Just took a quick pass through Lexis-Nexis. The Iran-Iraq war started in 1980, and it appears that Iraq started using nitrogen mustard around 1985. Here's a New York Times story from 1985 - brings back old memories.
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EVERY DAY, Iraq and Iran shell each other's positions, adding new casualties in their protracted border war. And every night, ''Aloha,'' a glittery American floor show in Baghdad's fanciest hotel, brings a touch of Las Vegas to the land of Sinbad and Ali Baba.
Elsewhere in the capital, Iraqi generals and colonels charm American diplomats over lunch at their private clubs. A gift of cocoa-dusted cookies arrives at an American Embassy party from a once-improbable donor: Iraq's strongman, President Saddam Hussein. And the anti-American rhetoric of the state-controlled news media has disappeared. Now, there are even words of welcome from usually dour customs agents and war- weary taxi drivers.
At the Dijla Elementary School in the heart of Baghdad, one of the 12-year-olds explains United States-Iraq relations to an American visitor returning after 10 months. In English sentences especially memorized for the occasion, Omar Dewachi, a small, serious boy in eyeglasses, declaims: ''Our friendship with America begins now and we are very pleased to get such friendly people as friends. The people of America love the people of Iraq because Iraq is on the side of peace.''
When his turn comes, Khaldoon al- Naimi, an affable youngster, seems to be improvising when he says: ''The Russians give us our ammunitions; the Americans are our friends.''
Since November, when the Stars and Stripes was raised over the river Tigris for the first time in more than 17 years, it is official Iraq policy to be nice to Americans. The two countries have embraced each other so warmly that it is hard to believe that Iraq once vowed never to re-establish diplomatic relations with the United States until Washington abandoned its pro- Israeli policy. Or that Iraq was one of the first nations condemned by the United States for providing ''repeated support for acts of terrorism.''
When Israel destroyed the armies of Syria, Jordan and Egypt and humiliated the entire Arab world in the 1967 war, a number of Arab nations, including Iraq, broke diplomatic relations with the United States and turned toward the Soviet Union for military and diplomatic support. Iraq is the last major Arab nation to restore ties, and American officials say the honeymoon is just beginning. The Iraqis don't disagree. ''If the Americans use that expression, I don't discourage them,'' says Tariq Aziz, the Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister. ''When you solve old outstanding problems in such a way, it is a success for both sides, of course.''
IT IS NOT DESTINY THAT has drawn Iraq to America, but desperation. Were it not for its slow- moving, four-and-a-half- year-old war with Iran, a conflict that has inflicted hundreds of thousands of casualties, Iraq might have kept the United States at arm's length. When President Hussein sent his forces across the border in September 1980, he intended to seize Iran's oil-producing region of Khuzistan, restore Iraq's sovereignty over the strategic Shatt al Arab waterway and perhaps even overthrow the revolutionary regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. But he miscalculated. The Iranians hurled back the invasion and forced the Iraqis to go on the defensive. They vow they will not end the war until Hussein is overthrown.
With no end in sight, Iraq wants the United States to continue to stem Iran's arms supply and use its diplomatic clout to discourage Western countries from buying Iranian oil. Iraq hopes that more American export credits and oil technology will help put its economy back on track. For the United States, the Iraqi overture offsets Iraq's long-term friendship with the Soviet Union. The United States also knows that Iraq, perhaps second only to Saudi Arabia in oil reserves, is a good long-term credit risk.
Certainly Iraq is far different today than it was in 1969, when crowds shouted and danced in celebration after Jews were hung as Israeli spies in Baghdad's Tahrir Square. Or, when in 1979, it led a movement at the Baghdad summit to expel Egypt from the Arab League for signing a peace treaty with Israel.
But the same people who came to power shortly after the rupture of relations with America are still calling the signals in Iraq. President Saddam Hussein, 48 years old, whose personalization of power outdoes even that of his 82-year-old Iranian archrival, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, rules with the assistance of the nine-man Revolutionary Command Council and the Arab Baath Socialist Party, a rigidly organized structure of local cells dominated by a powerful central committee. There remains the nagging feeling that if or when the war ends, the current pragmatism could quickly revert to the ideological intransigence and expansionist visions of the past.
RAQ IS VIRTUALLY A sealed society, secured by an organized party structure, an interlocking system of police, internal security and neighborhood organizations unrivaled in the Middle East. Throughout most of the region, hospitality flows freely; but not in today's Iraq. Educated Iraqis are both embarrassed and apologetic that they cannot have normal social relations with foreigners. Those who break the rules are arrested, or have intimidating shots fired at them.
