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Iran's conflicting views on
Saddam
By Safa Haeri
PARIS -
Ever since the capture of former Iraqi dictator Saddam
Hussein by US forces aided by Iraqi Kurdish peshmergas,
top Iranian officials on both sides of the leadership
have made discordant, if not contradictory, statements
about his trial, his sentence and the issue of Iran-Iraq
War reparations, estimated by Tehran at billions of US
dollars.
For several days after Saddam's capture
on December 13, there was stunned silence from Iran's
clerical rulers, high-ranking military commanders and
advisers. Saddam Hussein had launched a devastating
eight-year war from 1980-88, a conflict that cost Iran
half a million dead and wounded. Many of the casualties
were injured for life because of the massive use of
chemical weapons by Iraqi troops.
Hojjatoleslam
Mohammad Khatami, the Iranian president, was the first
to make a statement, surprising his audience by opposing
capital punishment for Saddam.
"Saddam made many
people suffer, mostly the Iraqis, but also the
Iranians," Khatami said. "Though I think if there is one
place in the world where he should be executed, this is
Iraq. However, for my part, I never wish that a man,
even accused of crimes, be executed if there are other
ways for him," he said. At almost the same time he
spoke, four people were hanged in various places in
Iran, accused of drug smuggling and other charges.
Next to communist China, the Islamic Republic of
Iran has the world's highest number of public
executions. Khatami said nothing about the thousands of
young Iranians killed or disabled, nor about the
thousands of Iraqi Kurds gassed in the city of Halabja
near Iranian border, nor about the hundreds of thousands
of Iraqi Kurds and Shi'ite Muslims slaughtered. He made
no mention of the vast southern marshes on the Iranian
border, traditional home of the Marsh Arabs, turned into
deserts in one of the greatest environmental crimes on
record.
Foreign Affairs Minister Kamal Kharrazi
called for Saddam to be tried by an international court,
while Ayatollah Mahmood Hashemi-Shahroodi, the
Iraqi-born head of the judiciary, said the dictator must
be tried in Iran. For his part, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
the leader of Iranian's theocratic regime, while
expressing satisfaction at Saddam's capture, wished for
US President George W Bush and Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon to "face the same fate" as the former Iraqi
dictator.
Where were the rejoicing
Iraqis?
Why do some Iranian leaders appear to
regret Saddam's arrest? Why do they hesitate to
acknowledge that a page has definitely been turned in
Iraq? Why did the state-run Voice and Visage (Radio
Television) of the Islamic Republic, controlled directly
by Ayatollah Khamenei, show pictures of a bearded, dirty
and unkempt Saddam, looking haggard as he was taken out
of his "rat hole"? Why did it comment: "Saddam Hussein
was captured by his former backers," meaning the
Americans? Why did the state-run media not show the
scenes of jubilation by the Iraqi people?
Some
Iranian scholars trace the reasons back to the early
days of the Iran-Iraq War and to the ousted Abolhasan
Banisadr, the Islamic Republic's first president.
According to Sadeq Ziba Kalam, a political-science
professor at Tehran University, Banisadr indoctrinated
the new and inexperienced ruling mullahs with the idea
that "Saddam is a pawn of the United States and attacked
Iran on the instigations of his American masters".
"It took the Iranian officials more than a
decade, to the start of the first Persian Gulf War
[1990], to realize that Saddam might, after all, not be
an American puppet. Yet instead of making a proper
assessment of Saddam Hussein and his personality,
politics and ambitions, the Iranian rulers rushed to
new, but wrong, conclusions, foreseeing a possible
destiny for the two Iranian and Iraqi peoples," Ziba
Kalam said.
In fact, a number of influential
figures of the time - clerics, civilians and some
officers of the Revolutionary Guard - had urged senior
decision-makers to side openly with Saddam against the
international coalition led by US president George H W
Bush, but it was the pragmatic Ayatollah Ali Akbar
Hashemi Rafsanjani who persuaded the leadership not to
side with the Iraqi leader.
Nevertheless,
relations between Tehran and Baghdad improved after
first Gulf War. Trade flourished, mostly smuggling cheap
Iraqi oil through Iranian ports controlled by the
Revolutionary Guards to the international markets and
exporting Iranian goods to the hungry and deprived
Iraqis suffering from international economic sanctions.
As US and British pressures increased prior to
their final assault on Iraq last spring, the Islamic
Republic once again leaned toward its "eternal enemy No
1" - Saddam. Messages of "solidarity" were sent to the
Iraqi leader, who dispatched his son Qusay to meet
senior Iranian military officers near the Iraq border.
They discussed possible military assistance from Tehran
in case the United States attacked, and Saddam twice
sent his minister of foreign affairs, Naji Sabri, to
Tehran, seeking Iran's diplomatic help in international
organizations.
