COMM: As occupation ends, those who survived Saddam's Republic of Fear, remain tortured souls.
Some Iraqis, like the writer Kanan Makiya, think the symbols of Saddam's reppression should be turned into memorials... lest his compatriots forget what he did.
But the humiliating experience of one year's occupation has, even in the minds Saddam's victims, already eclipsed three decades of brutality.
Many Iraqis feel betrayed by their liberators. The recovering patient, kicked in the teeth.
Quite a legacy really for Iraq's soon-to-be sovereign government to inherit.
(Drive towards monument)
Saddam's fists still clench the crossed swords that arch over his now empty parade ground in western Baghdad. A vast, vulgar metaphor for his violence and cruelty. In the new Iraq, the monument will remain... as a reminder.
KM: "I'm about now, coming back to Iraq, a year down the line, about to drive under the swords which huge military machines passed under while he stood there on that throne in the distance."
(Dissolves into military parade / Saddam on white horse under crossed swords)
SYNC / U/LAY
Kanan Makiya
Iraq Memory Foundation
"Part of what Saddam conceived as he looked at this, he wanted people to feel this palpable sense, this literal sense of the violence. Cruelty became the norm. The standard became torture. Not the exception."
COMM: An exile for 35 years, Kanan Makiya now dreams of building museums and halls of remembrance here. Makiya's "Memory Foundation" has the support of the US Defense Department -- and his effort to secure its financial suport has led some to suspect that the project was US-inspired all along. He says he's doing it for Iraq and Iraqis.
KM: "The point of a place like this is to have speech to discover ways of speaking about what happened. And in so doing of communicating of putting other human beings who have not suffered this pain in touch as close as humanly possible. The purpose of such a place is to bring the whole people of Iraq closer and closer to what pain and suffering was like."
COMM: Sabbah Hamoud personfies the agonies of life under Saddam, the suffering Kanan Makiya wants Iraqis to remember. An army deserter, Sabbah was branded with the mark of a traitor. Half his right ear was hacked off. Sabbah didn't languish in jail though. Saddam Hussein liked other Iraqis to witness the fate of those who dared disobey.
UNDERLAY
Sabbah
"When I saw people staring at my ear, I wanted to kill them. And on the bus, I sat at the back so people couldn't see my ear."
UNDERLAY
Sabbah
"I didn't want to accept Saddam's oppression. I escaped from the army on 28th August 1994. The Baathists chased me and captured me in my family home."
SYNC in viz
"When they arrested me, they told me: 'You're a traitor and a coward and chopping your ear off is the least that should happen to you. We should chop off your head.'"
COMM: Kanan Makiya's got six-million pages of copious notes kept by Saddam's henchmen on people like Sabbah. The Americans have a hundred million. The last batch of documents Makiya discovered -- with the help of the US Army -- had been hidden in the bowels of a Baathist mausoleum.
COMM: There are probably still lots of undiscovered dungeons full of documents. Each file containing scrupulously anotated paper trails to both perpetrators and victims; the living and the dead.
COMM: Saddam wanted total control. He had executioners. He had torturers. And he had Thought Police.
KM: SYNC / U/LAY
"Seven roomfuls of rumours"
COMM: Makiya's convinced that if Iraqi people could only look their recent history in the eye, society could begin the process of recovery. But museums and memorials are not a spending priority now. There's not much money on offer to suvivors either. Sabbah has joined an informal group of two-and-a-half thousand people who lost parts of their bodies to Saddam's surgeons. They meet in an abandoned building and tell eachother the stories Makiya thinks all Iraqis should hear.
SYNC
Jasem Rashid
Former political prisoner
"They arrested me and they locked me up in the Military Intelligence prison because of my political beliefs and religious activism. I was sentenced to 19 years in jail. I was then tortured for seven years..."
UPSOT:
"Go on, tell them what happened. Don't worry about it."
SYNC
Jasem
"They cut off one off one of my testicles. The other, well, you know, my manhood's been damaged."
COMM: Saddam understood very well the subtleties of his people's deeply religious traditions. His torturers were systematic and calculating in their infliction of both sexual and social humiliation.
These men exchanged dollars for dinars in a Baghdad market. Kanan Makiya's archivists unearthed this video, filmed by one of the torturers. This is the first time it's been broadcast. Mustafa Kazemi is in charge of the audiovisual archives.
UPSOT
"This man... they are going to cut his hand; they don't know what's going to happen..."