Even in Iran, chaos allows a certain degree of freedom. Perhaps only Libya rivals Iraq as a secretive, impenetrable society where political loyalties often supersede blood ties.
To prevent the outflow of currency, most Iraqis cannot travel abroad; foreign diplomats are not allowed to travel outside of the capital city of Baghdad without requesting written permission at least a week in advance; ownership of a typewriter without approval is illegal; politics is not acceptable dinner-table conversation.
''This is a bloody, brutal regime,'' says one veteran Western diplomat. ''There is a palpable fear here that deadens the senses. People don't talk to each other. Frankly, I've never been in such a dreadful place.'' Iraq is a society of half-truths where every event has several possible explanations: Did Saddam Hussein fire his half-brother Barzan Tikriti from his job as head of the security forces because Barzan didn't want his daughter to marry one of the President's bodyguards? Or was it that Barzan had political ambitions of his own?
Was the Minister of Health, Riyadh Ibrahim, executed in 1982 because, as Hussein said, he knowingly distributed contaminated medicine? Or because he gave an honest answer when asked, ''Should Saddam take a long vacation?''
Did talks with northern Iraq's Kurds, who were demanding greater autonomy, break down last summer because a top aide of the Kurdish leader, Jalal Talabani, was murdered? Or was it that the Kurds were demanding too much independence?
Even what is seen is not supposed to be there. While journalists in many countries are strictly limited in what they can photograph near military bases and other sensitive installations, in Iraq they are told not to take pictures of animals. ''They are thought to make the country look backward,'' explained a minor Government functionary. The donkey carts in Baghdad, the sheep tied to the lampposts in Najaf, the cow running past the kebab stand on the road to Basra, therefore, do not exist.
WHEN I ASK AN ARCHEOLOGIST about Qurna, the city that is believed to be the site of the Garden of Eden, he laughs and calls the place a tourist trap. But when I begin to take notes, his voice takes on a serious tone. ''Many Iraqi scholars believe that this is the Garden of Eden,'' he says. ''It could be true.''
Every Iraqi military unit, every bazaar, every school, every office, every factory, is infiltrated by members of the ruling Baath Party or its supporters. At Baghdad University, a professor of history, Ahmed Samii, who got his master's degree from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, gives me permission to ask the students about the restoration of relations between our two countries. Just as he is about to call on one of them, a serious young man in the front row interrupts. ''It is not permitted to talk about politics in a history class.'' he declares. Professor Samii apologizes. The classroom does not belong to him.
The young man, a student-council representative whose main task seems to be to insure political fidelity to the party line, explains: ''I will be held responsible for all their answers. Even the professor can't answer questions, because I will be held responsible. It is forbidden. I have instructions. '' Iraqis are taught how and what to think from the time they are in kindergarten. In history class, schoolchildren learn that ''Palestine was stolen by the Jews who killed parents and children and smashed the country.'' They memorize convoluted sayings of Saddam Hussein. Sometimes, the words get garbled. Tanya Jenabi, a soft-spoken 12-year-old, explains the nonaligned movement: ''The nonlegitimate movement was established in our modern age of the strong genuine needs of the people of the world who have suffered long periods. National health, national character and national . . . I forgot it . . . donate firms of blunder . . . impulsive . . . blackmail.''
In a rare moment of candor, a young white-collar worker explains: ''We're reduced to the level of animals here,'' he says. ''We sleep, eat, work, but can't think. We're inefficient, because we're all afraid of the person above and the person underneath.
''Oh, maybe 20 percent of the people support the regime,'' he continues, ''but they are the ones with something to lose if he should go. Even in Central America or in Poland, there is the church to speak out. There's no strong opposition here - the security is too good. In my neighborhood alone, 50 people were recently taken away and executed and their families told not to mourn.''
EXECUTIONS ARE ''an established method of dealing with perceived political and military opponents,'' according to the latest State Department report on human rights in Iraq. And although Iraq vehemently denies the existence of torture, the American study says that ''reliable reports make it clear that both physical and psychological torture are used extensively.''
Iraqi officials are understandably defensive about their system of justice. ''In the liberal world there is a prejudice that if a country isn't 100 percent liberal, it is repressive,'' says Minister Aziz. ''We are satisfied that we have a stable, popular Government.'' First Deputy Prime Minister Taha Yasin Ramadan puts it more bluntly. ''There is no such thing as degrees or levels of treason,'' he says. ''It's treason. That's all.''
