Tomb of the unholy martyr

Published on Sunday 5 August 2007 00:43

THE grave site is forlorn. There are intricate inscriptions hailing him as a martyr, as a hero of the insurgency and as "the eagle of the Arabs". But there is also the mundane bric-a-brac of his life - a carved wooden eagle hung with his personal prayer beads and a gallery of informal photographs.

Saddam Hussein's burial place, in his native village on the banks of the Tigris, is the only public space in Iraq where the former ruler is openly extolled. Everywhere else, he is a nonperson.

Under a decree dating from the American occupation in 2003, all paintings, photographs and statues of Saddam are forbidden, as are public protests in his support.

But in Awja, Saddam's legend lives on, though only as a pale shadow of what it was. The old reception area where he lies - renamed 'Martyrs' Hall' by the family members who manage it - has none of the grandeur of the palaces he built during his 24-year rule. The trickle of visitors drops on some days to twos and threes, and only rarely reaches double figures, far short of making Awja a pilgrimage site on the scale of Iraq's religious shrines.

Part of the problem is the danger - in death as in life - that envelops all that involves Saddam. Since his burial at the end of last year, no other Western reporter has reached the site, though it lies less than three miles from the centre of Tikrit, a strategic city long garrisoned by American forces that is now under the control of the Iraqi army and police. Reaching Awja required what amounted to a guarantee of safe conduct from the sheikh of Saddam's Albu Nasir tribe and from other people in the village with links to the "national resistance" - Sunni insurgents who control many of the riverbank villages and towns around Tikrit, the capital of Salahuddin province.

The site itself offers mixed messages. On broken ground outside the hall, behind a line of wilting sunflowers, Saddam's family has buried six others, including his two oldest sons, Uday and Qusay, whose brutishness and greed, unfiltered by the propaganda that made a mythic figure of Saddam, made them among the most hated people in Iraq. Three others buried near them were associates who stood trial with Saddam and were hanged in the same dank prison chamber in Baghdad within weeks of his execution at dawn on December 30.

The scant flow of visitors reflects, too, the chaos that has supplanted the tyranny Iraq endured under Saddam. Awja, 100 miles north of Baghdad, is in the middle of a fiercely contested war zone, where American troops passing on Iraq's main north-south highway are regularly ambushed and bombed by insurgents. In addition, there is continuing fury among Saddam's loyalists at his overthrow, trial and hanging, a mood that simmers so strongly at Awja that outsiders have generally stayed away.

The grave site, humble as it is, reflects something more than a hometown's determination to honour a fallen son. It shows the refusal of the Sunni minority, who ruled Iraq for centuries until Saddam's overthrow, to reconcile themselves to the assumption of power by the Shi'ite majority who won elections made possible by the American occupation authority.

Saddam was far from the beloved figure his propagandists depicted, even among the people of his home region. Not far into many conversations, people here speak of the ruthless killing that characterised his rule, of Sunnis as well as of his principal victims, Shi'ites and Kurds.

And they point to the 128-building palace complex Saddam built on a hill above the Tigris in Tikrit. For three years it was used as an American military command complex but is largely abandoned now. It is cited by locals as proof of how Saddam used Iraq's oil wealth to benefit himself, his family and a coterie of loyalists.

"Saddam Hussein led the country into destruction, and in doing so destroyed himself and his family, and led us into the present chaos," said Abdullah Hussein Ejbarah, the 50-year-old deputy governor of Salahuddin province.

Like many senior officials in the region, Ejbarah is a former high-ranking member of Saddam's Ba'ath Party, and was a fast-rising officer in the Special Republican Guard until members of Ejbarah's Jabouri tribe tried to assassinate Saddam in 1993. Ejbarah was lucky to escape the purge that followed.

Now, he treads an uneasy path as an intermediary between the American military command, with a huge regional headquarters for northern Iraq five miles north-west of Tikrit, and the shadowy oligarchy that holds much of the real power in Salahuddin.

Ejbarah, with the Tikrit governor and the leader of Saddam's tribe, flew by American helicopter to Baghdad on the day of Saddam's hanging and waged an argument deep into the night against the new Iraqi government's plans to bury him in an unmarked, secret grave.

When Saddam's body first arrived from Baghdad before dawn of December 31, it was buried quickly, to the accompaniment of angry protests, in the interior courtyard of a local mosque, then moved within hours to a caramel-coloured, two-storey reception hall built by Saddam as a gift to the village. There, the body lies in a shallow grave dug beneath the building's rotunda, under a huge chandelier. Covering it are two Iraqi flags of the design used under Saddam, with the words 'God is Great' in his handwriting.

Outside, down a pathway of broken concrete paving stones, lie the remains of the others chosen by Saddam's family for burial here, each, like Saddam, lying with their head toward Mecca. His two sons, killed in a shootout with American troops in Mosul in 2003 and reburied here after Saddam's hanging, lie at the back; beside them is Qusay's son, Mustafa, who was 15 when he died in the shootout with his father.

The other three in the front row, all of whom were hanged, are Saddam's half-brother, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, former director of the secret police; Awad al-Bandar, former chief judge of the Revolutionary Court; and Taha Yassin Ramadan, a former vice president.

But it is at Saddam's graveside that visitors linger. A remembrance book with perhaps 1,500 signatures shows that most visitors come from the country's Sunni heartland, predominantly from the provinces of Salahuddin, Anbar, Baghdad, Diyala and Nineveh, all insurgent strongholds.

On a wall hangs a further reminder of the insurgency, a black banner inscribed with a message in golden thread: "Gift from the Adhamiya mujahedin," a hard-line Sunni neighbourhood in Baghdad that was the birthplace of the Ba'ath Party in Iraq.

The condolence messages are replete with references to Saddam as a martyr, with prayers that God speed him to his reward in "his wide heavens". But many, too, echo the themes Saddam pressed in his courtroom harangues in the last 15 months of his life - damnation to Iraq's American occupiers, to Iran as the backer of the Shi'ite religious parties that now rule here and to Israel.

"May God bless Comrade Saddam Hussein, and have mercy upon him," wrote a Ba'ath Party visitor in May who gave his name as Comrade Abu Qaysar. He added: "By the will of God, victory will soon be ours, and we will liberate our beloved Iraq from the claws of the Zionists and their followers."