Saddam : His Rise and Fall (40 page)

A “Freedom Wall” was established at the University of Baghdad where students were encouraged to air their grievances. The state-controlled media began to carry a considerable number of articles detailing public complaints about everyday life, which enabled the minister of information and culture, Latif Nusseif al-Jasim, to claim, without any hint of irony, that “there is no censorship in Iraq. No person is asked about what he has written. The only limitations relate to issues of national security.”
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In order to demonstrate to the outside world the changes that were taking place in Iraq, a number of Western journalists were flown into the country to observe its flourishing “democratic process” firsthand. Saddam also initiated a charm offensive with the Arab press, and leading editors in Egypt who were invited to Baghdad reportedly received “spanking new red, white, blue and light brown Mercedes Benz 230 cars…. Lesser figures received Toyotas.”
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Saddam's efforts at liberalizing the country's political institutions were accompanied by a systematic purge of the armed forces. By 1988 Iraq had developed the fourth largest army in the world. Saddam's inept handling of the war, and in particular his rash interventions during the Fao Peninsula crisis of late 1986, had resulted in the military high command imposing curbs on his political power (see Chapter Nine). In retrospect this would have been the ideal moment for the military to make their move against Saddam. But
after more than a decade of close supervision by security agents and the Baath Party's highly effective network of commissars, the Iraqi military establishment had been virtually brainwashed against the notion of entertaining any political ambitions. Saddam had neither forgotten nor forgiven the humiliation he had suffered at the hands of his military commanders, even though the constraints they were able to impose on him had contributed to their success in eventually winning the war.

The discovery of various military plots to overthrow Saddam between 1988 and 1990 enabled him to reassert his authority over the military establishment. Apart from executing any officer suspected of being involved in the coup attempts, others were accounted for in mysterious accidents—more Iraqi military officers died in helicopter crashes in one year than had died during the eight years of war with Iran. Saddam was determined to break the bonds of comradeship that had formed during the war years which he believed, if left unchecked, could present a formidable challenge to his leadership. Thus his purge of the military was conducted with great brutality. For example, Lieutenant General Omar al-Hazzaa was sentenced to death after being overheard speaking ill of the Iraqi president. Saddam ordered that prior to his execution his tongue be cut out; for good measure, he also executed Hazzaa's son, Farouq. Hazzaa's homes were bulldozed, and his wife and children left on the street.

Even those officers who came from the same provincial background as Saddam, or were directly related by clan or marriage to the president's ruling circle, were not immune from prosecution. Saddam's treatment of General Maher Abdul al-Rashid was a case in point. Not only was Rashid a fellow Tikriti, but his daughter was married to Saddam's second eldest son, Qusay. But Rashid had become far too powerful for Saddam's liking, and he resolved to cut him down to size. First, Rashid's brother was killed in a mysterious accident. Then Rashid himself was forced to retire from his position and placed under virtual house arrest at his ranch outside Tikrit, a move that prevented him from maintaining contact with the substantial body of officers who were loyal to him. Although Saddam had other reasons for wanting his cousin and defense minister Adnan Khairallah out of the way, his death in the spring of 1989 in a helicopter crash fitted the pattern of purges that were being conducted in all areas of the armed forces.

For all the difficulties Saddam was experiencing with his relatives and in bringing the military to heel, by far the biggest challenge he faced was on the
economic front. The war had wrecked the Iraqi economy. At its outset Iraq had been one of the most prosperous countries in the world; at the end it was one of the most bankrupt—apart from incurring $80 billion of debt, the cost of reconstruction was put at $230 billion. Iraq's oil revenues of $13 billion did not cover the cost of the nation's expenditure, and the regime needed an extra $10 billion per annum simply to balance the books.
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As Saddam's regime relied heavily on patronage, the shortage of funds in a consumption-oriented economy like Iraq's created widespread resentment and led to charges of incompetence being leveled at the government. The extent of Iraq's indebtedness meant that Saddam was reliant on the goodwill of his creditors, a position that further weakened the president's image as an all-powerful leader.

