According to Arab dignitaries who have visited Saddam, he has become so paranoid about his security since the Gulf War that he maintains 250 safe homes. The staff in each house prepares dinner every night as if he is to arrive; nobody knows where he will sleep until he shows up at the door.
The Kamel clan was not the first to betray him. Last June he was shaken by a coup attempt led by the powerful Dulaimi clan from his Sunni heartland that had been a pillar of his armed forces. Provoked by the torture and death of a clan member accused of involvement in a previous coup attempt, General Turki al-Dulaimi led his troops in a bold but suicidal march on Baghdad. The rebels were defeated in a day.
It has not escaped the attention of most Iraqis that while the latest confrontation has occurred less than six years after the Gulf War, the reaction around the world this time has been quite different. America’s use of missiles was backed wholeheartedly only by Britain, Canada and Germany. Although he lost a few isolated radar and anti-aircraft batteries, Saddam succeeded in dividing the coalition that had been ranged against him.
The main reason for the change was the nature of Saddam’s offensive. He did not roll his army across an international border and occupy another country, but sent a limited force of tanks and infantry into Arbil, a Kurdish city 12 miles inside the Kurdish ‘safe haven’ patrolled by allied jets.
He was also invited in by the Kurdish faction that represents the majority of Kurds, the Kurdish Democratic party (KDP). Other Middle Eastern countries saw the American intervention as a blatantly inconsistent piece of interference in an internal problem. The United States had not objected when Turkey sent 35,000 troops into northern Iraq last year to attack bases of rebellious Kurds; nor when Iran sent 3,000 troops across the border into northern Iraq last month.
Turkey and Saudi Arabia, among the countries that are the closest allies in the Middle East, refused Washington permission to launch strikes from their soil. The Arab League, for once in agreement, denounced the attacks on Iraq.
Just as striking, the first criticism of the American bombing came from a Gulf newspaper, condemning the action and saying that all Arabs should oppose it ‘as a matter of honour’. It was the first time since the Gulf War that any paper in the region used the word ‘brothers’ to refer to Iraqis.
France was critical and Britain was unable to get a resolution denouncing the Iraqi incursion through the UN security council following strong opposition from Russia. By the end of the week, Saddam’s tanks were still dug in in northern Iraq and the allied coalition was in tatters.
For now, Saddam may have little choice but to accept the establishment of a security zone inside its territory by Turkey, which says this is needed to fight Kurds battling for independence from Ankara. He should not be expected to be quiescent forever, however. He has every prospect of increasing his power and has a lot of grudges to settle. Those who know Saddam say the one certainty is that he never forgets and never forgives.
For the ordinary Iraqi, life seems likely to get harder. While the so-called ‘war rich’ who have profited from the black market in Baghdad continue to work on new palaces, most people are worried about food prices driven to new peaks by the crisis.
Privations, large and small, continued last week. People had to shower at 4am because electricity cuts meant there was no water during daytime. In a hospital in Baghdad, surgeons who no longer had paediatric surgical equipment operated on children with adult-sized instruments. ‘It is butchery,’ one doctor agonised.
Saddam’s offensive put into limbo a UN-negotiated deal that would have enabled him to sell oil for food. There now seems little hope of relief in the near future.
Life is more comfortable but barely less bleak for Saddam’s two daughters and their six young children. They were not in the villa where Kamel and his other relatives were killed, but face a dark future.
The two young widows were forced to move into the house of their mother’s sister, where they are virtual prisoners. They cannot go out. Their children were taken away and they have been told they may never see them again. Sources in Baghdad said Rana, who was close to her husband Saddam Kamel, tried to kill herself and had to be hospitalised.
Ali, his sisters and cousins are living a sequestered life in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s birthplace. Ali may still be drawing pictures for his grandfather in vain. He and the other children are being raised to know that their parents were traitors.
Middle East
The Hawk who downed a dove: assassination of Yitzhak Rabin
12 November 1995
Marie Colvin and Jon Swain
Her name was Nava, and she was everything that Yigal Amir, a rather serious student at the religious university of Bar Ilan, wanted. Amir, his friends say, was an arrogant man, lonely and aloof, who had never had a girlfriend before because no girl had been good enough.
He began pursuing her as soon as they met in the spring of 1994. ‘She was rich, pretty, clever, pure and religious. She had it all,’ said a fellow student. They dated for five months. ‘They never broke the limits of what is permissible between a religious pair, but there was a huge commitment.’ So intense was the relationship, they planned to marry.
Then, in January this year, she abruptly left him for his best friend, Shmuel Rosenblum. Amir was stunned. ‘The talk on campus was that her parents had disapproved of her marrying him because he was poor and of Yemeni extraction,’ the friend said. A month later Nava married her new boyfriend.
Amir changed. He had always been fiercely nationalist, with a deep religious belief that God’s holy land had to be zealously guarded by the Jews. He was utterly opposed to Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister, and his policy of trading land for peace with the Palestinians.
Now he became outrageous, outspoken and dangerous. The extremist, angered and rejected, had tipped over into a potential assassin. ‘I think that not only political views caused the murder, but also his feeling of disappointment in his personal life,’ the friend said. ‘Suddenly we heard him talking about the duty to kill Rabin.’
A fellow student, Shmulik, recalled: ‘His arguments were always based on the Torah [the body of Jewish sacred writings and traditions].’ Amir would tell his friends that, since Rabin had given up parts of the land of Israel, it was a mitzvah (positive obligation) to kill him.
Eight days ago, on a Saturday night in Tel Aviv, he walked up to Rabin, pumped two exploding bullets into him, and discharged that obligation.
In the weeks before, Amir was on such a public rampage that it now seems astonishing that he was able to get near the prime minister with a gun in his hand and a clear line of fire. All last week, stunned Israelis asked why nobody had been watching him.
Amir had made no secret of his deadly intentions. He was a member of an extremist Jewish group that denounced Rabin for treason; he was dragged away by security guards for heckling Rabin at meetings; before he succeeded last Saturday, he had already made two unsuccessful assassination runs. Weren’t the groups of fundamentalist Jews who vowed to stop the peace process at all costs under any kind of surveillance?
The murder raised other, more profound questions. Nobody had believed a Jew would ever kill a Jew; despite the venomous rhetoric that had followed Rabin’s peace treaty with Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, nobody believed that taboo would be broken. So what was this nation of Jews if the land had become more important than an individual’s life?
The shock and incomprehension deepened as Israelis learned more details about the killer in their midst. Amir grew up in the heart of Israel, the Tel Aviv suburbs, and served in an elite brigade of the army. His background might have given him something of a chip on his shoulder; he was a Sephardi, an Israeli descended from