THR GREAT DICTATOR
John Laughland says Saddam Hussein inspires
terror in Iraq but loyalty too — thanks to the Anglo-American sanctions
IT was with a troupe of Ukrainian folk- dancers that I crossed the Syrian desert. The bus trundled through the twilit streets of Amman and out into the wasteland beyond as great picnics of sausage, tomato and cheese were magicked out of holdalls in that inimitable Soviet way. Vodka was tipped into plastic cups and toasts were drunk to the friendship of peoples. A wiry young man whipped out his guitar and the sound of Rodina maya floated out into the hot, dry night air. One of the troupe, built like Bianca Castafiore, waddled to the back of the bus and, for a verse or two, coated with her honeyed voice the some- what more robust singing of the others. Thus we lolloped across the aching expans- es of sand and scrub for 16 hours on the overnight drive to Baghdad.
Pariah tourism has its charms. To accompany a Delegation of the Society for the Friendship between the Ukrainian and Iraqi Peoples to the 12th Babylon Festival, the purpose of which was to celebrate `From Nebuchadnezzar to Saddam Hus- sein, 2,500 years of Jihad and Glorious Development', must surely count as one of the few thrills left in an otherwise pitilessly globalised world. The Anglo-American sanctions only add to the excitement.
The Babylon Festival is the Mother of all Delegations. Bulgarians, Romanians, Turks, Turkmen, Mongolians, Jordanians and Ital- ian peaceniks arrived, most of them resplen- dent in national costume, reeling their way in the procession to the festival's opening night to show their solidarity with the Iraqi people's resistance to the evil Anglo-Ameri- can duo. In true Middle Eastern manner (I have heard exactly the same thing in Azer- baijan), Saddam's name was repeatedly invoked in the opening speeches, invariably to rhetorical crescendi which invited, and naturally received, enthusiastic applause.
Of the fact that Iraq is a serious dicta- torship, there can be little doubt. The whole land is adorned with images of the Iraqi leader: Saddam as a field marshal or as a Bedouin; Saddam praying to Allah outside mosques; Saddam holding the scales of justice outside the court house or a twig of blossom outside a fertility clinic. The contrast with Yugoslavia under Slobo- dan Milosevic could not be greater. When I asked one of the few Iraqis I was able to meet in private — i.e. without my minder from the Ministry of Information whether people ever blamed the regime for their woes, his reply was a masterpiece of concision. 'No. If you criticise the gov- ernment here, you go to prison.'
Yet even dictators have constituencies, so I decided to visit one of Saddam's most prominent admirers, Abdul Razzak Abdul Wahed. He is Iraq's national poet and pens a few apposite verses whenever there is a great moment in Iraqi history. 'I am writing a play,' he told me as he served treacle-black Turkish coffee in the brightly lit salon of his villa on the banks of the Tigris, 'about a king who falls in love with a poor village girl. Through their friendship, she teaches him the virtues of simple people and of a simple life. He learns from her to turn his back on the intrigues and corruption of the court, and to imitate the strengths of his own peo- ple instead. The play shows how a leader and a party can be made by the people, not the people by the leader.' The hagiographi- cal allusion to Saddam, who has always claimed a mystical relationship between himself and the Iraqi people, is obvious.
On a side table made of inlaid wood, there is a photograph of the poet enjoying a convivial joke with the hero-President. `Sometimes,' Abdul Ra77ak Abdul Wahed explains in awe, 'Saddam looks at you with the eyes of a child. When he prays at the graves of his fathers, his eyes are full of tears. At other times, his regard can be so fierce that you think a sword will cut off your head.' Adbul Razzak Abdul Wahed's own eyes flashed at this point. 'I once asked him,' he went on, ' How do you combine these two qualities, of humanity and ter- ror?" "A leader must lead like that," Sad- `I can't come to work today. I'm in bed with a nasty bug.' dam replied.' Abdul Razzak Abdul Wahed paused for dramatic effect. The Iraqi Presi- dent is indeed famous for combining extraordinary brutality with occasional acts of exceptional kindness — the classic hall- marks of a psychopath. 'I told Saddam once,' my host went on, " You are not a politician. You are a man of principle. Strong enough and faithful enough to say no." That is why Iraqis love him. He once said to me, "When I visit farms in Iraq, the peasants greet me as 'Saddam'. I feel I am close to their hearts because my name is on their lips." ' Peasants may be direct folk but this is not how most Iraqis feel. In a sure sign of dictatorship, a sort of magnetic field of fear surrounds any potential mention of his name. In these conditions, it is the signal achievement of the Anglo-American sanc- tions to have actually bolstered Saddam by offering him on a plate the means by which to entrench his own organised self-adula- tion, while impoverishing and bombing ordinary Iraqis. Everything good in Iraq is now thanks to Saddam's heroism and beneficence, while all shortages are the fault of the sanctions. Saddam giveth but the UN taketh away.
Many Iraqis sincerely admire Saddam for having stood up to the Anglo-Americans, even though this has allowed him to tighten the screws at home. 'I don't care how many statues they put up to him,' a plumpish middle-class lady told me over dinner. (The food in Iraq is fabulous.) 'We will never accept the humiliation of being ruled by an American satrap, like all those sheikhs in Arabia.' Women, indeed, are among Sad- dam's staunchest supporters, not least because Iraq is a relatively liberal country for them.
Some Iraqis even defend Saddam's pro- gramme of building lavish presidential palaces. 'It is an act of defiance against the sanctions,' according to one lowly govern- ment official, explaining the alleged public acceptance of such conspicuous consumption while ordinary Iraqis languish in poverty.
Britain and America's increasingly John Wayne-style foreign policy is not only ugly, based as it is on humiliating one's enemies. It is also doomed to failure because it neglects that most basic human instinct, dig- nity. As Freya Stark wrote in the Baghdad Times in 1928: 'It is much easier for most people to forgive a real injury rather than a slight to their vanity.' The punitive regime of sanctions, imposed for the last decade by Britain and America in the teeth of opposi- tion from France and Russia, is now in tat- ters as planes fly into Baghdad every week. For ten years we have applied in Iraq the most ancient and the most modern forms of attack on a civilian population — besieging and bombing — and all for what? As Adbul Razzak Abdul Wahed told me as he led me out into the evening air, 'The whole civilised world, all the power of America, all their missiles and ships, have been against this lit- tle country for ten years. Yet they have not crushed our spirit.'
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