COMM: Saddam's surgeons were forced to do this. Kanan Makiya would love the world to see the unexpurgated version of these chilling images, but they're far too gruesome to broadcast. The footage shows scalpels slicing through people's wrists; it's slow, surgical and deliberate. In each case the hand is severed, placed on a green cloth and filmed.
UPSOT
"This show cut hand of young Iraqi man without any knowledge."
COMM: Muslims use their right hands for eating; not to do so is considered unclean. These men's shame is complete. For good measure, this money-changer had his forehead tatoo'd as well.
COMM: Saddam created a society in which extreme violence became the norm. He brutalised the nation and tormented two generations of Iraqis. Kanan Makiya thinks the punishment of perpetrators will help lay the ghosts of the past to rest -- but that, he says, will be just the beginning.
SYNC
Kanan Makiya
"Can we indict the system through these these individuals, that's the more important question. That is the kind of imaginative indictments that Iraqi lawyers and international lawyers need to draw up when people like Saddam Hussein and his cohorts are brought to trial in six, seven months from now.
COMM: For many Iraqis, the propect of holding Saddam's regime to account was one good reason for welcoming their liberators.
SYNC
Sabbah
"I was very happy when the Americans came to Iraq and I would like to thank the US for getting rid of Saddam and I would like to personally thank President Bush for ridding us of that infidel criminal."
COMM: The cruelest twist was to come within months of Saddam's downfall. Many Iraqis had thought the nightmare was over. But it wasn't.
SYNC
Jasem Rashid
"What happened in Abu Ghraib really disturbed us. Now, when I see an American on the street, I want to drink his blood. I spent three months in prison. They released me only three days ago. I can't forget the tortures, like when they poured cold water on me and then put me in front of an air-conditioner. I also witnessed many rape cases. I am one of the Iraqis who will fight the Americans when I go back to my home town. I will join the resitance."
COMM: Many other Iraqis we spoke to said they supported the resistance because of the humiliation suffered at the hands of the occupiers. Violence -- directed at the perpetrators -- becomes a cleansing force, restoring self-respect and human dignity.
These are members of the al-Fatlawi clan, a prominent Shia Muslim family, many of whom were jailed by Saddam. An informer from a rival tribe tipped off the Americans that they were planning an attack on coalition forces. The house was raided and nine were arrested.
SYNC
Riadh al-Fatlawi
Trader
"We had suffered for such a long time under Saddam Hussein, but we were surprised by the Americans' discrespect for human rights and democracy. The situation now is worse than the time of Saddam's regime. If I hadn't been imprisoned and seen things with my own eyes, I wouldn't believe the Americans were capable of such atrocities."
COMM: Under Saddam, Iraqis wouldn't have dared to complain. But, the perception is that Iraq's foreign occupiers are just as cruel and calculating and systematic as Saddam -- and not at all naive about the subtleties of Iraq's religious traditions. Humiliation that hurts requires an understanding of the culture.
SYNC
Thamer al-Fatlawi
Shopkeeper
"I heard the call to prayer, so I washed and started to pray. As I did so, an American came and put his boot on my head. I said, God is Great. He kicked me. Then, when I said 'there is no God but Allah,' he started beating me.
Sometimes they put shit on your beard and moustache and tear your clothes off. They pour dirty water on you or they beat you with electical cable. Once they killed a prisoner by torturing him. Then they threatened us and said that if we informed the Red Cross or any other organisation, they'd kill all of us."
COMM: We have been unable to corroborate this story. The US authorities in Baghdad refused to comment on these specific allegations. And it seems there weren't any small digital cameras snapping pictures in Najaf jail, as there were in Abu Ghraib. Whatever the truth, though, such stories aren't uncommon in Iraq.
***Kanan Makiya says that while he deplores this abuse, it's just not in Saddam's league. Yet the continuing human rights abuse in Iraq is making his Memory Foundation look like a bit of a sideshow.
On top of all that, the violent reality of post-Saddam Iraq is beginning to hit where it hurts.
While we're talking to him, one of Makiya's employees reports that his home has been hit by a rocket. He's got to go.
He asked us not to show his face.
(Hangs head)
Makiya can't even afford to pay his staff any more: the funding promised by the US Defense Department has yet to materialise. His whole world is crumbling.
COMM: Anger over the behaviour of occupation forces is so intense that few Iraqis care to remember how bad it all was before.
Yet unless Iraqis do confront their past, violence will continue to be thought of as normal and the cycle won't be broken.
Today Sabbah's mutilated ear is a badge of honour: the sign of a traitor transformed into the mark a man who was brave enough to resist.
Iraq's new sovereign government will now have to fight for the hearts and minds of men like Sabbah -- to stop them losing faith in the big democracy project.
