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Saddam’s Other Crimes

By: Sabah Salih

December 7, 2005

Forget about the obvious stuff, the wholesale burning of Kurdish villages, the Halabja genocide, the concentration camps, the mass graves, the summary executions, the destruction of the southern marshlands.  Saddam’s tyranny was about a lot more that.

Saddam’s tyranny turned thinking into a state monopoly.  At home, school, and work, the citizen’s mind was under a constant ideological occupation.  Language was made totalitarian through and through.  What words and television failed to accomplish was accomplished through the dictator’s perpetual gaze.  His ever present portraits were not just an assault on the citizen’s sensory experience; they were meant to be the added enforcers of state dogma. 

At another level, the portraits functioned as state intervention in society’s understanding of what it meant to be man, offering Saddam as every man’s role model and every girl’s dream of a man.  His trademark moustache, well-groomed hairstyle, arrogant posture, and dictatorial body language gave men reason to be the tyrant’s devoted imitators; they all knew how important appearances were in determining a man’s loyalty to the state.

Under Saddam, television and the printed word, the theater and the arts ceased to ask questions or engage the imagination; they were turned into further tools of ideological indoctrination and manipulation. Each in its own ways worked to rob the citizenry of the beauty of story telling and the delights and surprises of artistic creation.  To narrate and to compose meant giving voice or shape to tyranny’s thinking.

And then there was the fear factor.  It came from virtually everyone and everywhere: the neighbor who for some silly reason didn’t like you, the neighbor who wondered why you didn’t have pictures of the President in every room, the colleague who was jealous of the car you were driving, the student who didn’t like the grade you gave him or her, the party member who gave you a strange look at a government-sponsored rally, the men eavesdropping on your conversation with friends at the café the night before, the family member who for some reason decided to turn against you. The consequences the citizenry suffered were not the main point; the main point was making sure the citizenry lived in constant fear of the state. 

Another hallmark of Saddam’s tyranny was that, as he himself once proudly explained on television, the law was just a piece of paper with his name on it, meaning he was both the maker and un-maker of the law.  The result was that a citizen’s plans could at any time be ruined by the dictator’s whims, one day it would be a decree banning all overseas travel until further notice (usually a euphemism for a year or more), another day it would be a decree requiring all teachers to go through annual military training, still another day it would be a decree forbidding an Iraqi from marrying a foreigner except for the higher ups in the party.  That way Saddam not only kept the citizenry on toe but also made them profoundly grateful for the smallest of freedoms.

Saddam’s tyranny also turned more than a million Kurds and Arabs and others into cultural nomads, shattering forever their sense of belonging to a homeland and a culture.  Wherever they are, they feel and are treated like exiles, perhaps one of the saddest situations for a human being to be in.  Robbed of the intimacy once they had with their language and culture and finding integration all but impossible in a land and a culture so different from theirs, these people can no longer listen to their native language, music, or poetry without feeling the profound pain of having lost forever a part of their cherished past.  Not knowing what will become of them eventually, these nomads live in a perpetual limbo, having neither a language nor a country that they can truly call theirs.

These are aspects of life under Saddam we seldom hear about; when you add them to all the others, you’ll see why the peoples of Iraq to this day remain brutalized.

None of that is unknown to those who have taken upon themselves the task of defending Saddam, but they defend him all the same, not just because one is the gruesome former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, known the world over as the defender of tyranny, and the other is the ex-Qatari Justice Minister Najib al-Nueimi, a man as far removed from the idea of justice as the dictator himself is; it is, more important, because these men have committed themselves to the elimination of the truth from Saddam’s reign of terror. Their goal is to reinvent the tyrant as a revolutionary confronting imperialism.  In doing so, they have, once again, thrown their lot behind cruelty.  Their repeated description of Chief Judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin’s court as “illegitimate” is farcical since totalitarian regimes like Saddam’s are by definition devoid of all legitimacy.  The good news is that, theatrics notwithstanding, Saddam and his henchmen are finally facing justice.  This is one of the greatest moments of triumph for humanity.      

Sabah Salih is Professor of English at Bloomsburg University, USA.