Saddam a teenager when he first killed

The world’s greatest cowboy is getting a rodeo beating. US surveys right after 9/11 had seven of every ten Americans supporting George W. Bush’s war whoops against international terrorists. Latest polls have them going for an invasion of Iraq only if the UN okays it. Same with the British and Australians. That’s why their leaders are now advising Bush to give UN inspectors more time to flush out Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Last weekend ten million people marched for peace in over 30 US cities and dozens capitals all over Europe and Asia.

In contrast, nobody in recent months has rallied against Saddam’s brutality to his own people. Could it be that the world was lulled by his referendum, where all the ballots in a 98-percent voter turnout gave him a fresh mandate to rule? But then, there can’t be real suffrage under a despot.

That is the lament of Dr. Hussain Al-Shahristani, an Iraqi dissident who visited Manila this week. A nuclear chemist, he had defied Saddam’s order to make an atom bomb, and was thus thrown in torture prison. Ever since he escaped in 1991, Shahristani has been trying to direct world focus on Saddam’s series of genocidal acts using WMDs. He wishes that the UN would impose sterner sanctions on Saddam or even help oust him. But the UN has had a history of soft stands on mass murderers, as shown in Laos and Cambodia in the ’70s.

A recent article in The Economist stated that Saddam brags about first killing a man when he was but a teenager. Asked about this during an interview with The STAR, Shahristani quickly remembered the events of 1959.

Saddam was then applying for membership in the Baathist party. His test mission was to join the assassination of prime minister Abdul Kareem Khaasin. The party succeeded and took power. Saddam became head of its assassination cell, and quickly rose in rank. Twenty years later in July, Saddam declared himself supreme leader. Half of the party’s 20-man governing Revolutionary Council at the time were against him, and half were for him. In front of television cameras, he had the pros kill the antis. Thus did he gain complete control, Al Capone-style.

Control was vital in family affairs as well, Shahristani told The STAR. Months after Allied forces expelled Saddam’s invading troops from Kuwait in 1991, two sons-in-law fled to Jordan with his daughters Raghad and Rana and their babies. Saddam sent emissaries after them, persuading them to come home and feigning forgiveness for the embarrassing act of

disloyalty. Upon their return, he had his sons Uday and Qusay shoot the two men dead at the family compound.

That was well-reported in the press. What wasn’t was a subsequent event. "We have a saying in Iraq that the only children you can love more are the children of your children," Shahristani continued his account. "But Saddam was so afraid of the consequences of his acts that he had one of his own grandsons killed too. He suspected that the child, after learning of the treachery, would grow up and exact revenge."

Shahristani was himself a victim of Saddam’s cruelty. He was working late one night in Dec. 1979 at Iraq’s Atomic Energy Commission when the secret police arrested him on suspicion of sabotaging nuclear materials that Saddam was buying from France. They first stripped him and hanged him upside down to make him confess. He knew nothing about it but was tortured daily for nine months. Part of the plan to break him was to show torture as well in front of him. One time, he was taken to a chamber where a boy of nine, full of welts, was hanging by his wrists from the ceiling. "What did you do to anger them?" Shahristani whispered when they were alone. The boy said he only wanted to make classmates laugh when he wrote on the blackboard that "Saddam is a donkey." Asked also how he was, the boy said he felt nothing from his arms and hands. Two days later, Shahristani found out, the boy was killed.

Another time a Marsh Muslim woman was being ordered to explain where her husband, a suspected dissident, was. She didn’t know. A soldier grabbed her baby from her arms, then slammed her head on the concrete wall. When the baby wailed, the soldier killed it too, Shahristani recalled. Still another time, he got a reprieve from solitary confinement when he was shoved into a cell with two dozen other men. He recognized four of them to be fellow-scientists from the atomic center where they were researching the use of nuclear energy for medicine and electricity. Two of the four couldn’t move; their bones had been broken from whipping with iron bars, but were forbidden medical attention. One prisoner was bleeding in the rear; a soldier had assaulted him with a broken wine bottle.

In Sept. 1980 Saddam’s half-brother Barzan Tikriti had Shahristani delivered to a stately house to recuperate. For four months, Barzan tried to convince him to return to the research center and build an atom bomb for use against Iran, with which they had just begun war. Shahristani refused and was thrown back to prison. "I couldn’t do it," he explained. "I knew all (Saddam’s) weapons would be used against the Iraqi people."

Saddam’s secular Baathist ideology was intolerant of religionists, even moderate Islamists. He thus was always at odds with heads of Shiite Muslims whom comprise 95 percent of Iraq’s people. Shahristani said that Saddam often visits mosques nowadays only for show, to rally the support of the rest of the Arab world and Muslims against possible US invasion. "But he has destroyed many mosques to quash the madrasahs (Islamic schools)," the scientist said. Thousands of infuriated Iraqis have fled south and east, there to wage guerrilla war against Saddam. The despot has been pursuing them with biological and chemical WMDs. His favorite is nerve gas – mustard, tabun and sarin – with which he has killed 27,000 rebels and refugees in recent years, Shahristani revealed.

Saddam acquired mustard gas from the West, although its sale is regulated under the 1925 UN Protocal on chemical weapons. The nerve agent was first used in the first world war. Soldiers who inhaled it would so gasp with suffocation that they slit their own throats to be able to breath.

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The host asked a contestant in a Miss Central Luzon beauty tilt: "If you could live forever, would you and why?"

The girl in swimsuit beamed: "I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because if we are supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever."

Not bad in a land that restored English only last June as medium of instruction. Those to the language born express themselves in worse ways. A sampling:

"Smoking kills. If you’re killed, you’ve lost a very important part of your life." – Brooke Shields, during an interview to become spokesperson for an anti-smoking campaign.

"I’ve never had major knee surgery on any other part of my body." – Winston Bennett, University of Kentucky basketball forward.

"Outside of the killings, our city has one of the lowest crime rates in the country." – Mayor Marion Barry, Washington, DC.

"That lowdown scoundrel deserves to be kicked to death by a jackass and I’m just the one to do it." – A congressional candidate in Texas.

"Half this game is ninety percent mental." – Danny Ozark, Philadelphia Phillies manager.

"It isn’t pollution that’s harming the environment, it’s the impurities in our air and water that are doing it." – Al Gore

"I was provided with additional input that was radically different from the truth. I assisted in furthering that version." – Col. Oliver North, in his Iran-Contra testimony.

"The word ‘genius’ isn’t applicable in football. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein." – Joe Theisman, National Football League analyst.

"If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of failure." – Bill Clinton

"We are ready for an unforeseen event that may or may not occur." – Al Gore

"Traditionally, most of Australia’s imports come from overseas." – Keppel Enderbery

"Your food stamps will be stopped effective March 1992 because we received notice that you passed away. May God bless you. You may reapply if there is a change in your circumstances." – Social Services Department, Greenville, South Carolina.

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Catch Sapol ni Jarius Bondoc, Saturdays, 8 a.m., on DWIZ (882-AM).

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