Interactive Feature Thursday, January 04, 2007
Saddam the Pitiable?
Feared and Pitiless; Fearful and Pitiable
Baghdad
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Thomas Hartwell/Time Life Pictures — Getty Images, 1987
A MARTYR IN HIS OWN MIND But for brief moments, Saddam Hussein never stepped outside his horrific caricature.
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NOBODY who experienced Iraq under the tyranny of Saddam Hussein could imagine, at the height of the terror he imposed on his countrymen, ever pitying him. Pitiless himself, he sent hundreds of thousands of his countrymen to miserable deaths, in the wars he started against Iran and Kuwait, in the torture chambers of his secret police, or on the gallows that became an industry at Abu Ghraib and other charnel houses across Iraq. Iraqis who were caught in his spider’s web of evil, and survived, tell of countless tortures, of the psychopathic pleasure the former dictator appeared to take from inflicting suffering and death.
Yet there was a moment when I pitied him, and it came back to me after the nine Iraqi appeal judges upheld the death sentence against Saddam last week, setting off the countdown to his execution. As I write this, flying hurriedly back to Baghdad from an interrupted Christmas break, Saddam makes his own trip to the gallows with an indecent haste, without the mercy of family farewells and other spare acts of compassion that lend at least a pretense of civility to executions under law in kinder jurisdictions. From all we know of the preparations, Saddam’s death was to be a miserable and lonely one, as stark and undignified as Iraq’s new rulers can devise.
Many Iraqis, perhaps most, will spare no sympathies for him. However much he may have suffered in the end, they will say, it could never be enough to atone for a long dark night he imposed on his people. Still, there was that moment, on July 1, 2004, when Saddam became, for me, if only briefly, an object of compassion.
He had been brought to a makeshift courtroom in the grounds of a former presidential palace in Baghdad that became, as Camp Victory, the American military headquarters in Iraq. It was the first time he had appeared in public since his capture six months earlier in a coffin-like subterranean bolt-hole near his hometown of Tikrit when he emerged unkempt yet proclaiming himself to American soldiers who hauled him from his hiding place to be “Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq,” and ready to negotiate with his captors.
We know, from accounts given by his Iraqi and American interrogators, that the old Saddam quickly reasserted himself, heaping contempt on the new generation of Iraqi leaders who were taken out to a detention center near Baghdad International Airport the next day to verify for themselves, and for the world, that the man the Americans had seized was indeed their former tormentor.
So when the day arrived for his first court appearance, starting the process that led over the next 30 months to his two trials for crimes against humanity, there seemed little doubt to me which Saddam would show up to face the charges — Saddam the indignant, Saddam the self-proclaimed champion of Iraqi and Pan-Arab nationalism, Saddam the self-anointed figurehead of the insurgency that was already, then, beginning to look like a nightmare for the invaders.
His American captors had flown Saddam and 11 of his top henchmen to Camp Victory by helicopter, and led them hooded and shackled at the waist and ankles to the threshold of the mosque annex that served as a courtroom. Only at the door to the court were the hoods and shackles removed, clattering to the floor a moment or two before the door opened to show Defendant No. 1, Saddam Hussein al-Majid, standing clasped at the elbow between two Iraqi guards.
From 20 feet away on an observer’s bench, seated beside the late Peter Jennings of ABC News and Christiane Amanpour of CNN, I caught my first glimpse of the man who had become in my years of visiting Iraq under his rule, a figure of mythic brutality, a man so feared that the mention of his name would set the hard, unsmiling men assigned to visiting reporters as “minders” to shaking with fear, and on one occasion, in my experience, to abject weeping.
But this was not that Saddam. The man who stepped into the court had the demeanor of a condemned man, his eyes swiveling left, then right, his gait unsteady, his curious, lisping voice raised to a tenor that resonated fear. Quickly, he fixed his gaze on the handful of foreigners in the court, and I had my own moment of anxiety when it came to my mind that he was intent on remembering the faces of the non-Iraqis that were there to witness his humiliation, perhaps to get word through to his lawyers, and then on to the insurgents, that we were to be punished for our intrusion. It was only later, after I learned what he had been told before being taken from his cell to the court, that I understood that our presence meant something else to him entirely, that with foreigners present, he was not going to be summarily hanged or shot.
THE Americans who were his jailers in the first days after his capture — aboard an American aircraft carrier and then at a converted detention center known as Camp Cropper at the edge of Baghdad’s airport — had chosen, on that summer day, to give Saddam a taste of the fear that he exhilarated in imposing on others. All he was told was that he was being taken “to face Iraqi justice.” Small wonder, as the architect of a quarter-century of repression, that he should fear that he was about to suffer the torture and grisly death that he had inflicted on so many others.
At that instant, I felt sorry for him, as a man in distress and perhaps, too, as a once almighty figure reduced to ignominy. But the expression of that pity to the Iraqis present marked the distance between those, like me, who had taken the measure of Saddam’s terror as a visitor, shielded from the worst of it by the minders and the claustrophobic world of closely guarded hotels and supervised Information Ministry trips, and Iraqis who lived through it with no shield.
That I could feel pity for him struck the Iraqis with whom I talked as evidence of a profound moral corruption. I came to understand how a Westerner used to the civilities of democracy and due process — even a reporter who thought he grasped the depths of Saddam’s depravity — fell short of the Iraqis’ sense, forged by years of brutality, of the power of his unmitigated evil.