Although political power is in the hands of an Arab Sunni minority, more than half of all Iraqis are Shiites. While Sunnis believe that a temporal leader should be elected by community leaders, Shiites hold that leadership must stay in the family of the Prophet Mohammed and his son- in-law, Ali, the first Imam, or divinely inspired leader. They await the return of the last Imam, who disappeared in the ninth century and who they believe will return someday to establish a purified Islamic government of justice.
The Government insists there is no distinction between Sunnis and Shiites, and indeed, Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini miscalculated when he thought that Iraq's Shiites would rise up against President Hussein's regime and establish an Iraqi Islamic republic. Even the once- powerful Iraqi Shiite underground movement, Al Dawa al-Islamiya, the Islamic Call, sees itself as a Moslem organization fighting an evil secular government, rather than a Shiite group against Sunni rulers.
Saddam Hussein has strengthened his position by ruthlessly eliminating or exiling most of his opposition. ''Some of them are living happily in the paradise of Iran; others are enjoying themselves in London; the rest are on the streets of Damascus,'' says Aziz of Al Dawa's followers. ''They are excellent tourists.''
Still, the occasional exploding bomb testifies to the existence of an underground opposition. To discourage terrorist attacks, Government security guards prevent private cars and taxis from stopping at entrances to Government buildings, foreign embassies or major hotels.
IT IS NOW HARD TO BElieve that for 15 years, the Iraqis gave refuge to the Ayatollah Khomeini. In Najaf, one of Shiite Islam's holiest shrines, on a narrow, dirt alleyway littered with rotting orange peels and animal bones, sits a nondescript two- story beige brick building with rickety overhanging balconies. Here Khomeini lived in exile from 1963 to 1978. At the time, he was revered as a learned Shiite scholar, maybe a bit eccentric but certainly not dangerous, until he was placed under a sort of house arrest in 1977 because of his speeches against the Shah of Iran. Under pressure from the Shah, the Iraqis expelled Khomeini in 1978. He fled to Paris, and nearly four months later, he returned in triumph to Teheran.
Since then, the people of Najaf remember only the bad things: He never said hello to people on the street; everyone in the city hated him; he never had any followers and was fed his ideas by the imperialists; he shed no tears when his son Mustafa died; he left Iraq without paying his phone bill. ''Look,'' says a guide from the mosque, pointing to a second-story window of Khomeini's former residence. ''We even gave him an air-conditioner. What ingratitude.''
Saddam Hussein, determined to keep the loyalty of the Shiite majority, has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into renovating their shrines and rebuilding their towns. In the courtyard of the mosque in Najaf, Sudanese workers balanced on wooden scaffolding clean the turquoise tiles, while Egyptians with picks prepare the ground for new white marble. Iraqi construction workers are all at the front.
Strangers are not welcome, and it seems as if there are more security police than worshipers. ''You can't see them, but they are here,'' explains my Government guide Imad, who accompanied me on all my official interviews and on my trips outside of Baghdad. ''They might be dressed as Bedouins or sheiks, or they might be in Western dress. They might be anyone,'' he says as we pass a group of vendors selling boiled turnips and paper cones full of chickpeas.
Non-Moslems are not permitted behind the green velvet drapes at the entrance to the holy shrine, but Imad gives a running commentary about what people are saying. ''Women are crying and asking God to return their sons from the war,'' he says. ''Others are praying for their sons who have been martyred.''
Despite the secular nature of Iraq's regime, Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, is often photographed in prayer. Deputy Prime Minister Ramadan is fond of telling visitors how the Government ''builds mosques for Moslems, churches for Christians and synagogues for people of 'other religions' ''. Iraq's Chaldeans, Syrian Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox and other Christians, who account for 5 percent of the population, practice their faiths freely under Hussein.
As for the Jews, there used to be 200,000 of them living in Iraq. Many left after the creation of Israel in 1948; others were persecuted; few remain. During an interview, the Minister of Religion, Abdullah Fadhil, said that while there are many Jews in Iraq, ''I cannot give you a number.''
No one in the Ministry of Information seems to know the location of Baghdad's last functioning synagogue. Only a tour of al-Badawiin, once the Jewish quarter of Baghdad, reveals it: a crumbling buff-colored building tucked away in an alleyway. Inside, the paint is peeling and water has damaged the 30-foot ceilings. Green floral drapes cover the dirty windows, some of which are boarded up. Six women huddle around a floor heater on benches covered with Oriental carpets and wait for the once-a-month distribution of kosher meat.
According to Tawfiq Sofer, 65, who has worked as administrator of the synagogue for the last 10 years, there are about 400 Jews in Iraq at present. But there are few children to be bar mitzvahed, or couples to be married. Jews can practice their religion but are not allowed to hold jobs in state enterprises or join the army.
