Iraq split over fate of dictator's body

Published on Sunday 31 December 2006 12:20

WHILE the verdict and death sentence for Saddam Hussein were swift and unambiguous, an important question remains unanswered. What to do with his body?

Privately, both American and Iraqi officials say the subject has been raised at the highest levels, but no decisions have been made. There is wide disagreement on the subject of his body, according to interviews with several top Western and Iraqi officials.

The most discussed options include sending his body out of the country to his family in Jordan, where two of his daughters live; burying him in a secret location never to be made public; burying him in a secret location but, after a period of time, having him disinterred and sent to his family or tribe; or sending him immediately to his hometown of Tikrit to be buried with members of his tribe.

In fact, a top Sunni politician even raised the prospect of holding a state funeral for Saddam. That idea, a Western official said, had very little chance of becoming reality.

His body is reported to have been flown by helicopter to an unknown location.

Sources close to the Iraqi prime minister said the body would be buried in Iraq, but they would not reveal where.

By Muslim tradition, a body must be buried as quickly as possible, but it has emerged that a stand-off has developed between the government and the authorities in Saddam's home region.

The governor of Saddam's native province of Salahaddin has said that he was told by the Iraqi government to attend the former president's burial in Baghdad along with the head of Saddam's tribe.

But governor Mohammed al-Qaisi said he and Saddam's tribe were negotiating to have the body returned to his family village of Awja near Tikrit and that they had rejected an invitation by prime minister Nuri al-Maliki's Shi'ite-led government to attend a quick burial in Baghdad.

His Albu Nasir tribe wants him buried in Awja, near the graves of his two sons Uday and Qusay, who were killed in 2003 by US troops.

"We are still in discussions with the authorities over his burial as we want to receive his body and bury it in Awja," al-Qaisi said.

Saddam's sons, Uday and Qusay, were killed by US troops after the invasion of Iraq. To convince the public that they were actually dead, graphic images of their bloodied faces were made public.

Sami al-Askari, the political adviser of al-Maliki, said the government had not decided what to do with Saddam's body.

And if Saddam were allowed to be buried in Tikrit, which had been his main base of support, it would be out of character with the way the remains of some of the 20th century's other most notorious tyrants have been treated.

From Hitler to Ceausescu, the vanquishers of once powerful rulers have sought to ensure that memorials to them do not inspire the kind of passions they did in life.

Tojo, Japan's leader during the Second World War, was unceremoniously cremated after going to the gallows. The location of the ashes was kept secret for nearly three decades until the urn with his remains was secretly placed in the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, where it remains today.

Former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was buried secretly in a nondescript public graveyard. Although the grave markers bore fake names, the site was public knowledge within a year. He was executed by firing squad on Christmas Day, 1989.

Hitler's bones, the source of endless morbid fascination, were buried in secret, dug up, moved across East Germany, buried again and dug up once more only to be cremated. A piece of his skull is kept in Russia.

Iraq's leaders are obviously wrestling with the same questions. But in this case, they are complicated by the state of lawlessness in the country.

Parents were tortured and their children forced to watch

SADDAM'S highly successful strategy for staying in power during his 24-year tenure as president of Iraq was based on the calculated use and manipulation of fear.

As with the Nazis before him, Saddam cultivated a regime of paranoia and mistrust, in which people were encouraged to inform on the activities of family and neighbours, so that all lived in dread of being reported to the security services, whose reputation for brutality was unsurpassed.

Under Saddam, some of the worst human rights abuses of the past 30 years took place, all with his personal approval.

Executions were carried out routinely without due process, with bills then being sent to relatives for the cost of bullets.

The UN reported that, as far back as 1984, mass killings of political prisoners took place in order to 'cleanse' jails. As many as 4,000 deaths took place in one single event. Couples suspected of insurrection were tortured separately, and told that they would only be freed if they signed confessions admitting to being collaborators with opposition members. Women were reportedly stripped naked and burned with cigarettes. Men had their shoulders pulled back and were then hung from hooks in the ceiling while their children were forced to watch.

According to a 2001 Amnesty International report, "victims of torture in Iraq are subjected to a wide range of forms of torture, including the gouging out of eyes, severe beatings and electric shocks... some victims have died as a result and many have been left with permanent physical and psychological damage."

In 2002, the Foreign Office stated that Saddam had, through his Revolutionary Command Council, issued a series of decrees which set a new bar for violence. People found guilty of 'crimes' faced amputation, branding, having their ears cut off or other forms of mutilation.

In mid-2000, the council was said to have approved amputation of the tongue as a new penalty for slander or abusive remarks about Saddam or his family.

Saddam's personal paranoia led to him executing as many as 40 members of his own family, fearing that they might attempt to unseat him.

For women, Saddam Hussein's Iraq was particularly vicious. In one case, according to Amnesty International, dozens of women accused of prostitution were beheaded without a trial by members of the Saddam Fidayeen, the militia run by Saddam's feared elder son Uday. Prostitution was often used as an excuse to murder political opponents, such as Najat Mohammed Haydar, an obstetrician from Baghdad, who had criticised corruption in the Iraqi health service. She was beheaded in 2000.

Saddam's Sunni-dominated government also wreaked horrific destruction upon the other tribes and communities in the country. Documents passed to Human Rights Watch during the first Gulf War led to the first evidence that Saddam had, from 1983 onwards, executed thousands of Kurds in the north of the country. Kurdish villages were razed, while Saddam built a lavish palace in the area.

In total, the so-called 'Anfal' campaign against the Kurds resulted in the deaths of as many as 100,000 people, according to Amnesty International. That number includes the 5,000 civilians killed in the notorious chemical gas attack on Halabja.