ENDS///
Some Iraqis, like the writer Kanan Makiya, think the symbols of Saddam's reppression should be turned into memorials... lest his compatriots forget what he did.
But the humiliating experience of one year's occupation has, even in the minds Saddam's victims, already eclipsed three decades of brutality.
Many Iraqis feel betrayed by their liberators. The recovering patient, kicked in the teeth.
Quite a legacy really for Iraq's soon-to-be sovereign government to inherit.
(Drive towards monument)
Saddam's fists still clench the crossed swords that arch over his now empty parade ground in western Baghdad. A vast, vulgar metaphor for his violence and cruelty. In the new Iraq, the monument will remain... as a reminder.
KM: "I'm about now, coming back to Iraq, a year down the line, about to drive under the swords which huge military machines passed under while he stood there on that throne in the distance."
(Dissolves into military parade / Saddam on white horse under crossed swords)
SYNC / U/LAY
Kanan Makiya
Iraq Memory Foundation
"Part of what Saddam conceived as he looked at this, he wanted people to feel this palpable sense, this literal sense of the violence. Cruelty became the norm. The standard became torture. Not the exception."
COMM: An exile for 35 years, Kanan Makiya now dreams of building museums and halls of remembrance here. Makiya's "Memory Foundation" has the support of the US Defense Department -- and his effort to secure its financial suport has led some to suspect that the project was US-inspired all along. He says he's doing it for Iraq and Iraqis.
KM: "The point of a place like this is to have speech to discover ways of speaking about what happened. And in so doing of communicating of putting other human beings who have not suffered this pain in touch as close as humanly possible. The purpose of such a place is to bring the whole people of Iraq closer and closer to what pain and suffering was like."
COMM: Sabbah Hamoud personfies the agonies of life under Saddam, the suffering Kanan Makiya wants Iraqis to remember. An army deserter, Sabbah was branded with the mark of a traitor. Half his right ear was hacked off. Sabbah didn't languish in jail though. Saddam Hussein liked other Iraqis to witness the fate of those who dared disobey.
UNDERLAY
Sabbah
"When I saw people staring at my ear, I wanted to kill them. And on the bus, I sat at the back so people couldn't see my ear."
UNDERLAY
Sabbah
"I didn't want to accept Saddam's oppression. I escaped from the army on 28th August 1994. The Baathists chased me and captured me in my family home."
SYNC in viz
"When they arrested me, they told me: 'You're a traitor and a coward and chopping your ear off is the least that should happen to you. We should chop off your head.'"
COMM: Kanan Makiya's got six-million pages of copious notes kept by Saddam's henchmen on people like Sabbah. The Americans have a hundred million. The last batch of documents Makiya discovered -- with the help of the US Army -- had been hidden in the bowels of a Baathist mausoleum.
COMM: There are probably still lots of undiscovered dungeons full of documents. Each file containing scrupulously anotated paper trails to both perpetrators and victims; the living and the dead.
COMM: Saddam wanted total control. He had executioners. He had torturers. And he had Thought Police.
KM: SYNC / U/LAY
"Seven roomfuls of rumours"
COMM: Makiya's convinced that if Iraqi people could only look their recent history in the eye, society could begin the process of recovery. But museums and memorials are not a spending priority now. There's not much money on offer to suvivors either. Sabbah has joined an informal group of two-and-a-half thousand people who lost parts of their bodies to Saddam's surgeons. They meet in an abandoned building and tell eachother the stories Makiya thinks all Iraqis should hear.
SYNC
Jasem Rashid
Former political prisoner
"They arrested me and they locked me up in the Military Intelligence prison because of my political beliefs and religious activism. I was sentenced to 19 years in jail. I was then tortured for seven years..."
UPSOT:
"Go on, tell them what happened. Don't worry about it."
SYNC
Jasem
"They cut off one off one of my testicles. The other, well, you know, my manhood's been damaged."
COMM: Saddam understood very well the subtleties of his people's deeply religious traditions. His torturers were systematic and calculating in their infliction of both sexual and social humiliation.
These men exchanged dollars for dinars in a Baghdad market. Kanan Makiya's archivists unearthed this video, filmed by one of the torturers. This is the first time it's been broadcast. Mustafa Kazemi is in charge of the audiovisual archives.
UPSOT
"This man... they are going to cut his hand; they don't know what's going to happen..."
COMM: Saddam's surgeons were forced to do this. Kanan Makiya would love the world to see the unexpurgated version of these chilling images, but they're far too gruesome to broadcast. The footage shows scalpels slicing through people's wrists; it's slow, surgical and deliberate. In each case the hand is severed, placed on a green cloth and filmed.