THE SYNAGOGUE has no pictures or posters of Saddam Hussein - unlike the courtyards inside the mosques, the Christian church rectories, or almost anywhere else in Iraq, . His mustache and toothy grin are inescapable - in offices, on bus windows and construction fences, on pillars inside mosque courtyards, as well as on gold- trimmed cake plates, calendars, schoolchildren's notebooks, clocks, wristwatches.
A poem calls him ''the perfume of Iraq, its dates, its estuary of the two rivers, its coast and waters, its sword, its shield, the eagle whose grandeur dazzles the heavens. Since there was an Iraq, you were its awaited and promised one.''
On the thousands of 20-foot- high paintings of him spread throughout the country, Saddam Hussein shows his many roles: At Baghdad University, he is a young graduate in cap and gown; at the race track, a desert horseman; in Babylon, his profile overlaps that of Hammurabi, the great lawgiver of the ancient world.
But the President's penchant for plastering his portrait on everything has become a joke: Question: ''What's the population of Iraq?'' Answer: ''Twenty- eight million. Fourteen million Iraqis and 14 million pictures of Saddam.'' Sometimes, under the cover of darkness, posters of Hussein are ripped from the walls of poor Shiite villages. New posters are usually in place by morning.
Access to the President is severely restricted. The only time most Iraqis see him is on nightly television. My request for an interview, or even permission to attend one of his regularly scheduled ceremonial events, was refused. Instead, the Ministry of Information handed me 30 slim volumes of Saddam Hussein's speeches.
Yet no aspect of Iraqi life is too insignificant for his attention, whether it means attending a ritual circumcision or lecturing to engineers on how to raise cattle. On a recent visit to a penal farm, dressed in a peasant's sheepskin vest and carrying a shepherd's staff, Hussein commuted the sentences of two prisoners. ''You are free - to go to the front,'' he said. The crowd cheered. ''But,'' he warned, ''I will be watching you . . . You will be punished if you don't perform.''
SADDAM IS AS TOUGH as he was when, at the age of 22, he was wounded in an assassination attempt against the military strongman Gen. Abdel Karim Kassem and dug the bullet out of his thigh during a flight across the desert to Syria. He is as unsentimental as he was five years ago when he personally presided over the death, by firing squad, of more than 20 officials, including his own former personal assistant.
Born into a landless peasant family in the village of Tikrit, Saddam Hussein studied law in Cairo, where he began the underground life of intrigue that would ultimately bring him to power. He has been married for more than 20 years to a first cousin, and he is often shown with his youngest daughter, one of five children, in his lap. He has survived a number of assassination attempts, some of them documented in a 190- page best seller written by his half-brother Barzan, now in private life. And despite the President's fondness for uniforms and medals, he is not a military man.
About once a year, a new rumor surfaces of another attempt against Hussein's life. According to one version of a coup attempt last August, a group of Kurds and some Iraqi Army and Air Force personnel in the north had plotted to attack the presidential palace and radar and television transmitters in Baghdad with six MIG-23 fighters. Some 500 conspirators were reportedly executed. When I asked Deputy Prime Minister Ramadan about the incident, he smiled for the only time during a 90- minute interview. ''This is the first time I have heard reports of such a nature,'' he said, and then waited patiently until I broke the silence with another question.
One taxi driver explains the attitude of many Iraqis toward their President this way: ''This is car,'' he says,'' patting his hand on the dashboard. ''but if Saddam say this is bicycle, it is bicycle.'' He looks around anxiously and adds, ''He could kill me for saying this.''
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THE BIG BROTHER: IRAQ UNDER SADDAM HUSSEIN
BYLINE: By Elaine Sciolino; Elaine Sciolino is the United Nations correspondent for The Times.
February 3, 1985, Sunday, Late City Final Edition
Did the US speak out? Within months of the incident in Halabja, yes. Here's one source:
. The Washington Post, March 24, 1988, Thursday, Final Edition, FIRST SECTION; PAGE A37, 648 words, U.S. Decries Iraqi Use Of Chemical Weapons; 'Grave Violation' of International Law Cited, David B. Ottaway, Washington Post Staff Writer, NATIONAL NEWS, FOREIGN NEWS
Why did we wait? Probably because the event was being investigated to see if it was Iranian propaganda or not.
It appears that we did not protest when the Iraqis gassed Iranian soldiers, but they were using nitrogen mustard, which is NOT what was used at Halabja. Also, the Kurds who were gassed were civilians. |
