IRAQ: People Divided over Saddam Daughters

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Ferry Biedermann

BAGHDAD, Aug 5 2003 (IPS) - The divisions in Iraq that emerged after the end of the war are becoming apparent also in the way people react to events surrounding the family of deposed dictator Saddam Hussein.

Many still hankering after the old regime are supportive of the scattered and hunted remnants of the clan; others are outraged by any attempt to project the family sympathetically.

The appearance last week in Jordan of two of Saddam Hussein’s daughters, Rana and Raghad, and interviews they gave to the Arabic news channel Al- Arabiya and to CNN have evoked strong feelings in Iraq. The daughters expressed concern for their father and said they prayed to God to protect him.

“It broke my heart to see them like that without their father,” says a doctor’s assistant in Falluja, some 30 miles north-west of Baghdad. Like many others in the town, which has seen several attacks on U.S. forces, he expresses strong support for Saddam Hussein. “Saddam Hussein was the father of Iraq,” he says. “We are now a family that is lonely and confused.”

To the new daily Al-Zaman (The Times) launched after the war, such sentiments are just the reason why the interviews were dangerous.

In an editorial Monday, the newspaper wrote that the daughters spoke like politicians. Their appearance, the article says, was calculated to make people feel bad for the family, but the writer seriously doubted that this was this was how the daughters felt themselves.

But the daughters described Saddam Hussein as strong, calm and loving. One spoke of him as “our friend”. Some called this praise indeed for a man widely believed to have ordered their husbands killed in 1996.

To many Iraqis the daughters are tragic figures who were not closely involved in the affairs of the family and who, to a degree, were even its victims.

“The girls were not as much to blame as the rest of the family,” says a former member of the Republican Guard elite army unit.

He had watched the interview using a satellite dish that he was only able to buy after the war. Satellite television was prohibited under the old regime. In a sign of the changed times, though, the viewing was interrupted by a power cut.

The former guard was particularly sympathetic over the daughters’ talk of betrayal. “With regret, those my father trusted, whom he had put his absolute trust and confidence in and whom he had considered on his side, as I understood from the newspapers, betrayed him,” said Raghad.

The soldier agreed. “Nothing has been confirmed about these betrayals but everybody is talking about it and I think it is true,” he said.

He saw U.S. influence in the timing of the interviews. “The King (Abdullah of Jordan) must have been put under pressure by the United States,” he said. “They wanted to show after the killing of Uday and Qusay (Saddam’s sons) that they could be kind and humanitarian as well. So they let the daughters go and they made Jordan accept them.”

If that was the intention, the exercise seems to have backfired, says political analyst Saad Jawad from Baghdad University.

“This did not have much of an impact here,” said Jawad. “It did not do much to make the people feel more sympathetic to the family. What did make people feel pity for Saddam and his family much more was the killing of his sons and the tape afterwards in which he said he was mourning them. The people did not like it that the Americans showed them on television and held the bodies for so long without burying them.”

The daughters refused to talk about their brothers, who were killed by U.S. troops on 22 July. They did answer questions about their husband’s deaths, but did not blame Saddam Hussein. The two husbands were killed in 1996 when they returned to Baghdad after fleeing to Jordan.

The daughters said they had lived in humble circumstances in Baghdad since it fell to U.S. troops in April. They said they will stay in Jordan where they have been granted asylum.