Attitudes Altered In Iraq as Hussein Solidifies Standing
URL: washingtonpost.com
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, September 22, 2002; Page A01
KARBALA, Iraq -- Heroic images of Saddam Hussein are the most common feature of Iraq's desolate landscape. In some, he is wearing a revolutionary's black beret. In others, he is festooned in the traditional Arab headdress. And in the most popular new style, he is sporting a fedora and firing a rifle into the air.
But here in Karbala, a dusty city swarming with Muslim pilgrims, the imposing wooden billboard hanging over the market depicts a very different Hussein. His face is bowed. His hands are upturned. He is praying.
For almost two weeks in March 1991, Karbala was the epicenter of a bloody insurrection that became a bigger threat to Hussein's government than the Persian Gulf War that had just ended. Thousands of Shiite Muslim rebels commandeered two gold-domed mosques and lynched scores of government loyalists before the army retook the city.
To prevent such a rebellion from occurring again, Hussein's government cracked down, allegedly killing several Shiite clerics, abducting dozens of others and putting down protests with massive force, according to human rights groups. But the government also has sought to pacify the Shiites by repairing damaged mosques, putting more gold tiles on them and trying to convince people here that Hussein respects them.
His handling of the Shiite crisis illustrates the extraordinary measures he has taken since the Gulf War to shore up public support. Although Iraq's army and economy are significantly weaker than they were a decade ago, Hussein's efforts to coerce a variety of important constituencies, from Muslim fundamentalists to computer-savvy youths, have left him the undisputed leader of this nation of 23 million people.
A nearly two-week visit to Iraq, including trips to two southern cities regarded as potential hotbeds of anti-government activity, suggests that Hussein's strategy to neutralize opposition has been at least modestly successful. Western-oriented college students, black-turbaned Shiite clerics and soldiers who were forced to retreat from Kuwait said in often lengthy interviews that their allegiances to Hussein are firm, challenging assumptions by some of his opponents that Iraqis would quickly turn against him in the event of a military confrontation with the United States.
"Before, people used to hang pictures of him in the shops and offices because they worried they would get punished if they didn't," a businessman in Baghdad said as he gazed at a poster of the president on the wall behind his desk. "Now there are more people who are displaying pictures of him because they admire him."
Accurately gauging Hussein's support across the country is difficult, if not impossible. Criticizing the president is illegal and can result in a trip to jail. Foreign journalists usually cannot interview people without the presence of an official from the Information Ministry. And it is forbidden to travel from Baghdad to a crescent of autonomous Kurdish areas in the north, where there is little love for Hussein.
Even so, conversations with several Iraqis -- without a government employee present -- suggested that their attitudes toward the president have been shaped not so much by an official insistence that Hussein be adored but by moves he has made over the past decade to win public favor.
He has promoted the growth of Islamic fundamentalism, using it as a way to stoke anti-American sentiments and promote himself as the country's religious leader. He has managed to deflect criticism of domestic ills by blaming the U.N. economic sanctions imposed on Iraq after it invaded Kuwait in 1990. He has sought to instill a sense of pride among Iraqis in his defiance of the United States and its allies. And he has decided to dole out modest new freedoms, including Internet access and the ability to watch foreign music videos, as a way of stemming the people's restlessness with other restrictions on their activities.
"A decade ago, I would have welcomed the Americans," said a Shiite who has a low-level job in a government ministry. "But not now."
Hussein, the government employee said, "was crazy to invade Kuwait." But now, he said, he is happy the president is standing up for Iraq's interests in the face of "exaggerated American claims about weapons of mass destruction" and "America's attempt to control our oil."
"I'm not the only one who feels this way," he said. "Everyone I know has a better opinion of him."
To the Iraqi government, the prospect of a Shiite rebellion has long been as dire a concern as an American invasion.
Shiites, who are concentrated largely in southern Iraq, comprise about 55 percent of the country's population, but they wield comparatively little political clout. Most of the country's powerful officials, including Hussein, are Sunni Muslims, even though they make up only a quarter of all Iraqis.
Ethnic Kurds, who account for most of the rest of Iraq's population, have succeeded after years of fighting in carving out an autonomous swath of territory in northern Iraq. But the loss of land has not posed a strategic threat to Baghdad. If discontented Shiites tried something similar, however, Hussein's regime would be squeezed between two insurgencies, deprived of the country's most lucrative oil fields and cut off from access to the Persian Gulf.
