Posted on 06/14/2003 10:03:04 AM PDT by blam
Iraqis shop for glimpses into Saddam's life
June 13 2003 at 05:33PM
By Tim Sullivan
Baghdad, Iraq - Men push toward the makeshift market stall, elbowing their way to the front and standing on their toes to get a look at Ali Zowrayi's wares -behind-the-curtain glimpses of the fallen dictator who terrorised a nation.
"People who aren't going to buy, leave!" Zowrayi yells, clutching cash in one hand and a stack of video CDs in the other. The crowd ignores him. They are enthralled with his stock.
On the streets of the capital, Saddam Hussein's home movies are there for the taking, on crudely copied and labelled CDs. Also for sale: picture after picture of his notorious son Uday, a famously vain man with a penchant for cruelty.
'Dirty family! See the dirty family!' Finally freed of Saddam, the people of Iraq are getting a look at lives that were only imagined until just two months ago.
"Dirty family! See the dirty family!" Zowrayi calls out, a Baghdad carnival barker selling glimpses into the lives of the most feared people in Iraq. On the table, carefully watched by Zowrayi's unsmiling partner, is a battered nylon bag. It's stuffed with customers' cash.
"People want to see the truth about Saddam," Zowrayi said. "Saddam always talked about his faith and what he was doing for the country, but the reality was different."
Zowrayi is one of many vendors selling Saddam photographs and videos in the Souk Bab al-Sharji, a poor-man's market famed as a good spot to buy everything from tennis shoes to bathroom taps, much of it stolen.
But he's a great salesman, and he always draws a crowd. He says he sells 500 of the CDs every day, for about a dollar each, earning a fortune by Baghdad standards.
Saddam Hussein is boring There are more than a dozen different Saddam CDs for sale - the covers awash with photographs of the tyrant and his family. Most are compilations of international news reports about the dictator or the war. A few show movies or plays - from outside Iraq - that ridicule Saddam.
But one is a genuine family movie. The section with Saddam lasts just seven minutes. No one seems to know where it came from; presumably, it was looted from a palace.
The footage, which shows the family gathering for photos before a birthday party for the youngest daughter, Hala, offers the world a surprise about the man who blustered to the world for so long: Saddam Hussein is boring.
It's seven minutes of stilted poses and poor attempts at humour and phony smiles. If it wasn't Saddam's family, it wouldn't be interesting for 20 seconds.
The footage was filmed in some sort of salon, with archways and loud furniture. The women's hair is big - very big - and the clothing looks like it was stolen from the costume trailer of the American TV series Dynasty.
So it was probably filmed in the mid-1980s, during Iraq's bloody war with Iraq. It was a time when Saddam became increasingly paranoid about security, and there don't seem to be any windows in the room - indicating it may be in a bomb shelter.
But the dialogue is what you'd expect from any family.
There is Saddam with his wife, Sajida, nudging her to look happy for the photographer.
"Laugh," he says, smiling. "Laugh for the pictures."
And there is Uday, then perhaps in his late 20s, pushing aside Hala, a girl turning maybe 11, from the prime picture spot next to their father.
But Saddam, who is dressed in a military uniform, doesn't like his son's gentle bullying and walks away. "Udayi wants to make trouble for us," he laughs, belly jiggling above his belt.
And on and on.
The intrigue behind the videos, too, is worthy of a particularly graphic prime-time soap.
Uday, it's said in Iraq, regularly had people tortured for showing up late for appointments. Photos being hawked on the streets show him gleefully firing an assault rifle into the air during a party as women nearby cover their ears.
The sons-in-law - two brothers who married two of Saddam's daughters -defected to Jordan in the mid-1990s, but were lured back by Saddam with promises of forgiveness. Both were tortured and shot.
There is the birthday girl, Hala, by now a young mother. In Baghdad, it is rumoured, she was murdered by Baath Party thugs after her father's downfall.
Finally, there is Saddam - his fate undetermined, now the subject of a million rumours.
"I want to know the secrets of Saddam," said a CD buyer in the market named Abdul, who wouldn't give his last name because he still fears the former dictator. "Before, we couldn't even say his name, and now we can know the truth."
Zowrayi doesn't need his CDs to know how bad Saddam was. He and his partner spent seven years in the dictator's prisons, jailed for selling tapes of speeches by Muslim clerics.
He pulls up his shirt to reveal a sickening, tennis-ball sized knot of flesh protruding from his stomach. It's the result, he says, of beatings by Saddam's security forces.
These days, as his customers lay down dinars with Saddam's face to see movies of Saddam's family, the dictator is gone and the prisoner is profiting.
"Now," Zowrayi says, "I'm getting some kind of justice." - Sapa-AP
The Iraqi resistance movement is rapidly filling its coffers in order to wage a war of resistance against Imperialist American Occupation. The Iraqis will never accept foreign rule, they will rise up and defend their homeland, and... </sarcasm>
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