In an attempt to revive the economy Saddam initiated a series of measures to accelerate the economic liberalization process that had begun during the war. Price controls were removed, entrepreneurial activity was encouraged, and a number of state factories were sold off to private individuals, as were some other minor state assets. The overall impression created by these changes was that Saddam was committed to dismantling Iraq's large public sector
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Licenses were granted for private industrial projects, which resulted in the private sector accounting for nearly a quarter of all imports. The regime went out of its way to attract lucrative investment from the oil-rich neighboring Gulf states. All these changes succeeded in achieving, however, was the creation of a small group of wealthy entrepreneurs, most of whom were closely connected to the ruling regime and who were able to exploit the opportunities presented by privatization.

In terms of improving Iraq's economic performance, therefore, Saddam's reforms made little impact. The high expectations aroused by the changes were matched only by high inflation, which forced Saddam to reintroduce price controls. In the spring of 1989 he sought to place the blame for the country's economic fortunes on his ministers, and two of them were sacked for incompetence. But with 50 percent of Iraq's oil income being spent on debt repayments, the economic situation deteriorated, rather than improved. Saddam was forced to implement a series of austerity measures, such as reductions in the number of government employees and the demobilization of thousands of troops from the armed forces, which only served to increase unemployment and did not help the growing sense of restlessness among the Iraqi people. Even so the postwar years were a period of grandiose ambi
tion on the part of the Baathist regime. On one occasion Saddam announced that he was going to build a world-class subway system for Baghdad, a multibillion-dollar project, and then claimed he would construct a state-of-the-art national railway system around it. The only restriction on his undertaking these fantastic projects was a lack of funds. The country was, after all, broke.

According to Saad al-Bazzaz, the former editor of Baghdad's largest daily newspaper who was head of the ministry that oversaw all of Iraq's television and radio programming, the liberalization measures proposed by Saddam were mainly cosmetic. In 1989, for example, Saad found himself unexpectly summoned to see Saddam. Security officers drove him to a large villa on the outskirts of Baghdad. On arrival he was searched and then invited to sit on a sofa, where he waited for half an hour as people came and went from the president's office. When it was his turn, he was handed a pad and pencil, reminded to speak only if Saddam asked a direct question, and then ushered in. It was noon and Saddam was wearing a military uniform. Staying seated behind his desk, he did not approach Bazzaz or even offer to shake his hand. First, Saddam complained about an Egyptian comedy show that had been airing on one of the Iraqi television channels. “It is silly, and we should not show it to our people,” he said. Bazzaz duly made a note. Then Saddam came to the issue that was causing him most concern.

Even in the new era of liberalization it was the practice of the state-owned broadcasters daily to air poems and songs that had been written in praise of Saddam. Most of the work was amateurish, written by Iraqis whose admiration of their president was significantly greater than their writing skills. Although the verses were still being broadcast, Bazzaz and his producers had cut down their number, and had become more rigorous in their selection. Saddam had noticed the change in policy and casually remarked, “I understand that you are not allowing some of the songs that carry my name to be broadcast.” Bazzaz was suddenly gripped with terror, and replied, “Mr. President, we still broadcast the songs, but I have stopped some of them because they are so poorly written. They are rubbish.” Saddam was unimpressed by the explanation. “Look, you are not a judge,” he informed the terrified director of programs, who thought he was about to be taken away and shot. “How can you prevent people from expressing their feelings toward me?” All Bazzaz could do was to repeat “Yes, sir” and frantically write down everything the president said. Saddam continued with his tirade, giving new
instructions about how the press and the arts were to be administered. Later that day Bazzaz was allowed to return to his office in Baghdad, where he immediately rescinded his earlier policy. That evening there was a full broadcast of poems and songs dedicated to Saddam.
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Another of Saddam's key priorities in the immediate aftermath of the war was to improve Iraq's international standing, especially with the Arab countries that had supported the Iraqi war effort. In February 1989 he helped to set up the Arab Cooperation Council (ACC), comprising Egypt, North Yemen, Jordan, and Iraq. Apart from encouraging economic cooperation, the ACC was conceived to present a unified bloc that would arrest Iran's expansionist aims, promote the Palestinian cause, and isolate Syria, Saddam's sworn enemy. The formation of the ACC was welcomed in the West, which noted a sea change in Baghdad's position, particularly with regard to the Palestinian issue. In this respect Saddam's prewar “rejectionist” rhetoric was scaled down to the extent that he was credited with helping sponsor the PLO's historic declaration of Israel's right to exist, which was made by Yasser Arafat in Geneva in December 1988.

