by Con Coughlin
Precisely how Saddam managed to get Bakr to step down has always been regarded as something of a mystery. The issue of Bakr’s declining health, the official reason given for his “retirement,” cannot be entirely dismissed. Rumors were constantly in circulation among Baghdad’s gossip-driven diplomatic community about Bakr’s physical well-being. As early as 1971 Bakr had been hospitalized for what was reported in the Iraqi media as a “slight indisposition.” In 1974 he was said to have suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, which prevented him from attending his wife’s funeral.2 His indisposition had also meant his being unable to receive French prime minister Jacques Chirac when he visited Baghdad; Saddam, that great Francophile, had effortlessly filled the breach. In May 1977 a distinguished medical team from George Washington University had flown in secret to Baghdad to treat “a top Iraqi official,” whom everyone took to be Bakr.3 Apart from his poor health Bakr had also had to contend with a number of deeply upsetting personal bereavements through the deaths of his wife, son, and son-in-law.
Even so it is unlikely that Bakr would have resigned his position without a fight and, according to former Baath Party members interviewed for the first time by this author, the meeting at which Bakr was persuaded to stand down quickly became acrimonious. Having decided to assume power on the anniversary of the revolution, Saddam, together with his cousin Adnan, the defense minister, and his uncle, Khairallah Tulfah, went to see Bakr in his office at the Presidential Palace on the evening of July 16, 1979. “They essentially presented him with a fait accompli,” recalled one former Baathist. “They told him: ‘You step down voluntarily and nothing will happen to you. But if we are forced to take action it could be very unplesant.’” At this point Bakr’s son Haytham, who was in the room with his father, drew his gun and fired a shot in the air as a warning to Saddam’s group, whom he denounced as traitors. But he was quickly overpowered and disarmed, and Saddam and his backers were able to get their way.4 The next day Saddam assumed the presidency and Bakr made a dignified resignation speech.
Bakr should have anticipated Saddam’s move. He had received plenty of warnings about Saddam’s ambition to replace him and, earlier in the year, had revived the idea of unifying the Iraqi and Syrian Baath Parties, a plan devised in part to undermine Saddam, who was strongly anti-Syrian. Apart from putting Saddam in his place, the other, more pressing, motivation for the proposed union was the desire of the regimes in Damascus and Baghdad to present a united Arab front that could challenge Egypt’s historic peace agreement with Israel, which had been negotiated at Camp David the previous year. Iraq and Syria, which were ideologically and vehemently opposed to the existence of Israel, regarded the Camp David agreement as a sellout, not least because it left the Palestinian issue unresolved. With Egypt no longer an ally in the struggle to destroy Israel, the Syrian and Iraqi Baath Parties in October 1978 agreed to set aside their own long-standing ideological differences in order to establish a “joint charter for national action”—i.e., against Israel.
Saddam was given personal responsibility for negotiating the deal to unite the two countries with Syria’s president Asad, and in January Saddam became the first senior Iraqi politician to visit Damascus in ten years, during which he signed a deal to merge the two countries’ respective ministries of foreign affairs, defense, and information. This was regarded as a first step toward a total union, which was scheduled to take place the following April. Apart from the challenge presented by Camp David, Iraq was also keen to cement its relationship with Syria as a means of protecting itself from the new threat posed by Iran’s Islamic revolution after Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in February 1979. Speaking shortly after Khomeini had seized power, Saddam spoke enthusiastically about the proposed Iraq-Syria merger, declaring that “this unity was not a system, but rather the principal part of the entire Arab revolution.” He also made a conciliatory gesture toward the new regime in Teheran, saying that “Iraq would support whatever the Iranian people decided.”5 The Iranian revolution had undoubtedly unsettled the Baathists, and even Saddam was prepared to set aside his natural anti-Syrian sympathies to build a united front against the Islamic extremists who had taken control in Teheran.
Even though Saddam was responsible for negotiating the union between Iraq and Syria, he was unable to overcome his strong reservations about the enterprise, which became more pronounced the longer the negotiations continued. His biggest concern appears to have been that a linkup with Syria would limit his power. Saddam therefore set about undermining the proposal, while at the same time giving the appearance that he was deeply committed to the union project. When President Asad, for example, came to Baghdad on June 16, 1979, to discuss the latest proposals, Saddam snubbed him by refusing to go to the airport to meet him. Bakr went in his place, and after three days of talks, Bakr and Asad announced a declaration of unity under which the governments of the two countries would be merged as a means of confronting “the Zionist-imperialist-Sadat onslaught.”6 Under the terms of the proposal, Syria and Iraq would become a loose federation, with Bakr at its head, Asad as deputy, and Saddam as number three. This arrangement was unacceptable to Saddam. As things currently stood in Baghdad, Saddam was already the de facto number one, and the prospect of being relegated to the position of number three in the newly merged nation did not appeal to him, particularly as he knew that, given Bakr’s indifferent health, Asad would become the main power in the new union, in the same way that Saddam had become the undisputed power in an independent Iraq. If the union went ahead, moreover, Asad would purge Saddam in the same way that Saddam had dispensed with his own rivals. The only way for Saddam to prevent the federation from taking place, and remove the threat to his own career, was to seize power himself. No matter how much Bakr might desire the Iraq-Syria union, the initiative had come too late; from the mid-1970s onward, Saddam had effectively been running the country, and his vaulting ambition was not about to be inconvenienced by the new constitutional arrangements being advanced by his Baathist colleagues. The Syrian writer Patrick Seale wrote that, shortly before Saddam assumed control, Bakr sent a message to Asad, asking him to speed up the proposed union between Iraq and Syria because “there is a current here which is anxious to kill the union in the bud before it bears fruit.”7 No prizes for guessing the identity of the “current.”
The brutal truth of the matter was that, by the summer of 1979, Bakr was powerless to reclaim the authority that he had gradually allowed to devolve to Saddam during the past decade. Former Baathist officials insist that the support Saddam received in his quest for supreme power from Khairallah Tulfah and his cousin Adnan was a decisive factor in persuading Bakr to step down. They were able to put pressure on Bakr to resign “for the good of the clan.”8 At any rate a special closed session of the Revolutionary Command Council was convened on July 11, 1979, at which it was decided to replace Bakr the following week, and for all his powers—and most of his titles—to be transferred to Saddam Hussein. Bakr’s humiliation did not end with his removal from office. Three months after Saddam’s takeover, Bakr was stripped of his last remaining title, that of deputy secretary-general of the Baath Party, which he had been given as an honorary title after being deposed as president; it was the same position that he himself had given the young Saddam in the late 1960s. Bakr died three years later in 1982 in complete obscurity during one of Iraq’s darkest moments in the Iran-Iraq War, and amid rumors that he should be restored to power. According to previously unpublished information obtained by this author, Bakr was killed by a team of doctors who worked for Saddam’s security apparatus and were sent to treat him when rumors began to circulate that Bakr was preparing a comeback. Apart from a heart condition Bakr was known to suffer from a variety of ailments, such as diabetes, hypertension, and kidney problems. His usual doctors were banned from attending to him for a month. During this period the team sent by Saddam injected Bakr with a large dose of insulin, which caused him to go into a coma. He never regained consciousness, and Saddam’s doc
tors stayed by his side until they were sure he was dead.9 In this way Saddam repaid the generosity, encouragement, and support of the mentor and kinsman who had been the most important influence on his life and career.
If Saddam’s accession to the presidency was seamless, that is not to say it was unopposed. During the special meeting of the RCC at which it was decided to remove Bakr, Muhie Abdul Hussein Mashhadi, the RCC’s secretary-general, summoned the courage to protest against Saddam’s promotion. During the discussions Mashhadi had “suddenly stood up and demanded that they vote on the question of President Bakr relinquishing his responsibilities in the Party and the State to Saddam Hussein. He insisted that the decision be carried unanimously. ‘It is inconceivable that you should retire,’ he told Bakr. ‘If you are ill why don’t you take a rest?’”10 Opposition such as this had to be eliminated, and Saddam acted quickly. On July 15, the day before Bakr was to resign, it was announced that Mashhadi had been relieved of all his duties at the RCC.