After that initial encounter with Saddam, I saw him many times walking within 10 feet of my feet in the glass-walled press gallery in the courtroom at the former Baath Party headquarters, chosen as a venue for his trials by the Regime Crimes Liaison Office, the unit created by the United States Justice Department, to help Iraqi judges and lawyers create what became the Iraqi High Tribunal, the special court designated to try high-ranking members of the old regime. But the Saddam who dominated that courtroom was another figure — haughty, defiant, often beside himself with anger, but, above all, remorseless. If the death penalty held any fear for him, when it was handed down in November, for the killing of 148 men and teenage boys during a systematic persecution of the Shiite town of Dujail in 1982, he never showed it.
Almost the only chink in his prideful armor showed when he demanded at the Dujail trial that he be shot by firing squad, the privilege as he told it, due to him as the — still legitimate, as he claimed — commander in chief of Iraq’s armed forces. That plea was quickly denied by the chief judge. It was a point never again raised by Saddam, who took, at the end, to proclaiming his eagerness to die as a “martyr” for Iraq, and his belief that this would earn his passage to paradise. But the plea to be spared hanging suggested that fear — of humiliation, if not of death — was a close companion during the 1,000-odd days he spent in solitary confinement in Camp Cropper.
Of other strains of humanity there was little sign. During the Dujail trial, and just as much during the Anfal trial that followed, at which Saddam and six other defendants were accused of murdering as many as 180,000 Kurds in the late 1980’s, he showed no hint of remorse as survivors of the torture chambers and the desert internment camps and, in the case of the Anfal campaign, the chemical weapons attacks and the mass graves, told their pitiful stories. Head to one side, hand pressed to his head, fingers splayed, writing detailed notes on yellow legal pads, Saddam listened impassively to the accounts of women hung upside down to be beaten, of sons holding wet cloths to their faces and finding the twisted bodies of mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers heaped in an agony of death from mustard-gas attacks, and of young men who scrambled back to life from beneath the bloodied bodies of fellow villagers in remote pits scraped from the desert wadis of Iraq.
LIKE some ghastly accountant with an obsession for detail but no morsel of pity, Saddam limited his questions to peripheral issues: What were the precise geographic coordinates of the mass graves? How could a boy no more than 10 at the time recall so precisely the details of a chemical attack? Why should anyone credit the testimony of a man — brother to seven others who were executed after the alleged attack at Dujail — who admitted he belonged to Dawa, an Iran-backed religious party?
Not once did he avail himself of what seemed like the expedient response of a man who had pleaded not guilty to involvement in any of these crimes: an expression of sorrow for the victims, albeit coupled with renewed denials of his responsibility.
Like many another dictator before him, Saddam so sealed himself off from his own people, in his scores of palaces, and on his carefully staged, video-recorded walkabouts among crowds of ululating citizens, that he seemed never to grasp, even in the extremities of his last weeks, how hated he was by his people. In the courtroom, he insisted, repeatedly, that he remained Iraq’s lawful president and thus immune to prosecution, even as the judges responded by calling him “ex-president” and ordering him to sit down. He was sustained in this make-believe world by his former acolytes, who would stand in the dark as he entered, greeting him with expressions of undying fealty.
Among the most insistent of these courtiers were two men who were scheduled to die with him on the gallows after their appeals in the Dujail case were denied, his half-brother, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti and Awad al-Bandar, chief judge of the revolutionary court who passed the death sentences on the men and boys from Dujail, in a court hearing that lasted only hours with the dock too crowded for many of the condemned even to enter the court, and with no legal representation. This miserable precedent appeared to make no impact on Saddam and his fellow defendants, who protested at every opportunity during their own trials at the denial of what they claimed were their proper rights and comforts. The quality of the prison food — including American military rations known as meals-ready-to-eat — was one such issue; the quality of the cigarettes given to them another.
Saddam, prideful to the last, left much of the caviling over prison conditions to his erstwhile minions. And shortly before he was sentenced to death, he demonstrated, inadvertently, that in the shrunken world of his captivity he remained the leader who dare not be defied. An American official who worked closely with the Iraqi court told of watching on a closed-circuit relay as Saddam and other defendants in the Dujail trial waited one day in a holding room off the courtroom floor. At the time, Saddam had declared a hunger strike on his own and his associates’ behalf in protest of the Dujail case continuing after the walkout of the defense lawyers, who had been replaced by counsel appointed by the court.
At one end of the room, visible on the surveillance cameras, was a table laid with food, including cellophane-wrapped oatmeal biscuits of the kind available in every American military canteen in Iraq. Thinking his fellow defendants were distracted, one of the accused, Taha Yassin Ramadan, a former vice president renowned even among Saddam’s henchman for his brutality, slipped two pockets of biscuits into his pocket, only for Saddam to march on him demanding to know who gave him permission to eat. Mr. Ramadan, the American official said, denied he had taken anything from the table. “Empty your pockets, you betrayer!” Saddam demanded. Whereupon Mr. Ramadan lamely admitted his guilt and, with the sheepish deference born of two decades in Saddam’s inner circle, returned the biscuits to his basket.
# posted by Brian @ 10:11 AM 