With those risks in mind, the government set out after the 1991 insurrection to transform its relationship with the Shiites, using new threats and new enticements.
When the fighting ceased, opposition leaders said Shiite clerics with anti-government leanings began to wind up missing or dead. First to be secreted away, according to rights organizations, were 105 religious scholars and their relatives. In 1999, Ayatollah Mohammed Sadeq Al-Sadr, a top Shiite leader who had called on the government to release Shiite prisoners, was assassinated. And last summer, another leading Shiite scholar, Ayatollah Hussein Bahr Al-Aloom, was found dead 10 days after refusing to endorse the appointment of Hussein's son Qusay to the Baath party's regional command, according to a U.N. report.
Shiite leaders based outside Iraq contend that several senior clerics have been prevented from meeting with visitors, and others have been told to publicly pledge fealty to the government. The Iraqi government is engaged in "continued systematic suppression of religious activity among the Shiite community," Max van der Stoel, a former U.N. human rights rapporteur for Iraq, said in a statement to the U.N. Human Rights Commission.
Iraqi officials insist the government is not responsible for the deaths of the clerics. They blame tribal rivalries, natural causes and Shiite insurgents from Iran.
Until recently, officials sought to ward off any new groups of insurgents by reminding Shiites about the violence that occurred in the two mosques here, which contain shrines to two of the prophet Muhammad's grandsons, Hussein and Abbas, and are considered among the holiest places for Shiites. In a room near the entrance to the Abbas mosque, nooses made from electrical cable used to dangle from the ceiling and pictures of the shattered structure hung on the walls.
But they have been removed. The government's message of the moment is harmony between Shiites and Sunnis.
In a sign of reconciliation, Hussein has paid several visits to the shrines in this crowded city 60 miles southwest of Baghdad. Pictures of him are placed prominently at the entrances. Officials say that Hussein the president is related to Hussein the enshrined Shiite.
The government has even stopped blaming local Shiites for the violence. The official line now is that the trouble was caused by Iranian infiltrators.
"While the Iraqi army was paying all its attention to the major battle with the Americans, the Iranians took advantage of the situation," said Sayed Mehdi Al-Ghorabi, the government-appointed administrator of the Abbas mosque.
Reasoning that personal prosperity might improve attitudes toward the government, officials said they are planning to develop the city into a major religious tourist destination for Shiites, with hundreds of small new hotels and restaurants. Authorities already have constructed a palm-lined plaza to connect the two shrines.
In the bustling market, filled with stalls hawking plastic trinkets and fragrant sweets, several longtime residents were reluctant to talk about the rebellion with a foreign journalist, insisting they were out of town at the time. But they said, in the presence of a government employee, that people here now firmly back Hussein.
"The people here love the president," proclaimed Atalla Habib, an elderly man whose small shop is replete with wooden prayer beads and green prayer mats. "We know he loves Shiite people."
Diplomats and analysts said they are unsure how deep that sentiment runs, but they said Hussein's Shiite strategy probably has reduced chances of another insurrection.
"Saddam has very skillfully used the carrot and the stick with them," a diplomat in Baghdad said. "It doesn't appear that they are eager for another fight."
These days, the government appears so confident of the security situation that it allows thousands of Iranian Shiite pilgrims to travel here. As the sun began to set on a recent evening, the streets filled with black-robed women and men in full-length tunics jostling their way into the shrines for the day's final prayers. Despite the crowds, uniformed security forces were not on the streets save for a few white-suited traffic policemen.
"In any community there are some outlaws," said Abdel Sahib Naser Nasrulla, the administrator of the Hussein shrine. "But I assure you there are now very few here."
Hussein's efforts to quash dissent by promoting religion also extends well into the Sunni heartland. As the ululating call to prayer echoes across Baghdad on Friday afternoons, hundreds of families drive up to a mosque where a 605-page, glass-encased copy of the Koran has been penned with what officials say is 50 pints of the president's blood.
It is the Mother of All Battles Mosque, a gift from Saddam Hussein to the people of Iraq that appears to be as much about self-preservation as self-promotion.
Hussein never used to be regarded as particularly religious. His Baath party is officially secular. And Baghdad was known in the Arab world for its comparatively free-wheeling nightlife and open sales of alcohol.