UPSOT
"This show cut hand of young Iraqi man without any knowledge."
COMM: Muslims use their right hands for eating; not to do so is considered unclean. These men's shame is complete. For good measure, this money-changer had his forehead tatoo'd as well.
COMM: Saddam created a society in which extreme violence became the norm. He brutalised the nation and tormented two generations of Iraqis. Kanan Makiya thinks the punishment of perpetrators will help lay the ghosts of the past to rest -- but that, he says, will be just the beginning.
SYNC
Kanan Makiya
"Can we indict the system through these these individuals, that's the more important question. That is the kind of imaginative indictments that Iraqi lawyers and international lawyers need to draw up when people like Saddam Hussein and his cohorts are brought to trial in six, seven months from now.
COMM: For many Iraqis, the propect of holding Saddam's regime to account was one good reason for welcoming their liberators.
SYNC
Sabbah
"I was very happy when the Americans came to Iraq and I would like to thank the US for getting rid of Saddam and I would like to personally thank President Bush for ridding us of that infidel criminal."
COMM: The cruelest twist was to come within months of Saddam's downfall. Many Iraqis had thought the nightmare was over. But it wasn't.
SYNC
Jasem Rashid
"What happened in Abu Ghraib really disturbed us. Now, when I see an American on the street, I want to drink his blood. I spent three months in prison. They released me only three days ago. I can't forget the tortures, like when they poured cold water on me and then put me in front of an air-conditioner. I also witnessed many rape cases. I am one of the Iraqis who will fight the Americans when I go back to my home town. I will join the resitance."
COMM: Many other Iraqis we spoke to said they supported the resistance because of the humiliation suffered at the hands of the occupiers. Violence -- directed at the perpetrators -- becomes a cleansing force, restoring self-respect and human dignity.
These are members of the al-Fatlawi clan, a prominent Shia Muslim family, many of whom were jailed by Saddam. An informer from a rival tribe tipped off the Americans that they were planning an attack on coalition forces. The house was raided and nine were arrested.
SYNC
Riadh al-Fatlawi
Trader
"We had suffered for such a long time under Saddam Hussein, but we were surprised by the Americans' discrespect for human rights and democracy. The situation now is worse than the time of Saddam's regime. If I hadn't been imprisoned and seen things with my own eyes, I wouldn't believe the Americans were capable of such atrocities."
COMM: Under Saddam, Iraqis wouldn't have dared to complain. But, the perception is that Iraq's foreign occupiers are just as cruel and calculating and systematic as Saddam -- and not at all naive about the subtleties of Iraq's religious traditions. Humiliation that hurts requires an understanding of the culture.
SYNC
Thamer al-Fatlawi
Shopkeeper
"I heard the call to prayer, so I washed and started to pray. As I did so, an American came and put his boot on my head. I said, God is Great. He kicked me. Then, when I said 'there is no God but Allah,' he started beating me.
Sometimes they put shit on your beard and moustache and tear your clothes off. They pour dirty water on you or they beat you with electical cable. Once they killed a prisoner by torturing him. Then they threatened us and said that if we informed the Red Cross or any other organisation, they'd kill all of us."
COMM: We have been unable to corroborate this story. The US authorities in Baghdad refused to comment on these specific allegations. And it seems there weren't any small digital cameras snapping pictures in Najaf jail, as there were in Abu Ghraib. Whatever the truth, though, such stories aren't uncommon in Iraq.
***Kanan Makiya says that while he deplores this abuse, it's just not in Saddam's league. Yet the continuing human rights abuse in Iraq is making his Memory Foundation look like a bit of a sideshow.
On top of all that, the violent reality of post-Saddam Iraq is beginning to hit where it hurts.
While we're talking to him, one of Makiya's employees reports that his home has been hit by a rocket. He's got to go.
He asked us not to show his face.
(Hangs head)
Makiya can't even afford to pay his staff any more: the funding promised by the US Defense Department has yet to materialise. His whole world is crumbling.
COMM: Anger over the behaviour of occupation forces is so intense that few Iraqis care to remember how bad it all was before.
Yet unless Iraqis do confront their past, violence will continue to be thought of as normal and the cycle won't be broken.
Today Sabbah's mutilated ear is a badge of honour: the sign of a traitor transformed into the mark a man who was brave enough to resist.
Iraq's new sovereign government will now have to fight for the hearts and minds of men like Sabbah -- to stop them losing faith in the big democracy project.
ENDS///