HANGING GUARDIAN OF BABYLON
John Simpson leaves Baghdad a wiser man, but minus all his film
THEY seem to be thinking of turning the Hanging Gardens of Babylon into a recrea- tion area. They might as well; there's little enough left of the original place now. My footsteps echoed on the new concrete paving of the palace where Nebuchadnez- zar lived and Alexander the Great came to die. The only Iraqi I could see tried to sell me a cuneiform cylinder: perhaps he was a secret policeman. I could see that there was something not quite right at the base of a nearby wall, and went over to inspect it. The tidy new yellow brickwork, 25 feet high and crowned with olde-worlde machi- colation, gave way to three courses near the ground which were crude and irregular. They proved to be the original mud bricks of Babylon, and they looked distinctly out of place in the gleaming new reconstruc- tion. It requires real self-confidence to take an archaeological site like Babylon and rebuild it along the lines of an empty Safeway supermarket. Saddam Hussein has a great deal of self-confidence.
At the Saddam Arts Centre in Baghdad the artists in residence were putting in a heavy day's work, painting new portraits of their President: icons 15 feet high to decorate every major crossroads and every public building in the entire country. On either side of the road that leads past the Ministry of Information there are 36 such portraits, side by side. In some he appears as the stern father of his country, uni- formed and thoughtful. But mostly he strives for the jovial effect. He smiles behind dark glasses in a variety of cos- tumes, from hunting clothes to short- 'The doctors told him to lay off it.' sleeved shirt and panama hat, he climbs mountains and kisses little children. Na- ture has given him a misleadingly pleasant appearance, much as it did to Nicolae Ceausescu. But the brown pebble-like eyes are unsmiling and alert.
Yet these are not the bland, featureless portraits of Mao Tse-tung's China or Kim Il Sung's North Korea. Saddam presents himself to his people as real and approach- able; he wants to be a part of everyone's life. His disarmingly pleasant, Westernised deputy foreign minister, Nizar Hamdoun, explained to me that the people's love for their President is such that in any private house his portrait is to be found not merely in the hallway or the sitting-room, but even in the bedroom. 'Most unusual,' I mur- mured.
In an expensive, impersonally furnished government office the incumbent minister looked mournfully at one of the armchairs, and turned to me. 'It's terrible to think that it's only a few weeks since Farzad Bazoft sat there,' he said. This came as a consider- able surprise: we had not been talking about Farzad, though his execution for supposed espionage was much on my mind. Farzad had once worked for me, and I felt an obligation to defend him strongly. It appeared that on his last visit to Iraq he had tried to enlist the minister's support in getting to the weapons plant. He had already tried the Information Ministry, which had not been helpful. The man I now found myself talking to had not helped him either. Bazoft had told him, just as he had told the other government officials, precisely what he wanted to do. I had the impression from the minister that Bazoft had also warned him that he planned to travel to the plant, with or without permis- sion. During the trial Bazoft tried to call the minister to give evidence on his behalf: no right-thinking spy would announce his intentions to a member of the government. But the court refused the application. I had the strong impression that the minister felt guilty about the whole affair, but in Sad- dam Hussein's Iraq it is more than a government minister's job, and maybe his life, is worth to defend a man whom the President has declared to be a spy. Perhaps the empty armchair was a continual re- proach, and talking to me about it was a kind of quietus.
I spent seven troubled days with a camera crew in Iraq, during which we were followed, bugged, criticised and censored more intensively than in any country I can remember. Shortly before we left we were told that our video cassettes contained 'bad pictures', and that we would not be allowed to take them out of the country. The BBC's television audience will not therefore see schoolchildren being taught English by means of the chant 'Long live our President, Saddam Hussein! Long live our Party!' Nor will it see the full details of the extraordinary victory monument which was designed by Saddam himself to mark the end of the Gulf War: two monstrous crossed scimitars held in hands modelled upon his own, with a tassel descending from each pommel and made up of a net containing hundreds of Iranian helmets, most of them bearing bullet or shrapnel holes. Between the two scimitars is a pathway studded with more helmets. In early Babylonian fashion one walks on the skulls of Saddam's enemies.
Baghdad, too, is like Babylon: rebuilt from scratch by Saddam in his own image, and thereby deprived of any real life of its own. It is quiet and dull, and the people do not want to talk to foreigners. It must be the only place in the entire Middle East where the shopkeepers fall silent when a Westerner comes along. As I wandered round a market-place, conscious of the minder following me, no one met my eyes or tried to sell me something or asked me in for a glass of tea.
In Saddam's Iraq there is no sign of independent thought, let alone opposition. In 1986 and 1987, when the war with Iran seemed to be going badly for him, the list of offences which merited the death penal- ty was lengthened to 29. It was already an offence punishable by death for someone to leave the ruling Ba'ath Party or to persuade others to leave it. `A law is a piece of paper on which we write one or two lines and sign underneath it Saddam Hussein, President of the Republic': Sad- dam Hussein.
History too is a piece of paper on which Saddam Hussein writes his own lines. At a school where the children chanted in praise of their President, the headmistress, a large lady with blonde hair, handed me some literature about Iranian war crimes. The school itself had suffered badly in an Iranian rocket attack two years before, and 43 children died. As a result it is a showpiece where visitors go to recharge their batteries of indignation. I leafed through one of the pamphlets. `The inhabi- tants of Halabje,' said the accompanying text, `were destroyed in an attack of chemical warfare by Iran.' Halabje is a Kurdish town in north-eastern Iraq. In 1988 it went over to the Iranian side in the war, and paid the penalty. I saw the results for myself when I went there two days later. The streets were clogged with the bodies of the inhabitants; Iraqi jets, not Iranian ones, had bombarded them with a selection of chemical weapons — mustard gas, nerve gas, cyanide. Now it is Saddam's criffie no longer. His propaganda machine, like Stalin's after Katyn, blames it all on his enemies. Halabje, by the way, has been rebuilt and renamed `Saddam'.
Nevertheless the more Western politi- cians and journalists criticise Iraq, the more support Saddam receives. I was in Baghdad to cover a pan-Arab conference to protest against the supposed campaign which was being waged against Iraq by Britain. Speaker after speaker, and by no means only those from the radical fringe, believed that Britain dragged up criticisms of Saddam and intervened to stop the flow of military technology to him because of Israeli pressure. The West, they said, was afraid of Saddam because he was strong and independent.
But if we help Saddam's cause by attack- ing him, what else can we do about him? To treat him as we treat Syria and Iran, and pretend he does not exist, leads nowhere. To wince at his misdeeds, but go on supplying him with the tools of his trade, is irresponsible. There may be a third strategy. During the war with Iran Saddam's regime reached new heights of repression and violence. But, now the war is over, he has promised to reform the constitution and allow a freer press and the legalisation of political parties. He doubt- less intends the changes to be purely cosmetic — but it may be possible to encourage him to go further than he now plans. It is the only real hope.
My colleagues and I finally made our way through to the various controls and into the departure lounge at Saddam Inter- national Airport. We were glad to be leaving, but depressed at the thought that we had lost the videotapes which repre- sented all our work. I wandered into the duty-free shop and distractedly looked at the display of watches. There lay a gim- crack pocket-watch in imitation gold; on it was the smiling face of Saddam Hussein, rebuilder of Babylon, victor of the Gulf War, the new Nasser of the Arab world.
`Do you-sell many of these things?' I asked.
The woman behind the counter glanced at an Iraqi who didn't look like a passen- ger. She shrugged helplessly. Until there is real change in Saddam's Iraq, even the sale of political kitsch is best not discussed.
John Simpson is the BBC's foreign affairs editor.
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