--- Adbul Razzak Abdul Wahed , Poet
Can't crush our spirit!
John Laughland
The Spectator, 28 Oct.
IT was with a troupe of Ukrainian folk-dancers that I crossed the Syrian
desert. The bus trundled through the twilit streets of Amman and out
into the wasteland beyond as great picnics of sausage, tomato and cheese
were magicked out of holdalls in that inimitable Soviet way. Vodka was
tipped into plastic cups and toasts were drunk to the friendship of
peoples. A wiry young man whipped out his guitar and the sound of Rodina
maya floated out into the hot, dry night air. One of the troupe, built
like Bianca Castafiore, waddled to the back of the bus and, for a verse
or two, coated with her honeyed voice the some-what more robust singing
of the others. Thus we lolloped across the aching expans-es of sand and
scrub for 16 hours on the overnight drive to Baghdad.
Pariah tourism has its charms. To accompany a Delegation of the Society
for the Friendship between the Ukrainian and Iraqi Peoples to the 12th
Babylon Festival, the purpose of which was to celebrate 'From
Nebuchadnezzar to Saddam Hus-sein, 2,500 years of Jihad and Glorious
Development', must surely count as one of the few thrills left in an
otherwise pitilessly globalised world. The Anglo-American sanctions only
add to the excitement.
The Babylon Festival is the Mother of all Delegations. Bulgarians,
Romanians, Turks, Turkmen, Mongolians, Jordanians and Ital-ian peaceniks
arrived, most of them resplen-dent in national costume, reeling their
way in the procession to the festival's opening night to show their
solidarity with the Iraqi people's resistance to the evil
Anglo-Ameri-can duo. In true Middle Eastern manner (I have heard exactly
the same thing in Azer-baijan), Saddam's name was repeatedly invoked in
the opening speeches, invariably to rhetorical crescendi which invited,
and naturally received, enthusiastic applause.
Of the fact that Iraq is a serious dicta-torship, there can be little
doubt. The whole land is adorned with images of the Iraqi leader: Saddam
as a field marshal or as a Bedouin; Saddam praying to Allah outside
mosques; Saddam holding the scales of justice outside the court house or
a twig of blossom outside a fertility clinic. The contrast with
Yugoslavia under Slobo-dan Milosevic could not be greater. When I asked
one of the few Iraqis I was able to meet in private - i.e. without my
minder from the Ministry of Information -whether people ever blamed the
regime for their woes, his reply was a masterpiece of concision. 'No. If
you criticise the gov-ernment here, you go to prison.'
Yet even dictators have constituencies, so I decided to visit one of
Saddam's most prominent admirers, Abdul Razzak Abdul Wahed. He is Iraq's
national poet and pens a few apposite verses whenever there is a great
moment in Iraqi history. 'I am writing a play,' he told me as he served
treacle-black Turkish coffee in the brightly lit salon of his villa on
the banks of the Tigris, 'about a king who falls in love with a poor
village girl. Through their friendship, she teaches him the virtues of
simple people and of a simple life. He learns from her to turn his back
on the intrigues and corruption of the court, and to imitate the
strengths of his own peo-ple instead. The play shows how a leader and a
party can be made by the people, not the people by the leader.' The
hagiographi-cal allusion to Saddam, who has always claimed a mystical
relationship between himself and the Iraqi people. is obvious.
On a side table made of inlaid wood, there is a photograph of the poet
enjoying a convivial joke with the hero-President. 'Sometimes,' Abdul
Razzak Abdul Wahed explains in awe, 'Saddam looks at you with the eyes
of a child. When he prays at the graves of his fathers, his eyes are
full of tears. At other times, his regard can be so fierce that you
think a sword will cut off your head.' Adbul Razzak Abdul Wahed's own
eyes flashed at this point. 'I once asked him,' he went on, '"How do you
combine these two qualities, of humanity and ter-ror?" "A leader must
lead like that Saddam replied.' Abdul Razzak Abdul Wahed paused for
dramatic effect. The Iraqi Presi-dent is indeed famous for combining
extraordinary brutality with occasional acts of exceptional kindness -
the classic hall-marks of a psychopath. 'I told Saddam once,' my host
went on, '"You are not a politician. You are a man of principle. Strong
enough and faithful enough to say no." That is why Iraqis love him. He
once said to me, "When I visit farms in Iraq, the peasants greet me as
'Saddam'. I feel I am close to their hearts because my name is on their
lips."'
Peasants may be direct folk but this is not how most Iraqis feel. In a
sure sign of dictatorship, a sort of magnetic field of fear surrounds
any potential mention of his name. In these conditions, it is the signal
achievement of the Anglo-American sanc-tions to have actually bolstered
Saddam by offering him on a plate the means by which to entrench his own
organised self-adula-tion, while impoverishing and bombing ordinary
Iraqis. Everything good in Iraq is now thanks to Saddam's heroism and
beneficence, while all shortages are the fault of the sanctions. Saddam
giveth but the UN taketh away.
Many Iraqis sincerely admire Saddam for having stood up to the
Anglo-Americans, even though this has allowed him to tighten the screws
at home. 'I don't care how many statues they put up to him,' a plumpish
middle-class lady told me over dinner. (The food in Iraq is fabulous.)
'We will never accept the humiliation of being ruled by an American
satrap, like all those sheikhs in Arabia.' Women, indeed, are among
Sad-dam's staunchest supporters, not least because Iraq is a relatively
liberal country for them.
Some Iraqis even defend Saddam's pro-gramme of building lavish
presidential palaces. 'It is an act of defiance against the sanctions,'
according to one lowly govern-ment official, explaining the alleged
public acceptance of such conspicuous consumption while ordinary Iraqis
languish in poverty.
Britain and America's increasingly John Wayne-style foreign policy is
not only ugly, based as it is on humiliating one~s enemies. It is also
doomed to failure because it neglects that most basic human instinct,
dig-nity. As Freya Stark wrote in the Baghdad Times in 1928: 'It is much
easier for most people to forgive a real injury rather than a slight to
their vanity.' The punitive regime of sanctions, imposed for the last
decade by Britain and America in the teeth of opposi-tion from France
and Russia, is now in tat-ters as planes fly into Baghdad every week.
For ten years we have applied in Iraq the most ancient and the most
modern forms of attack on a civilian population - besieging and bombing
- and all for what? As Adbul Razzak Abdul Wahed told me as he led me out
into the evening air, 'The whole civilised world, all the power of
America, all their missiles and ships, have been against this lit-tle
country for ten years. Yet they have not crushed our spirit.'