SADDAM INVULNERABLE? WE'LL SEE ABOUT THAT
Christopher Hitchens
WHEN the British intelligence officer in charge of preparing the Nuremburg trials went to visit the Nazi leadership in prison, he was shocked. But not in the way he had thought he might be.
In the cells were a collection of mediocre thugs, misshapen fawners and cringing child-molesters. How on earth, Airey Neave thought, could the whole of Europe have trembled in fear at this sorry riff-raff?
I get the same impression when I see Slobodan Milosevic in the dock: he looks like the sort of faceless uniformed dolt who stamps your passport in a banana republic. "The banality of evil", to borrow Hannah Arendt's imperishable phrase about the pint-size, wispy bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann.
But there's nothing banal about Saddam Hussein. Even though he doesn't look quite the same without his uniform, and in off-moments resembles a man who talks too much on a park bench, he can remind you of what it would have been like to live under him.
His claim that he's still President of Iraq is authentic megalomania. His reference to the Kuwaitis as "dogs" brings back the image of blazing oilfields and raped women. His casual reaction to the citation of the gassing at Halabja reproduces the reptilian coldness that was involved at the time. His assertion that Bush is the real war criminal doesn't quite reach this standard (it sounds more like Michael Moore).
Now would be an excellent time for the BBC to screen the video of Saddam's seizure of power. It is one of the most chilling sequences ever filmed.
He sits smoking a cigar on a dais, while a roomful of terrified central committee members listens to a broken man working his way through an abject confession.
As the man begins to name names, guards appear and escort them white-faced from the room. Saddam continues to puff away until nearly half his audience has been dragged off.
The next sequence, which hasn't ever been televised, apparently shows what we know did happen: the survivors were then given pistols and compelled to shoot their former comrades. This perfect Godfather touch improves on anything done by the great dictators of the 1930s. It shows that Saddam had really studied the methods and techniques of tyranny, and added some refinements of his very own.
This is the man, after all, who took his sons to watch midnight torture sessions in order to toughen them up. The man whose police would deliver videos of such sessions to the families of the victims.
Everywhere I have been in Iraq, I have noticed that the bravest person betrays a slight change of expression when the name Saddam Hussein is mentioned. Just a flicker in the eye, perhaps, but pure fear. The sort of fear you can bottle. And a hint of humiliation, too. Years and years of compulsory applause and hysterical adulation: the systematic humiliation of an entire people.
I used to know this man's interpreter: a lovely and gentle Anglophile named Mazen Zarhawi who was part-Kurdish and all gay.
He was too good at his job for these disqualifications to matter but then came the invasion of Kuwait. A foreign statesman arrived in Baghdad to advise Saddam Hussein to accept the American offer and pull out of Kuwait while there was still time.
He was insufficiently respectful in his manner and Mazen must have known that it was death to be in the same room and to see the Leader insulted. He was denounced as a homosexual and tortured until he died. Details like this - the hundreds of thousands of micro atrocities that went to make up the macro picture of total horror - are absent from the rather arid form taken by the official indictment.
LEGAL phrasing about the execution of religious leaders, or the killing of the Barzani clan, masks the pits filled with dead children, the ravaged villages, the bodies on meathooks and the bloody ear nailed to a wall that a colleague of mine found in a Ba'athist police station.
Most of my Iraqi and Kurdish friends, including some who have suffered appallingly from his reign, are opposed to capital punishment on principle. There obviously isn't a prison sentence that could be long enough but then nor is there any way that the taking of one life can recompense the countless dead. The trial should be seen as an important contribution to history as well as to law: the establishing of an archive of memory that can at least ensure that the murdered and enslaved are not forgotten.
Ann Clwyd MP, the founder of the organisation Indict, has long been arguing that the British government should be a party to this trial as well. It was our citizens who were taken hostage in Kuwait, in gross violation of international law, and it was on the streets of London that the Abu Nidal terrorist gang, directly sponsored by Saddam Hussein, conducted one of its most grisly assassinations.
Saddam used to boast that he was invulnerable because if all those who wanted revenge on him were ever assembled, there would not be enough of him to go around.
We'll see about that.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair |
