"Can you back this up? It sounds like bluster to me."
Part II Living in the lap of luxury........ plus more on poverty & oppression
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UPI - Feature: Iraq the rich, Iraqis the poor
As we turned into the palace grounds it was a scene of pandemonium.......
What was even more amazing was the sheer scale of the place. Easily covering 2 square kilometers (.77 square miles) and consisting of at least a dozen buildings, this place was testament to gross abuse of office and horrible taste in home furnishings. While the woodwork was first class, the furniture and fixtures were, well, kitsch. It was as if Saddam had hired John Gotti to be his interior decorator. No taste, truly the barbarian chieftain, but lacking the glory or wisdom of people like Olaf the Red. A brutish clown, nothing more than a common hood.
What really turns your stomach, however, is that just over the 20-foot foot high walls, people live in almost medieval squalor. A person cannot drive 10 minutes down the road here and not see entire families pulling brackish water from stagnant canals, carrying it by hand to mud brick homes with dirt floors and little else. Livestock roam freely around the front yards and children play barefoot. While the landscape is stunningly beautiful, with green fields of grain and majestic stands of palms, I'm glad I wasn't born here.
I don't think that the sanctions had much to do with this either. There was plenty of money flowing through this place. One fellow we met spoke English and was eager to speak with us. At 41, Abas Ali looked tired.
"Because Saddam was a bad man, many people in Iraq are poor," he said, moving aside to let two young men carrying a heavy oak panel door pass. "We need something. Not money, but freedom and good government. We need a government not at war with everyone, but a peace government with good relations.....
upi.com
While the rest of the nation starved, people in Uja - Saddam's birthplace - prospered, and many are quick to show their gratitude even with the old regime now in tatters.
``He gave us a good life,'' said Yassin Badr, a businessman. ``We will celebrate his birthday on April 28, just as we do every year.''.....
Under Saddam's rule, Sunni tribesmen who once made a precarious living herding sheep became members of the ruling elite, lording over the majority Shiites.
Blood ties are paramount in Iraqi society, and Saddam - known nearly as much for his extravagant generosity as for his boundless cruelty - lavished family and friends in Uja with the nation's oil wealth.....
On Tuesday, Maj. Byron Harper, a Marine based at Camp Pendleton, Calif., led his team on searches through the stately homes of Uja, which have now been abandoned.....
On the main bridge leading west across the Tigris to Tikrit and Uja, many people expressed anger at being subjected to the Americans' stringent searches as they entered town.
``We were comfortable under Saddam Hussein,'' said Omar Rahim, a teacher. ``We had much better living conditions under him.''.......
guardian.co.uk
Baathist records reveal repression
The bookkeepers of the police state were meticulous.
Payoffs to tribal leaders, quotas for cheering crowds on Saddam Hussain's birthday, long lists of "bonuses" paid out to party members on every state occasion, reports on suspicious families and pro-Iranian Shiite "traitors" in their midst - at the Mother of All Battles Branch of Iraq's ruling Baath Party, they wrote it all down.....
Here at the chief party headquarters for Iraq's second city, near the party villas and the date palm groves and the decayed elegance of the Shatt Al Arab waterway, officials kept a hand in nearly every aspect of daily life.....
The documents, hundreds of pages of which were reviewed and translated in recent days, record the minutiae of party life in a dictatorship, details not previously available before the fall of Saddam's government....
To those who benefited, and there were many among Basra's Sunni minority, Baathism meant power and security and hero worship of Saddam.........
Overall, the documents and interviews offer of a portrait of a regime that ruled with two main tools: fear and money. The fear was of a party that watched everyone, that ordered the arrests of those who opposed it, that used torture and more mundane forms of coercion like withholding jobs and higher education from those who refused to join the party. The money was for those who cooperated with the system, whether tribal leaders whose authority grew in recent years or educated technocrats who got perks and power.....
Seventeen times a year "bonuses" were handed out to loyalists on a sliding scale: 5 million dinars (roughly $1,700 before the war) for important tribal leaders, 100,000 dinars for the head of a party section, he said. Party demonstrations were more important than work, "even for farmers in the field and workers in the factories".....
Comrade Sabah Noori Sadoon, a party leader in Basra, was blunt about the terrible conditions faced by the Al Quds recruits. His July 2001 inspection report of a camp found breakfast consisting of tea, "sometimes with rotten cheese with a bad smell", and no meat for eight days. The soldiers, he said, were so hungry that "many of them fell ill while they were training because they couldn't bear it". They were abused by the officers, he said, and denied medical treatment in a camp "full of snakes and scorpions".....
