In the Eighties, I picked up a copy of Saddam’s Iraq: Revolution or Reaction, a collection of essays by Ann Clwyd, a Labour MP, and her fellow left-wing activists. On re-reading, what struck me was how little they knew. Clwyd was a good friend to the cause of Iraqi democracy, who never ran for cover when the going got rough. She and her colleagues did not intend to give Saddam Hussein an easy ride and correctly noted that he had built the cult of the personality of the classic totalitarian tyrant. But Moynihan’s Law meant they had no guide to the terror to tell them who was torturing whom and where. Blank spaces were all over their map. They suspected that ‘there be dragons’ but couldn’t identify the monsters and invite an insouciant world to face them.
Makiya’s achievement was to fill the gaps on the map of the police state. He described how the Soviet Union helped the Baath create the Amn, or state internal security department, and supplied it with surveillance and interrogation equipment. He reported the crimes of the Estikhbarat, or military intelligence, which the Baath based in Iraqi embassies to arrange the intimidation and assassination of potential leaders of the opposition among the millions of Iraqi refugees. Above all, he detailed the power of the Mukhabarat, the political secret police, which combined domestic and foreign intelligence gathering and spied on any part of the bureaucracy that might provide cover for a potential challenger to Saddam, including its rival intelligence services.
The whole country was under surveillance. In 2003, Steve Boggan of the London Evening Standard went into Baghdad with the American forces. He and his interpreter scouted the ruins of a burnt-out police station. Fortunately for them, Stasi spies from East Germany had helped train the Baathist secret police, and Saddam’s goons had adopted the German habit of meticulously recording every detail of their work. The Iraqi interpreter started reading papers going back decades and then stopped in astonishment. ‘Hairdressers,’ he exclaimed. ‘Hairdressers!’
Boggan got him to translate and heard how hairdressers in Baghdad had to report subversive remarks made by women under the driers. What was a hairdresser to do if her sensibly wary customers steered clear of politics? For how long could she keep telling the secret police that she had nothing to report, without running the risk of the spies marking her down as uncooperative?
Makiya described how it was dangerous to show curiosity in a country gripped by fear. People vanished. Weeks later the police returned their corpses to their families in sealed boxes. They gave them death certificates which stated that X had died in a fire or Y had died in a traffic accident. The procedures were correct in all respects except one. The police told the families that they must on no account open the boxes and look at the real injuries on the corpses. For their own safety, they had to obey and become complicit in spreading the official lie when they gave their friends and neighbours the reason for the deaths of their relatives.
Beyond the spies were the party’s militia, the regular police and the armed forces. Beyond the direct instruments of violence were the state’s employees and the million members of the Baath Party. All had to be ready to condemn others to torture and murder for fear that the same fate would meet them if they did not collaborate.
When Makiya added up the forces of oppression, he found there was one agent of the state for every twenty Iraqis, but I don’t think he understood the implications of his calculation until the Nineties.
Alexis de Tocqueville said of the French Revolution: ‘It is almost never when a state of things is the most detestable that it is smashed, but when, beginning to improve, it permits men to breathe, to reflect, to communicate their thoughts with each other, and to gauge by what they already have the extent of their rights and their grievances.’
All the attempted coups and insurrections in Iraq failed because the Baath had too many spies dedicated to stopping people breathing. There was no space to organize, no one to trust with your thoughts, and Saddam knew it. In 1971 he told the Baath that ‘with our party methods, there is no chance for anyone who disagrees with us to jump on a couple of tanks and overthrow the government’.
The hideous choice for Makiya, Iraq and all those who professed to believe in human rights was this: either they would have to wait for his death and the deaths of his sadistic sons Qusay and Uday, or they had to accept that the only way to remove the Baath was foreign invasion.
By the time he approached Mohamed Makiya, Saddam had closed down the alternative prospect of a rival faction within the party taking control and moderating Baathism as Khrushchev had moderated Soviet communism. In 1979, he became ‘the leader’, the undisputed master of both party and country, and staged a horror show that taught Iraqis that from now on anyone could be the torturer and anyone could be the torturer’s victim.
Saddam ordered the kidnapping of the families of one-third of the members of the Revolutionary Command Council and purged their supporters in the bureaucracy. He told his colleagues to cooperate or see his interrogators rape their wives and daughters.
They cooperated.
The ‘ringleaders’ were marched to a lecture hall to confess to their counter-revolutionary crimes before an audience of 1,000 party members and a camera crew Saddam had instructed to record the scene for posterity.
The film shows Saddam as a trusting and simple man who is overwhelmed with grief by the perfidy of colleagues he took to be friends. He tells the audience: ‘After the arrest of the criminals, I visited them in an attempt to understand the motive for their behaviour. “What political differences are there between you and me?” I asked. “Did you lack any power or money? If you had a different opinion why did you not submit it to the Party since you are its leaders?” They had nothing to say to defend themselves. They just admitted their guilt.’
Mystifying, really.
Saddam looks at the unsuspecting audience, produces a list and proclaims, ‘The people whose names I am going to read out should repeat the party slogan and leave the hall.’ To its astonishment, the audience realizes that Saddam believes there are traitors among them.
A party official goes down the list. After he announces each of the sixty-six names, armed guards force each doomed apparatchik to cry ‘One Arab nation with a holy message! Unity, freedom and socialism!’ before dragging him from the hall. Saddam enjoys the spectacle. He puffs on a cigar as panic floods the room. When his arrested colleagues try to protest their innocence, he dismisses them with a wave of his hand. No one knows who will be next. No one knows what real or imagined slight to Saddam will be a death sentence.
When the last name has been read and the list has been put away, the survivors of the purge weep with hysterical gratitude at their escape from murder. ‘Long live the father of Uday!’ screams one. ‘Saddam is too lenient,’ screams another.
As a gesture of solidarity, Saddam condescends to sit among them. ‘We don’t need Stalinist methods to deal with traitors here,’ he says. ‘We need Baathist methods.’
The Baathist method is something special. Saddam asks the survivors to execute the ‘traitors’. Personally execute them, that is, by joining him in a firing squad. His was a new totalitarian tactic in a century that seemed to have exhausted the possibilities of brutality. Stalin made Molotov divorce his wife and then vote to have her imprisoned as a Zionist agent. Even that master of cruelty did not think to have him murder her.
By forcing the Iraqi elite to be the executioners of their colleagues, Saddam was binding them to him. They were criminals now, his made men, who had to sink or swim with the big boss. The purge over, Saddam ordered his armies to begin a war against Iran that was, for once, all about oil. Makiya watched the body count run towards a million and the Iraqi economy collapse. He heard of the generals Saddam had shot for lowering