The Shia community was also systematically oppressed. More than 100 Shia clerics disappeared during the 1990s. At a protest in 1999 against the murder of the most senior Shia cleric in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, government forces fired into the crowds, killing hundreds of civilians. This was government policy: a document dated 1991 from the Baghdad security headquarters recommended, during hostile demonstrations, "kill 95% of them and leave 5% for interrogation".

Most notoriously, Saddam wreaked terrible damage on the Marsh Arab society in the south of Iraq, draining the marshlands which had fed a 5,000-year-old culture, and forcing those who lived there to move to the cities, where his forces could keep a watch on them.

While he retains loyal support among his own Sunni followers, few others in Iraq will recall Saddam with anything other than a shudder.

Bush warns hanging will not halt the bloodshed

US PRESIDENT George Bush talked with his top national security adviser yesterday about the world's reaction to the hanging, an execution the president called a milestone on Iraq's road to democracy.

Bush cautioned that Saddam's death will not halt the bloodshed and political discord splitting the country. He warned of more challenges ahead for US troops.

"Many difficult choices and further sacrifices lie ahead," he said in a statement released on Friday night from his Texan ranch. "Yet the safety and security of the American people require that we do not relent in ensuring that Iraq's young democracy continues to progress."

The threat of violence comes at a time when Bush is completing his weeks-long effort to change US policy in Iraq.

The president's statement had a sober, measured tone that contrasted with his offhand remark after US troops found the deposed Iraqi dictator in an underground hideout in 2003. "Good riddance," Bush said then. "The world is better off without you, Mr Saddam Hussein."

Bush said Saddam received a fair trial, describing it as "the kind of justice he denied the victims of his brutal regime".

Saddam's hanging comes at the end of a difficult year for Iraqis and for US troops, he added.

The US death toll is nearing 3,000, and December has gone down as the deadliest for American troops this year.

Bush was asleep when Saddam was executed for the killings of 148 Shi'ite Muslims from an Iraqi town where assassins tried to kill him in 1982. Last Monday, Iraq's highest court rejected Saddam's appeal of the sentence and ordered him to be put to death.

"The president concluded his day knowing that the final phase of bringing Saddam Hussein to justice was under way," deputy White House press secretary Scott Stanzel said.

Bush arose shortly before 5am - 11am UK time - yesterday and had a 10-minute phone call about an hour later with national security adviser Stephen Hadley to discuss world reaction to the execution.

American sentiment about the war has changed dramatically since the spring of 2003 when jubilant crowds of Iraqis toppled a 40ft statue of the dictator.

Saddam's capture boosted Bush's political stature, following months of rising casualties.

Now, unrelenting violence and the rising US death toll has sent Bush's approval ratings on the war plummeting to their lowest ever levels.

Seven out of 10 voters disapprove of his management of the war and almost two-thirds doubt that a stable democratic government will ever be established in Iraq, according to a poll published earlier this month.

'Every day they beat me and I looked into their faces. I would never forget them'

VICTIMS of Saddam's brutal regime have told of their ordeals over the years, although many of the victims were unwilling to testify at his trial without anonymity.

English teacher Haidar Salman, who was repeatedly tortured during three years and 45 days in an Iraqi prison:

"They pulled me out of my classroom at gunpoint and dragged me to the security police headquarters. They blindfolded me and tied my hands, then put me in a cell underground 10 metres square, with no windows. They beat me with sticks, pulled my hands above my head and shoved electric cables on to my genitals.

" I spent 45 days in this room with 40 others, being tortured every day. There was no food, people around me were dying in the cell and I was sure I would die there. Every day they came to me and I looked into their faces. I would never forget them."

Footballer Sharar Haydar (below) was pulled out of class aged 16 and sent to meet Uday Saddam Hussein, who ran the national team. He said: "He didn't just torture us when we lost. Even when we won. He started by shaving hair - I know in Britain it's a fashion now, but in Iraq it's a big embarrassment. After that he started to put players in prison. He used to come to watch us. Sometimes we won three or four-nil, but still he [ordered guards to] take three or four players, put them in prison and torture them because he didn't like their form. Then he started to beat the coach, referees.

"There's a special prison, they do for you what they call 'the reception', because you are a new 'guest' or something. They took my clothes off, made me lie on the ground on my back and scratched me on the pavement so the skin on my back was all off and my legs were cut. Then they made me roll in the sand. Then [to ensure the wounds became infected] I had to climb a ladder and jump into dirty water."

Ahmed Hassan Mohammed (right) was one of only a handful of Iraqis who were willing to testify during Saddam's trial without anonymity. Choking back tears, he told the court: "I swear by God, I walked by a room and... saw a grinder with blood coming out of it and human hair underneath. There were mass arrests. Women and men. Even if a child was one day old they used to tell his parents: 'Bring him with you'. They tortured him by electric shock and they would beat him before my father, who was born in 1905. They would ask him where your brothers are. And he had no idea.

"The mask they put on my face was falling because I was so little. They were torturing women in front of me. It's OK if they torture me or my brothers. But why do you take my mother and sisters?"

Novelist Haifa Zangana was held in the infamous Abu Ghraib jail following time in another of Saddam's prisons. She has since written: "How can you talk about your humiliation, your weakness, letting yourself and others down, your reduction to an animal sleeping with urine and faeces? Can you explain how your mind loses its grip on nerves and muscles, how fear grows inside you like weed? Silence becomes your refuge while carrying your shame and guilt for being alive. Thirty years on I still wake at 2am every morning. That is the time they used to lead me out of my cell for interrogation."