Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, August 13, 1995                   TAG: 9508140090
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: JERUSALEM                                  LENGTH: Medium

SADDAM'S EX-AIDE CALLS FOR OVERTHROW

``We will work seriously to change the regime in Iraq,'' Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel al-Majid told a news conference at the heavily guarded palace of Jordan's King Hussein in Amman, the Jordanian capital.

``We are calling on the officers of the Iraqi army, the officers of the Republican Guard, the officers of the special guards, the civil servants of the Iraqi state and all the Iraqi society to be ready for this important change,'' he said through an interpreter.

``I know all the officers of the army and the Republican Guard know what this call means ... We will establish new and developed relations with the world and get rid of what is shameful and what caused the backwardness of the society,'' said the general, who wore a dark business suit and looked relaxed as he spoke.

Hussein al-Majid denied diplomatic reports he already has been contacted by U.S. military and intelligence officers eager to hear what he has to say about Iraq's nonconventional weapon programs. He said contacts with foreign governments will come later.

In Washington, the Clinton administration said the general's news conference remarks ``tend to confirm our view that his defection is a potentially significant development.''

An administration official said the comments ``underscore the extent of Saddam's isolation in Iraq'' and reinforce the U.S. view that the Iraqi dictator is responsible for the suffering of the Iraqi public.

The general said he drove with his brother, Saddam Kamel al-Majid - who is another son-in-law of Saddam Hussein and was head of the presidential guards - their wives and an entourage of aides and officers from Baghdad to the Jordanian border without being stopped or questioned.

He said that he had decided to defect after failing to reverse Iraq's decline from within the regime's inner circle. At the time of his defection, Hussein al-Majid was minister of industry and military industrialization. A distant cousin of Saddam's, he is credited by Western diplomats with building the Iraqi war machine in the 1980s before the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. After Iraq's defeat at the hands of a U.S.-led international coalition in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Hussein was put in charge of rebuilding the nation's shattered infrastructure.

He also had been in charge of Iraq's difficult negotiations with the special U.N. commission charged with clearing Iraq of weapons of mass destruction under the terms of the Gulf War cease-fire.