Iran's puzzling 'positive
neutrality'
Iran adopted what it called "positive
neutrality" in the US-led war against Iraq.
As
the war started, Iranian conservative-controlled media,
particularly Voice and Visage, predicted a victory for
Saddam. Military experts from the clerics' elite
praetorian guard would explain to incredulous viewers
and listeners that Iraq was to become another Vietnam
and Baghdad another Stalingrad, expressing no doubt that
US and British forces would sink in the Iraq quagmire.
But the evaporation of any significant
resistance from Iraqi forces, especially from the
vaunted Republican Guards and Saddam's notorious
fedayeen suicide squads, shattered the notion,
cultivated by Iran, that Saddam was Washington's man.
"Short of explaining the quick fall of Baghdad,
the Iranian authorities at the top created a new thesis
based on the grounds that Saddam, at the last minute,
made an arrangement with the advancing forces, opening
up the gates of his capital and surrendering all his
forces," political scientist Ziba Kalam said.
All the baseless theories and wishful thinking -
of larger-than-life Saddam - put forth by the Iranian
leadership and the military crumbled when television
viewers saw the humiliating and effortless capture of
the docile Iraqi tyrant, who did not put up a struggle
or even try to take his own life.
Another reason
for these discordant views, in which reality fails to
conform to political mythology, is the absence of any
central decision-making unit in the Islamic Republic.
Duplication and redundancy prevail in both the
government and the army. Often the decisions made by the
leader's shadow cabinet, which is the real one, are not
communicated to the president's ministers for
implementation, political analysts say.
This is
seen in Iran's declarations of old Iran-Iraq War damages
and demands for reparations, estimated by Tehran in the
billions of dollars. This comes at a time when virtually
all of Iraq's major creditors, such as France, Germany
and Russia, have agreed to reduce Iraq's debts
dramatically in order to win new reconstruction
contracts. And despite a United Nations Security Council
resolution calling for reparations, Saddam never agreed
to pay the Iranians.
Contradictory statements
on reparations
Jalal Talabani, the leader of the
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and a member of Iraq's
US-installed provisional government, told a newspaper
recently: "Iran didn't ask for one cent of us. On the
contrary, they provided huge assistance for the
reconstruction of Iraq. They offered a lot of help for
reconstruction and to reoperate the factories, build
cities and towns, many issues. They did not discuss with
us, in any of our meetings, or in any of the ministries,
the subject of the reparations." He was interviewed by
the Farsi-language weekly newspaper Kayhan in London.
And the present head of Iraq's governing
council, Hojjatoleslam Abdolaziz al-Hakim, said Iran
"deserved" reparations arising out of the Iran-Iraq War
in the 1980s, but left open whether payment would be
forthcoming.
According to Qasem Sho'leh Sa'di, a
lawyer and scholar, the recent declarations by Iranian
officials concerning the trial of Saddam or the payment
of war damages are "for domestic consumption only".
"Of course, in practice, it is possible to try
Saddam in an independent international criminal court,
like the one in The Hague, but considering the
often-contradictory positions taken by Iranian leaders
concerning the Iraqi dictator, one has to admit that
their purposes of today are nothing more than to dupe
the public opinion," he told Asia Times Online.
A co-founder with Mohammad Mohsen Sazegara of a
new political party named tentatively "Iranians for
Democracy", Sho'leh Sa'di spent 40 days behind bars and
was severely tortured for having criticized the domestic
and international policies of the leader, whom he dared
to address with the diminished honorific "Hojjatoleslam"
Ali Khamenei, instead of the ritual title "Ayatollah".
"There was the time they [Iranian leaders] would
describe Saddam as kaafar [a non-believer] who,
if he washes his hands in the sea, the waters would
become impure. Then the tyrant became 'brother Saddam'
after a flurry of friendly exchanges with the
then-president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. When the
war started, Iran vehemently sided against the
Americans, did its best to save Saddam and his bloody
regime, creating difficulties for the coalition forces,
predicting the defeat of the Americans in their
so-called analysis of the war situation," he added.
"Have they forgot how, on their Radio and
Television, they would boast of Saddam's capacity for
resistance? Have they forgot how they would predict the
defeat of the United States in the Iraqi quagmire? And
after the Iraqi forces melted as snow under a hot sun
and now that the new Saladin of the Arabs has been
captured like a mouse in his hole, they continue
persisting that all their assessments came true,"
Sho'leh Sa'di pointed out.
Asked to comment on
declarations by Rafsanjani that "Saddam's humiliating
end awaits all leaders who do not heed the voice of
their people", or by Ayatollah Hashemi-Shahroodi that
"God's law punishes all those who oppress their people
in this world", Sho'leh Sa'di said briefly that if they
have made such statements, "then they should expect a
similar end".
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online
Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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