Gość: maurycy
IP: *.jeleniag.sdi.tpnet.pl
26.01.03, 10:47
New York Times:
Like other dictators who wrote bloody chapters in 20th-century history, Mr.
Hussein was primed for violence by early childhood. Born into the murderous
clan culture of a village that lived off piracy on the Tigris River, he was
harshly beaten by a brutal stepfather. In 1959, at age 22, he made his start
in politics as one of the gunmen who botched an attempt to assassinate Iraq's
first military ruler, Abdel Karim Kassem.
Since then, Mr. Hussein's has been a tale of terror that scholars have
compared to that of Stalin, whom the Iraqi leader is said to revere, even if
his own brutalities have played out on a small scale. Stalin killed 20
million of his own people, historians have concluded. Even on a proportional
basis, his crimes far surpass Mr. Hussein's, but figures of a million dead
Iraqis, in war and through terror, may not be far from the mark, in a country
of 22 million people.
Where the comparison seems closest is in the regime's mercilessly sadistic
character. Iraq has its gulag of prisons, dungeons and torture chambers —
some of them acknowledged, like Abu Ghraib, and as many more disguised as
hotels, sports centers and other innocent-sounding places. It has its
overlapping secret-police agencies, and its culture of betrayal, with family
members denouncing each other, and offices and factories becoming hives of
perfidy.
"Enemies of the state" are eliminated, and their spouses, adult children and
even cousins are often tortured and killed along with them.
Mr. Hussein even uses Stalinist maxims, including what an Iraqi defector
identified as one of the dictator's favorites: "If there is a person, then
there is a problem. If there is no person, then there is no problem."
There are rituals to make the end as terrible as possible, not only for the
victims but for those who survive. After seizing power in July 1979, Mr.
Hussein handed weapons to surviving members of the ruling elite, then joined
them in personally executing 22 comrades who had dared to oppose his ascent.
DOING the arithmetic is an imprecise venture. The largest number of deaths
attributable to Mr. Hussein's regime resulted from the war between Iraq and
Iran between 1980 and 1988, which was launched by Mr. Hussein. Iraq says its
own toll was 500,000, and Iran's reckoning ranges upward of 300,000. Then
there are the casualties in the wake of Iraq's 1990 occupation of Kuwait.
Iraq's official toll from American bombing in that war is 100,000 — surely a
gross exaggeration — but nobody contests that thousands of Iraqi soldiers and
civilians were killed in the American campaign to oust Mr. Hussein's forces
from Kuwait. In addition, 1,000 Kuwaitis died during the fighting and
occupation in their country.
Casualties from Iraq's gulag are harder to estimate. Accounts collected by
Western human rights groups from Iraqi émigrés and defectors have suggested
that the number of those who have "disappeared" into the hands of the secret
police, never to be heard from again, could be 200,000. As long as Mr.
Hussein remains in power, figures like these will be uncheckable, but the
huge toll is palpable nonetheless.
Just as in Stalin's Russia, the machinery of death is mostly invisible,
except for the effects it works on those brushed by it — in the loss of
relatives and friends, and in the universal terror that others have of
falling into the abyss. If anybody wants to know what terror looks like, its
face is visible every day on every street of Iraq.
"Minders," the men who watch visiting reporters day and night, are supposedly
drawn from among the regime's harder men. But even they break down, hands
shaking, eyes brimming, voices desperate, when reporters ask ordinary Iraqis
edgy questions about Mr. Hussein.
Using a satanic arithmetic, prison governors worked out how many prisoners
would have to be hanged to bring the numbers down to stipulated levels, even
taking into account the time remaining in the inmates' sentences. As 20 and
30 prisoners at a time were executed at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, warders
trailed through cities like Baghdad, "selling" exemption from execution to
shocked families, according to people in Iraq who said they had spoken to
relatives of those involved. Bribes of money, furniture, cars and even
property titles brought only temporary stays.
MORE recently, according to Iraqis who fled to Jordan and other neighboring
countries, scores of women have been executed under a new twist in a "return
to faith" campaign proclaimed by Mr. Hussein. Aimed at bolstering his support
across the Islamic world, the campaign led early on to a ban on drinking
alcohol in public. Then, some time in the last two years, it widened to
include the public killing of accused prostitutes.
Often, the executions have been carried out by the Fedayeen Saddam, a
paramilitary group headed by Mr. Hussein's oldest son, 38-year-old Uday.
These men, masked and clad in black, make the women kneel in busy city
squares, along crowded sidewalks, or in neighborhood plots, then behead them
with swords. The families of some victims have claimed they were innocent of
any crime save that of criticizing Mr. Hussein.