The West, together with most moderate Arab regimes and the Soviet Union, had all backed Iraq toward the end of the war with Iran, and the perceived threat posed by the hard-line ayatollahs in Teheran meant that most of those countries wanted to continue their support for Iraq, if nothing else as a bulwark against the spread of Islamic fundamentalism throughout the Middle East. Although most Western powers were inclined to continue doing business with Baghdad, two issues impeded the full normalization of relations—Iraq's appalling human rights record and its continued development of weapons of mass destruction.

As in 1975, when Saddam's deal with the shah had enabled him to launch a devastating attack against the Kurds, so the 1988 cease-fire with Iran enabled him to resume hostilities against the Kurds. Within a couple of months of the end of the war about sixty-five Kurdish villages came under the same kind of chemical attack that had decimated Halabja the previous March as Saddam sought to impose a “final solution” on the troublesome issue of Kurdish independence. An estimated 5,000 people died in the chemical attacks, while another 100,000 fled in the direction of the Iranian and Turkish frontiers. By the autumn of 1989 the number of Kurdish refugees in Iran and Turkey had reached 250,000. The persecution of the Kurds provoked international outrage. In the United States the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee dispatched two staff members, Peter Galbraith and Christopher Van Hollen, to look at the situation in Kurdistan. When they reported back in October 1988 that Iraq was using chemical weapons as part of a policy to depopulate the region, the U.S. Congress responded by calling for sanctions. In France Danielle Mitterrand, the wife of the French president, took up the cause of the Kurds under the aegis of her Association France-Libertés and organized a Kurdish conference in Paris in October 1989. In Britain the foreign secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, issued a statement condemning Saddam's treatment of the Kurds.

Concern over Iraq's human rights abuses was mirrored by the mounting evidence that Saddam, despite the perilous state of the country's finances, was increasing the development of its military infrastructure in the aftermath of the war rather than concentrating his resources on peaceful reconstruction. In 1989 Iraq's military imports were running at $5 billion a year, accounting for nearly half of the oil revenues. At the end of the war a new organization was set up, the Military Industrialization Organization (MIO), to oversee development of an indigenous Iraqi arms industry. Hussein Kamel al-Majid, the man responsible for putting the bomb on Adnan Khairallah's helicopter, was placed in charge of the MIO and its vast budget. Saddam had learned from bitter experience that Iraq could not rely on its foreign arms suppliers in times of crisis, and so resolved to continue with his plan, first conceived in the mid-1970s, to make it self-sufficient in the manufacture of weapons, in particular weapons of mass destruction.

In this he seems to have been highly successful, for in October 1989 the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a private research foundation, issued a report entitled “The Genie Unleashed,” which cataloged Iraq's chemical and biological weapons production and suggested that the West might already have lost the battle to halt the proliferation of such weapons. The report stated: “Significantly, Iraq has continued and even expanded its efforts since the cessation of fighting with Iran in July 1988,” and went on to say that international efforts to undermine the chemical weapons program by starving it of raw materials were increasingly irrelevant as Iraq was on the verge of becoming self-sufficient. “Baghdad's willingness to invest substantial resources in its chemical and biological weapons programs suggests that its leaders believe that these programs will continue to be of tremendous strategic importance.” There were further indications that Iraq's biological weapons program was well advanced, and that the Salman Pak facility, twenty
miles southeast of Baghdad, was producing botulin toxin. The other main biological plant at Samarra was said to be investigating the possible military applications of typhoid, cholera, anthrax, tularemia, and equine encephalitis.