Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 30, 1995 TAG: 9507280031
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ETHAN BRONNER THE BOSTON GLOBE
DATELINE: BAGHDAD, IRAQ LENGTH: Long
The Baghdad zoo, which during the 1980s was a much-admired oasis with its expansive lion habitat and well-tended grounds, is today a kind of animal slum, a metaphor for this once-powerful and predatory nation.
As President Saddam Hussein marks five years since his invasion of Kuwait and the start of crushing economic sanctions, he cannot fail to compare his position to what it was at the start of the decade. His army was in high gear after its war with Iran. His nuclear and biological weapons programs were humming along, his rhetoric was soaring, his eye wandering. He had plans.
Today, he looks only inward, fighting spiraling crime and army desertions with amputations and branding. U.N.-sponsored spy planes watch his industry from above, video cameras from below. Food prices climb daily. The currency is worth less than the cheap paper on which it is printed. Professors are driving cabs to buy rice for their families.
And the United States, his nemesis, has turned its victory over him into an opportunity, installing military outposts in key parts of the gulf, selling billions in weapons to his neighbors, gaining regional acceptance for Israel.
There are even faint stirrings of instability. Saddam Hussein's sons are battling other members of his family for power and influence. The Cabinet, which includes members from various family branches, is reshuffled frequently. A provincial funeral in May turned into a confrontation between once-loyal tribesmen and the regime's troops.
But the brutal paradox of this brutal land is that despite its humiliation by the U.S.-led ``Desert Storm'' coalition, despite the severe sanctions, despite the discontent and palace intrigue, the chances of Saddam Hussein being removed from power are remote.
``Is there another country in the world whose government is opposed by every one of its neighbors, and by the only superpower which also funds the main opposition group and by the world media,'' said a senior member of the ruling Baath Party. ``None. Yet you can see for yourself. There is absolutely no chance of a change. This is not a weak system.''
It is nonetheless a deeply troubled one, and its society is unraveling in the cruelest of ways. As a political scientist here said, ``The reaction is more mass depression and emigration than mutiny. People feel trapped.''
One former government official who has sold off rugs and artwork and gathers mint in the woods to supplement her government tea ration, said a friend recently committed suicide and she is considering doing the same. All that stops her is the fear of the humiliation it would bring to her family.
Depression is not the worst of it, however. For the first time in decades, some Iraqis are going hungry.
Dirk van Kolfschoten, a Dutchman who coordinates an emergency food relief program around Iraq for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said Iraqis aren't dying in the streets. But people are succumbing in large numbers in hospitals.
``A new cycle has developed,'' he said. ``People suffer malnutrition; they weaken; they get sick; they go to hospital where there are no medicines and so they die.''
This used to be a country with first-class free medical care. Today, a walk through any hospital, such as the mother and child hospital in Ramadi 80 miles southwest of Baghdad, shows a score of malnourished infants staring death in the face in torn beds in ill-lighted, ill-kept wards.
The United States, which wants the sanctions on Iraq maintained for a while, argues that such suffering is directly traceable to Saddam Hussein, who while claiming to sympathize with his people continues to erect palaces and hoard money and supplies to prop up his regime.
But if the president cannot be removed without sending this country into the Stone Age, the question, experts and diplomats here say, is whether the sanctions should go on for much longer. Last week, Iraq threatened to end cooperation with U.N. weapons inspectors if sanctions are not lifted now. Iraq says it has done what was asked and that dragging out the sanctions at this point is manifestly unfair.
Many here argue that the world must deal with this president while he is weakened and humbled but still able to rule a fractious people. Otherwise, the consequences for 20 million Iraqis and people beyond these borders could be catastrophic.
Indeed, the situation is more complex than presidential greed. For Iraq, like Kuwait and other oil-rich gulf states, used to depend heavily on imported labor - Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Filipinos who served as nurses, streetsweepers and maintenance workers.
When the economy here collapsed, those workers moved away, leaving a society completely unprepared to care for itself.
Second, years of war - the 1980-88 war with Iran and then the 1990-91 Gulf War - have produced a generation of men with little training other than soldiering, men who missed early adulthood and walk around today with shrapnel in their chests and confusion in their eyes.
Third, because this was such an opulent country with everything flowing from the government, hospitals used to be oversupplied, and waste was built into the system. As scarcity came with sanctions, people continued to waste.
Finally, Saddam Hussein is so paranoid about any social structures that do not flow directly from his regime that any efforts citizens might make to relieve their situations - clean-up patrols or neighborhood block associations - are quashed.
Fear is the main weapon. Everyone suspects everyone else of being an informer.
All of this means that while the sanctions would be difficult for any society, they are all the more crushing here, where the government has always provided everything and individual initiative has been firmly discouraged.
Iraqis may fear their leader, but many fear a future without him even more. Ahmed Chalabi, head of the main opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress based abroad, is widely despised as an opportunist who has not been in Iraq in four decades and who takes his money from the CIA.
``It is difficult for an Iraqi to accept an American-sponsored leader over a home ruler,'' said a political scientist here.
Iraqis look north at the instability in semiautonomous Kurdistan and they quake. The 3 million Kurds held elections in 1992 in which the two main Kurdish parties split the vote, vowed to work together and have been fighting ever since. And they are the ones benefiting from Western military protection.
Turkey and Iran, which have their own large Kurdish populations, are not happy about the prospect of an independent Kurdistan in northern Iraq, and there is some reason to believe they would like to see Saddam Hussein renew his rule there.
As one diplomat in Baghdad said of the Kurds, ``If Saddam takes over, there will be one less wild dog running around.''
This is a prospect which terrifies the Kurds who remember Saddam Hussein's 1988 slaughter of tens of thousands of their kinsmen, including through the use of mustard gas.
For the Shia in the south, the traditional losers in the Iraqi equation - even though they make up the country's majority - Saddam Hussein's consolidation of power is an especially melancholy development.
Right after the Gulf War, in March, 1990, they rose up and took control of their cities, including the holy cities of Najjaf and Karbala, only to be fiercely and decisively crushed by government troops, with tens of thousands killed.
Since then, Saddam Hussein has worked to coopt the Shia religious feeling. He has banned alcohol from restaurants, added Islamic studies to the school curriculum, rebuilt the mosques of Najjaf and Karbala and emphasized his supposed descent from the Prophet Mohammed's son-in-law Ali, the main figure in Shiite Islam. He has also announced plans to build in Baghdad the largest mosque in the Middle East.
In Najjaf and Karbala, government-paid imams hold sway and tell all interested that whatever damage occurred there was caused by the U.S.-led allies.
Yet the president understands that he must also satisfy the United States if his country is to survive. He released two Americans jailed for illegally crossing into Iraq four months ago. He said it was a humanitarian gesture, but it was negotiated over three months by U.S. Rep. Bill Richardson, D-N.M., and it seems likely part of a larger, if vague, deal.
The question is whether Iraq must comply with all the U.N. resolutions such as those dealing with human rights and compensation for war victims or whether it should be allowed to sell small quantities of oil soon to help its economy off its knees in a controlled fashion. It is a decision that could be taken some time in the fall.
As one diplomat put it: ``The U.S. should say: `OK, you have recognized Kuwait, cooperated in a shifty sort of way with the U.N. and we can use you when Iran gets stroppy. So sell oil in the following way and put 30 percent in a U.N. compensation fund.'''
An Iraqi professor said that if the sanctions are lifted, Iraq will still be anemic for years and the West and Iraq's neighbors have little to fear.
by CNB