he lost all his piano students after the war a year ago. It is not safe to travel anymore, and the roads here are gridlocked since the American’s closed so many main streets.

“You know I wish you could have seen me a few years ago. I was never like this. I had $200,000 in the bank before the 1991 war, then the sanctions came and the money was devalued, and so was all our lives. We were a first world nation reduced to a third world country. Can you imagine that? all the luxuries you like having in Britain suddenly being taken away from you overnight’.

We pass an American patrol. “But I blame Saddam for everything, he gave the American’s the excuse to be here now. He stole 30 years from every Iraqi’s life’. There is a road block, now guarded by Americans and Iraqi soldiers. this is new Iraq.

So why are the insurgents still fighting then? I ask him. Samir believes they are Saddam loyalists and foreign fighters. But many tell me they are ordinary Iraqi’s fighting to liberate their land from the American occupation. We reach Samir’s home, I quickly disappear inside the house, keeping a low profile. The house is hot, the electricity is not working and the generator is not strong enough to power the air coolers. Then the electricity comes on and the air coolers work.

We watch an interview with an Iraqi minister from the new interim government, defiant words on tackling the insurgents. “We will deal with them in our own way, in a way only the Iraqi people know” he smiles, and so does Samir. His words send a shiver down my spine. I see Ariel Sharon appear momentarily in his face. Samir gets agitated, “Iraqi’s need another Saddam, they need a dictator here. There are too many little Saddam’s out there to control.”

Then the electricity goes out again. Samir is angry. “They’ve had a year to get this right… Saddam sorted this out in 3 months after the war in 1991 and look at the place…” he goes off into another rant. I looked out of his window at the war torn neighbourhood, riddled with bullet holes, a US tank lies on a roadside destroyed.

Samir puts his arm around me. “Saddam knew how to run this country. He knew how to deal with his people.”