Posted on 11/09/2002 12:19:47 PM PST by aculeus
AS CHILDREN growing up in their father’s palace in Baghdad, Uday and Qusay Hussein acted out their sibling rivalries with more fervour than most. They surprised even their private army of bodyguards with their unbridled hatred for one another.
Uday, the elder of the two by three years, was mildly reprimanded in his early teens for putting his younger rival in hospital during a particularly violent fight that ended with Qusay sustaining a stab wound to his thigh and several broken ribs. The fight, it was claimed, was over who would stand on their father’s right-hand side during a military parade.
As the boys grew up, Saddam Hussein viewed their bitter rivalry as nothing more than a consequence of the closeness of their age. He refused to interfere as Uday regularly beat his younger sibling, on one occasion almost blinding him with a cigarette stub.
But as the brothers grew up, desperately vying to be their father’s favourite, the violent blood-feud continued. Yet as men, the focus of their anger would no longer be each other but the Iraqi people Saddam believed they were born to rule.
The White House is widely believed to be preparing the ground for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, drawing on archives that spell out in chilling detail the dictator and more recently, his sons’ reign of absolute terror.
The political hawks in Washington hope Saddam, Qusay and Uday - and some of their key henchmen - will be prosecuted for crimes against humanity if the tyranny topples.
Thousands of security officials and party functionaries who carried out their orders will also face a reckoning with the victims as part of the amnesty. The CIA believes that Saddam’s pen-pushers, like the bureaucrats of Hitler and Stalin, have meticulously logged human rights abuses. Documents that have emerged from inside Iraq have already recorded the mass execution of women, beheadings, brandings, the punishment of dissidents' relatives, the razing of villages and the deportation of their inhabitants.
The US believes many more such documents will record the names of victims and their tormentors, which they hope will help the commission in its work. The Future of Iraq Project, funded by the US and made up of Iraqi exiles, is to propose setting up the commission, modelled on a similar body in post-apartheid South Africa.
The focus of most of the intelligence gathering by the CIA continues to fall on the power struggle between Uday and Qusay. Following the Gulf War, it was taken for granted that Uday, infamous for a career of rape and pillage, would take over. However, a surprise attempt on his life at the end of 1996 temporarily put him in a wheelchair, allowing Qusay to take over both his offices and, more crucially, Saddam’s private army of bodyguards.
Qusay, also head of Saddam's intelligence agencies, seemed to be in the ascendancy. But over the last two years, Uday has once again tightened his grip and managed to usurp his father as the most feared man in Iraq.
Uday controls Iraq’s only private radio and television stations, and all its newspapers. Uday has used his control of the media to build up a personality cult and massive business empire.
According to dissidents who have recently escaped from Iraq, the assassination attempt on Uday’s life made him even more violent and increased his voracious appetite for rape. Uday’s former personal assistant, Hassan al Janabi, has told a Channel 4 Dispatches investigation that Saddam’s eldest son is building a powerbase to undermine his younger brother. He said: "When Uday was shot, he was confined to a wheelchair. He was no longer the Uday who would attend celebrations, go to the racing club or ride a horse. Previously he was a very active man but his situation changed and he became aggressive and devoid of humanity."
A former security guard at Baghdad racecourse recently claimed that Uday and his friends would gather at the clubhouse where, after consuming prodigious amounts of whisky, they would force naked women to wear numbers and race around the track.
But it is Uday’s passion for public executions that is attracting the international attention. In recent speeches, both Tony Blair and George Bush alluded to the execution of women in Iraq in 2000 and 2001 as an example of the sort of atrocity which makes Saddam Hussein unfit to rule.
As well as the testimony of Uday’s former assistant, the Dispatches team has uncovered eyewitness accounts of the execution of 15 women in a market square in the port of Basra. Ashraq Jabr, a 32-year-old Iraqi exile, claims she is willing to testify to the United Nations that she witnessed the public beheadings of 15 women accused of being prostitutes in October 2000. She and hundreds of others were ordered to attend the execution carried out by members of "Fedayeen Saddam" (Saddam's Redeemers), the private militia operated by Uday.
Ashraq, who had been ordered to attend the execution by Saddam’s Ba’ath party, said she was told the women were being killed because they were prostitutes - although prostitution is not normally considered a capital offence in Iraq.
The investigation has uncovered further witness testimonies of the state-sanctioned execution from a number of Iraqis in Basra, as well as political exiles in Europe. Officials in Baghdad say the beheadings never happened.
One of the women murdered in October 2000, Najat Mohammed Haidar, was a middle-aged obstetrician, according to human rights groups. Opposition organisations said she was killed because she complained about the black market in medicines at her hospital.
Witnesses have also come forward to detail the public execution of Umm Liq’a, a mother-of-three whose husband was a jailed Shi’ite activist. It is claimed the wife was abducted by Uday’s men last year and taken to a dusty square near the Baghdad Sheraton Hotel, where her head was virtually removed with the single stroke of a sword embossed in gold with the words: "For the honour of Saddam Hussein."
According to an eye-witness to the execution, there were signs of torture on her body due to beating and slashing. Rasha Juma, 34, a mother of two, who saw the execution from her flat overlooking the pitch and now lives in Britain said: "I knew the woman and she had blonde hair, but it had been shaved off. After she was executed, her head remained attached to her body by a thin layer of skin. When they lifted her, the head separated from the body. They picked up the head and placed it in the rubbish container."
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