"There's no one who wasn't tortured in some way in Iraq," he said. "Any person the Baath Party wanted to take to prison, they would take to prison in Iraq."
In the end, an old man spoke for the rest in addressing the Baathists who used to work out of his makeshift new home.
Sattar Tahir quoted an Arabic proverb. Roughly translated, it means: "May they die and never come back."
gulf-news.com
War Breaks Open Doors of Lavish Palaces
They are havens of decadence in a land run coarse by years of sanctions and by a power-hungry government that cared little about its people. But now at least four of the huge, walled, luxurious palace complexes of Saddam Hussein have been broken wide open to the world’s gaze by the war, and what they reveal stands in stark contrast to the reality outside.....
There are believed to be more than 30 palaces in the capital, some of which were used as residences for Saddam and his family.....
Outside, ornamental lakes inhabited by ducks and containing empty rowboats had a mirage-like quality that was only enhanced by the lush rose gardens and the statues that sit around them. Another Sky Television reporter, Colin Brazier, followed US troops into a palace complex in Baghdad. “It’s an extraordinarily decadent structure,” he said. “Some of the ornamentation we have seen is straight out of ‘Doctor Strangelove’."........
What the properties do highlight, though, is the glaring contrast between the lavish lifestyle enjoyed by Saddam and his entourage, and the hand-to-mouth existence of most of Iraq’s 26 million people.
Capt. Oliver Lee, operations officer with British Royal Marines in Basra, said: “It’s fairly striking — the rich-poor divide — particularly having just driven through the outskirts of Basra and seeing the extraordinary poverty there.” That gap prompted many Iraqis to gather around the gates of the palaces, trying to get in to continue the limited looting that briefly followed their capture by US and British troops.
arabnews.com
While not Saddam Hussein's creation, the Baath Party became his creature, a place of privilege and power, a vehicle for opportunity and advancement, an organization of violence and corruption. It was the pervasive presence of Saddam Hussein in the life of Iraq's 23 million people....
At the private Al Sadoon Hospital he manages for his father, Audi catered to the more favored and wealthy Baath members....
In the lives of privileged young men, the party was an indispensable underpinning of society....
Across town, where most people do not have the money to visit private hospitals or even to buy enough clean water, there is a less sanguine view of the Baathists.....
But everyone in the party is just looking after themselves. So if you have to kill 1,000 people to get what you want, that's the way it is.”......
A group of Iraqis guided visitors to some of the "black holes” for prisoners, cement block rooms that admitted not a ray of light.
"They used to torture anyone,” said Mohammed Sabah, an unemployed laborer. "Whoever doesn't support Saddam, they took him.”.......
newsday.com
<Font size=5>For X the Unknown <g><Font size=3>
Totalitarianism
The structure of the Iraqi totalitarian order resembled the Nazi model with its single party system, command economy, nationalist-socialist ideology and control of the media and army......
an oil rentier economy provides vast resources that render the state independent from social power relations.
Equipped with such powerful financial and economic tools, the state built massive coercive organs - army and security services.
It also expanded the Baath Party to a membership of 1.8 million and provided almost free education and medical care.....
Iraqis at large were ultimately offered two options: elimination or allegiance.
The principle was: we give you food and employment, you give up your freedoms.....
The state also restructured the upper classes, turning tribal leaders and the business elite into dependent clients - becoming in the process the largest single employer, owner and producer.....
Tribal networks from the president's clan were integrated into the top of the political order.
A clan class was created, permeating the army, bureaucracy and business classes. Religion and the ideology of kinship were also elevated to an official discourse.
This strange amalgam of modern totalitarianism and primordial institutions may well explain the durability of the system despite the disruptive effects of two wars and more than a decade of sanctions.....
news.bbc.co.uk
Saddam's palace of opulence while Iraqis starved
It was the main building in the Republican palace in Baghdad, one of the most opulent buildings in the world, rebuilt by Saddam to defy the world after the 1991 Gulf war, while much of Iraq lived in squalor......
As with his other palaces in Iraq, everything is massive and elaborate. Interiors have gold doors and engraved wooden ceilings. Some bathrooms have gold fittings and there are hundreds of mostly empty rooms and marble-lined halls.
The Republican palace contrasts starkly with the poverty that has gripped Iraq since its defeat 12 years ago. The ballroom is the size of an opera house, with a wooden ceiling and balconies. Underneath is a private cinema with blue leather chairs.
newindpress.com |