All that changed in the mid-1990s as sanctions began to take their toll on the Iraqi population. With life becoming more difficult, more people began turning to religion. Mosque attendance boomed, as did praying five times a day. In Baghdad, where women once wore the latest Parisian fashions, head scarves and even full-length veils became de rigueur.
Such trends have been viewed with alarm by political leaders in other Arab nations. But in Iraq, Hussein has sought to exploit it. He has become perhaps the country's single biggest proponent of religion.
During the Gulf War, he famously added the words "Allahu Akbar," or God is great, to the red, white and black Iraqi flag, reportedly in his own handwriting. Since then, he has instituted a "faith campaign" intended to Islamicize Iraq. The public consumption of liquor has been banned. Schoolchildren must now finish studying the Koran before graduating from high school. He has set up Saddam University for Islamic Studies to churn out new clerics. And he has ordered the construction of dozens of mosques, including one, to be called the Saddam Hussein Mosque, that is intended to be the largest in the world.
Getting people to the mosque has clear political benefits for Hussein. Sermons are often imbued with fiery anti-American and anti-Israeli rhetoric as well as the obligatory messages of support for the president.
"Our belief in Islam will make us stronger for our fight against America," said Abdel Ameer, 36, a board member of a large Shiite mosque in the southern port city of Basra.
Several clerics have recently cast Iraq's dispute with the United States as a jihad, or holy war, in which all able-bodied men must fight. "If there's a war, Saddam is not going to say 'Fight for me' this time. He's going to say 'You must fight for Allah,' " a Western diplomat said. "It will be a much more powerful message."
For the time being, though, perhaps the most popular new sound in Baghdad doesn't emanate from minarets. It comes from hand-held radios and car stereos tuned to a U.S. government-run station called Radio Sawa.
Beamed into Iraq from a transmitter in Kuwait, Sawa is an attempt by the State Department to present a flattering image of America to Arab youth by broadcasting a mixture of Arabic and Western pop songs interspersed with short, U.S.-centric news reports.
The Iraqi government has not jammed Sawa. It's available all day in southern cities. In Baghdad, it's heard only in the evenings, when AM signals travel farther. "We know the news is American propaganda, but we love the music," said a merchant named Sayed who was listening to Sawa on a recent evening.
Growing increasingly confident of public support of the government's view of the world, officials have recently begun allowing people to indulge in a few liberties long out of reach.
Iraqis can now access the Internet, either from home if they are prosperous enough to own a computer or from several government-run Internet centers. Web-based e-mail programs such as Hotmail are blocked, as are sexually explicit sites, but international news sites are accessible.
Although erecting a satellite dish on one's roof to watch CNN is illegal, the government has set up a satellite relay system in Baghdad that allows residents to see 14 television channels from outside Iraq with a regular antenna. There's no world news, but there are music videos and sports programs.
Sayed said he finds it hard to believe the statements of U.S. officials broadcast on Radio Sawa saying that a new government would be better for Iraq. "If America says it cares for us so much, why did they impose sanctions on us?" he said.
That's a question Ali Chamel said he asks every day. His 13-year-old son, Mohammed Ali, is suffering from leukemia. His doctors in Basra say they would have a good chance of saving him if they could administer a cocktail of five drugs. But the hospital only has three of the five. The doctors said the delivery of the other two has been held up by a U.N. sanctions committee that determines whether imports might have potential weapons-making uses.
Chamel can barely contain his rage. "Why are the Americans doing this to my son?" he growled. "How can Iraq make a weapon with medicine?"
Under a U.N. Security Council resolution, the sanctions cannot be lifted until inspectors certify that Iraq does not possess nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Western governments have accused Iraq of prolonging the sanctions by hindering the inspectors, resulting in their departure from the country in 1998. But men like Chamel don't blame Hussein for the continuing embargo, they blame the United States.
"This is not the president's fault," Chamel said. "He's defending Iraq."
Hussein's defiance plays well among Iraqis. Baghdad residents love to mention that after a British plane bombed the capital's version of the Space Needle, he ordered it rebuilt taller than the Tower of London. The newest addition to the city's collection of monuments is a hulking granite depiction of the Arabic word for "No."
"He stands up to the world," Sayed said with a grin. "We admire him for that."
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