Even by the standards of Stalin’s great purges in the 1930s, the process by which Saddam clinically set about removing any surviving Baathist rivals in the wake of his accession added a whole new dimension to the concept of state-inspired terror. Mashhadi had not been alone in opposing Saddam’s accession, and many senior Baathists had supported Bakr’s attempts to revive the union with Syria as a means of thwarting Saddam, irrespective of their feelings about the Camp David Accords. They had begged Bakr to provide them with the breathing space to put in place a strategy to counter Saddam’s seemingly unstoppable march on the presidency, but Bakr was too old, weak, and exhausted to countenance a confrontation with his deputy. This last attempt by the Baath Party to bring the Saddam juggernaut to a halt therefore succeeded only in making the president-in-waiting aware that his popularity did not extend to all areas of the Baath.
True to character, Saddam resolved that his enemies would be shown no mercy, and the manner in which he set to work purging the party demonstrated not only his mastery of the psychology of terror, but his own formidable organizational skills. His first move, then, was to relieve Mashhadi of his duties as secretary-general of the RCC. The removal of Mashhadi was astute, for he was the only Baathist opposed to Saddam who had the authority to convene the RCC to discuss Bakr’s successor. With Mashhadi out of the way, the party’s ability to challenge Saddam was severely limited. Mashhadi, furthermore, was subjected to the customary interrogation by torture which, by 1979, had become even more sophisticated. Mashhadi’s family was brought into the room where the sedated form of the former RCC secretary-general was sitting. Mashhadi was given two choices: he either cooperated with Saddam, and provided him with the list of names he required, or his interrogators would rape his wife and daughters in front of him before killing them. Mashhadi himself would be executed as an Israeli spy. Mashhadi went for the former option. Not only was Mashhadi persuaded to confess to any number of plots and conspiracies, he was willing to name his accomplices, who, conveniently for the new president, just happened to be the same people who were opposed to Saddam’s accession.11
The stage, then, was set for Saddam to present his master class in state-sponsored persecution. Saddam was clearly delighted with the arrangements he had made for his Great Purge, so much so that he ordered that the entire proceedings be filmed for posterity, both as a warning to future opponents and to demonstrate his complete mastery over the regime’s political and security structures. The venue chosen for the most brutal and far-reaching purge of his entire career was the Al-Khuld conference center in Baghdad, which resembled a large movie theater and was located opposite the Presidential Palace. On July 22, five days after his inauguration, Saddam convened an extraordinary conference of senior Baath Party members. Most of the one thousand or so delegates who had traveled from all parts of the country to attend this historic gathering would have been at least vaguely aware that the party’s senior hierarchy had been indulging in yet another bout of infighting, but none of them could have guessed at the dramatic events that were about to unfold.
The film of the conference that was made especially for Saddam opens with Saddam nonchalantly sitting in a chair to one side of the platform, the personification of relaxation. As the proceedings get under way, he puffs, almost distractedly, on a large Cuban cigar. The conference opens with an address by Taha Yassin Ramadan, a close associate of Saddam who was the newly appointed vice president and head of the party’s militia, the Popular Army. Other key loyalists are also visible on the stage including Izzat al-Douri, Saddam’s second-in-command in the Baath and deputy secretary-general of the RCC; Tariq Aziz, the new foreign minister, and General Adnan Khairallah, the chief of staff and the cousin with whom Saddam had been raised by his uncle in Tikrit.
As Saddam looks on, his face almost concealed behind a plume of cigar smoke, Ramadan announces the exposure of “a painful and atrocious plot.” Ramadan speaks in a sad and melancholic voice, trying hard to give the impression that the betrayal of the party by some of its most prominent members has caused him personal grief. The rapt audience is then moved to genuine astonishment when Ramadan announces that all the plotters are actually present in the conference room, and that they have been invited to the meeting without realizing that they are about to be exposed as traitors. Pausing for dramatic effect, Ramadan then invites Saddam to address the audience. Putting his cigar to one side, Saddam steps up to the podium. Dressed in a smart, tailor-made single-breasted suit with a neatly knotted tie, Saddam stands with his hands held loosely behind his back as he addresses the audience. His voice is measured and his demeanor oozes self-confidence. He speaks slowly, without notes, leaving lengthy pauses between each sentence for added impact. In the past, Saddam begins, he has always been able to rely on his sixth sense to warn him when there is trouble brewing. In this instance, however, although aware that the party was in danger—because of the planned merger with Syria—he has waited for the right moment before moving against his enemies. “We used to be able to sense a conspiracy with our hearts before we even gathered the evidence,” he says. “Nevertheless we were patient and some of our comrades blamed us for knowing this but doing nothing about it.”12 But now he believes he has sufficient evidence to denounce the traitors. At that moment Saddam invites Mashhadi, who has been brought from prison to attend the meeting, onto the platform to narrate the details of the “horrible crime.” Mashhadi, a middle-aged man with graying hair and a neat mustache, is also smartly dressed, and speaks in a measured tone as he explains the details of the plot, occasionally waving his finger in the air for emphasis.
