Ten years on, and the human shield victims still seek justice
A decade after Britons were used as human shields in the Gulf War, they want the Iraqi leader in the dock. Gaby Hinsliff reportsSunday December 1, 2002
The Observer
The videotape made harrowing viewing. More than a decade after it was shot, Patrick Herbert sat down yesterday and watched film of the moment that would come to dominate his life. The short tape recorded his audience with Saddam Hussein: a gaunt and bewildered Patrick, who had spent three months held captive at gunpoint along with thousands of foreign nationals being used as a human shield during the Gulf war, was shown being solemnly lectured on why he was a 'guest' of the Iraqi dictator.
The British banker had been summoned to the presidential palace in Baghdad for the bizarre televised meeting as a propaganda stunt - prompted by the arrival of his wife Gwenette and nine other British women in Baghdad to plead for their husbands' release over the heads of the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.
'It is very, very easy to see how people come under his spell,' Herbert, who now works for the NHS, said yesterday. 'That meeting was extraordinary. Although we were sitting all around a fairly large room, and he was sitting at the head of it, you felt drawn to him. 'He has a magnetism, a charisma which in normal circumstances you would say was almost great, but was probably an evil charisma.'
At the end of the lecture, Saddam suddenly announced that as a reward for the wives' 'bravery in the face of the tyranny of Mrs Thatcher', their men could go. Clutching an official photograph album of colour snaps of himself, his wife and their six-year-old daughter with a beaming Saddam, Herbert was freed, his terrifying ordeal over.
Copies of the video and those photographs have now been turned over to lawyers attempting to prepare a landmark legal case against the Iraqi dictator. Britain's Attorney General is due to announce shortly whether he will allow a groundbreaking attempt by Indict, the pressure group chaired by Labour MP Ann Clwyd, to charge Saddam in the British courts with war crimes over his taking of British hostages during the 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
A legal opinion prepared by Clare Montgomerie QC, a leading human rights barrister from Cherie Blair's Matrix chambers, concludes the case against Saddam is 'overwhelming': the Prime Minister has requested a copy.
For Herbert, 57, and many other ex-hostages whose traumas have been revived by the prospect of another war with Iraq, it is the best hope of justice. He would rather see Saddam in court than toppled in a war risking civilian lives.
'I don't have feelings of vengeance. I just believe that it is part of the process of justice that he should be held to account,' says Herbert.
Like many other Britons working in Kuwait, he believed the British Embassy's reassurance that increasing Iraqi aggression was only 'sabre rattling' and stayed on through the long hot days of July 1990. When the shells began landing on Kuwait City on 2 August marking the Iraqi invasion, he initially mistook them for the noise of building work.
Herbert and a colleague went into hiding when the Iraqis ordered all Western citizens to come forward. But a month after the invasion came the knock at the door. 'I looked through the spyhole and saw 10 Kalashnikovs pointing at the doorway,' he recalls.
He was taken first on a gruelling 14-hour journey to Baghdad, then flown back to the airport at Basra to act as a human shield, living 200 yards from a fuel dump which would have exploded and killed his 10-strong group of hostages had it been bombed.
First came the terror: that subsided eventually into a constant, dull shredding of the nerves. 'You suffer from immense boredom, you are constantly on edge because everybody has a gun except you,' he says. 'I have heard hostages say they were never in any doubt that they would get away. That's just sheer bravado.'
The guards were sometimes kind, sometimes brutal. The Basra hostages were once treated to a bizarre party to celebrate the reunification of Germany, complete with barbecue and cake iced in the colours of the German flag.
Yet a fellow hostage later told Herbert he had been driven into the desert, blindfolded, surrounded by soldiers priming their rifles and convinced he was to be shot dead. Both men and women have reported being raped by their captors: beatings by guards were not uncommon.
Nor did release mark the end of their troubles. Reports of depression, unexplained flashes of aggression, wrecked careers, and broken marriages are not uncommon: there have been two suicides. The parents of Colin Blears, the little boy whose fear as Saddam ruffled his hair in yet another televised propaganda exercise became one of the lasting images of the war, have said he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder - as did Patrick Herbert.
Maureen Chappell, who was captured with her engineer husband John and their two teenage children when their flight to Madras stopped over in Kuwait on the day of the invasion, says the drama deeply affected her children, who saw a Kuwaiti shot dead at the airport.
Her son John, now aged 26, is still finishing his degree after repeatedly dropping out of his studies: her daughter Jennifer, 12 at the time, has been divorced and is currently out of work. 'It has been difficult for them to settle,' says Chappell.
She too would rather see Saddam indicted than the West rush into war too hastily: 'I think all the shouting from America is not particularly productive.'
Clwyd has secured the support of more than 80 MPs - including Conservative backbencher Andrew Selous, whose brother was a hostage - for the campaign to indict Saddam and three other senior figures: his Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz; his cousin and governor of occupied Kuwait, Ali Hassan Al-Majid, better known as 'Chemical Ali' for orchestrating the gassing of the Kurds; and Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan.
Clwyd is undaunted by arguments that there is no real prospect of them standing trial, saying that former Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic was indicted despite widespread scepticism, and faces an international tribunal. In the US, Pentagon lawyers are compiling evidence for war crimes charges against the Iraqi regime.
'Our QC says, short of getting Saddam to sign a confession in blood, there is nothing more the law could possibly require. When people are looking at alternatives to war in bringing about regime change then this is a very strong proposition,' she said.
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