Saddam had, in all probability, promised to spare Mashhadi’s life in return for his agreement to address the conference and denounce his former colleagues. Certainly if he had known the true fate that awaited him it is unlikely that he would have been able to put on such a convincing show. As Mashhadi delivers his denunciation, the camera shows Saddam sitting back in his seat, puffing on his cigar and looking rather bored by the proceedings, as though he has heard it all before.
Mashhadi’s speech has been well rehearsed. He provides the audience with full details of the conspiracy: dates, places of meetings, and, most shocking of all, the names of the participants. Mashhadi, a Shiite who has been a member of the Baath for twenty years, reveals how he has, since 1975, been part of a Syrian plot to overthrow both Saddam and Bakr in order to pave the way for a Syrian-Iraqi union. When the conspirators had realized that Bakr was about to step down in favor of his deputy, Mashhadi relates, they tried to persuade the president to change his mind, knowing that if Saddam took over, the prospects of a union with Syria would be dashed. President Asad himself is alleged to have had several meetings with the plotters to advise them how to deal with Saddam.
When Mashhadi has finished his testimony, Saddam returns to the podium. He tells the audience how stunned he has been to discover that he has been betrayed by his closest colleagues. “After the arrest of the criminals,” he says, “I visited them in an attem
pt to understand the motive for their behaviour. ‘What political differences are there between you and me?’ I asked, ‘did you lack any power or money? If you had a different opinion why did you not submit it to the Party since you are its leaders?’ They had nothing to say to defend themselves, they just admitted their guilt.” Finally Saddam ends his speech by declaring, “The people whose names I am going to read out should repeat the party slogan and leave the hall.”13 Saddam produces a list, which is read out by one of the security officials. A sense of terror grips the room as the first of the alleged conspirators is led from the room, escorted by specially selected, armed members of the Baath Party’s security apparatus. The security operation is overseen by Barzan al-Tikriti, Saddam’s half brother, who has worked closely with Saddam in making the arrangements for the purge. One by one the denounced delegates are escorted from the conference hall by Barzan’s guards while Saddam watches from his chair at the podium, occasionally puffing on his cigar.
A total of sixty-six people, including some of Saddam’s closest Baath Party colleagues, are denounced. Before leaving the conference hall, the condemned men are required to recite the party oath: “One Arab nation with a holy message! Unity, freedom and socialism!” The only time that Saddam takes an interest in the procession is when one of the accused attempts to speak out against the injustice of the event. Without raising his voice, Saddam interrupts him and, referring to Mashhadi’s speech, says, “The witness has just given us information about the leaders of the organization. Similar confessions were made by the ring leaders.” Then, with a distinct hint of menace entering his voice, Saddam simply states, “Itla, itla.” “Get out, get out!”
As this grotesque ritual proceeds, the surviving members of the audience begin to grasp the significance of what they are witnessing, the brutal exposition of their new leader’s unconstrained power. Iraq is inexorably moving from a military dictatorship to a totalitarian regime where the will of the supreme leader will be paramount. As their denounced Baathist colleagues are forcibly removed from the chamber, the surviving rump rise to their feet to acclaim the country’s undisputed leader. “Long live Saddam!” they chant. “God save Saddam from conspirators,” they cry, along with “Let me die! Long live the father of Uday.” Some of the delegates are so overcome with emotion that they start sobbing. Saddam himself also seems moved by these sudden outpourings of loyalty, and can be seen reaching with one hand for a tissue to wipe away a tear while with the other he holds his cigar.