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'We want our Saddam back'
23/04/2003 16:20 - (SA)
Baghdad - Once an hour the new radio station set up by the US forces has been telling its listeners over recent days that they "have started a new life in a liberated Iraq thanks to the coalition troops".
But in the small living room of Sahar, a teacher in Baghdad, nothing has changed. In the corner a photograph of Saddam Hussein holding a rifle stands in its accustomed place of honour.
"We want our Saddam back," she says with anger in her voice.
In this neighbourhood of Sunni families living along the narrow alleyways of the inner-city quarter of Faudat al-Arab, there are many people who believe that the dictator, whom they revere as a demigod, will one day turn up to rule the country again. 'We will be martyrs for you'
"I love him and am prepared to blow myself up to drive the Americans out of our country," Sahar's neighbour Maha says.
Dressed in the traditional headscarf and shouting almost hysterically, Maha says she has brought up her four youngest sons to think the same.
The boys, the eldest of whom is seven, demonstrate their feelings by shouting through the narrow streets: "With our lives and with our blood, we will be martyrs for you, O Saddam!"
None of the dozen neighbours gathered on the street are offended in the least by this battle cry of the fallen regime. Sahar's grey-haired mother even carries a picture of the toppled leader through the quarter, kissing it repeatedly.
Under the old regime, Sahar worked as a teacher in an institute aimed at improving the education of children and young people between the ages of six and 20.
She now believes the institute will be closed down and that she will be one of the losers under the new dispensation, just like another neighbour, Shehab Ahmed, who worked in the foreign ministry. 'Ba'ath party will be banned' He thinks there will be "so many new political parties and only the Ba'ath Party will be banned".
No official ban on the Ba'ath Party, though which Saddam controlled political life in Iraq, has been imposed, but Ahmed knows he would be in danger of his life if he were to display the dictator's picture among his Shi'ite countrymen currently protesting on one of Baghdad's main squares.
The Shi'ites loathe Saddam and all he stood for and have been demonstrating for an Islamic state and the release from custody of one of their religious leaders in front of the US troops and their tanks. US brought 'women who allow their hair to be seen' But like the Sunni supporters of Saddam, the Shi'ites also want the coalition forces to leave Iraq as soon as possible.
"Look at what the Americans have brought to our country; infidels like that woman up there who allows her hair to be seen without shame and wears makeup," one protester dressed in white turban, black robes and with a long beard, shouts in front of the Palestine Hotel.
He gesticulates at a US journalist peering over the wall high up on hotel roof.
Heavily armed US troops guard the front of the hotel, which has been sealed off with barbed wire that separates them from the protesters.
"If we had not liberated Iraq and fought for them, the Shi'ites would not even have been here, because Saddam would immediately have beaten back their protest demonstration," one of the soldiers says.
In an ironic twist, he has the name Alladin on his helmet, explaining that his grandfather was a Moslem. National pride insulted
Saeed, a bearded Iraqi from one of Baghdad's more prosperous suburbs, also feels his national pride insulted when he sees US tanks rolling past his house.
Nevertheless, he believes their presence is temporarily necessary as the lesser evil amid the chaos of post-conflict Baghdad.
"Many Iraqis are glad that Saddam has gone," he says, adding that his father, who died in 1986, had always expressed the wish to see the dictator toppled from power.
"But the thousands of deaths, the destruction, the looting and the US occupation are too high a price to pay for this," Saeed says quietly.
Saeed believes that more even than the war's victims, the looting that struck Baghdad, along with the still dysfunctional water supplies and the fact that the schools remain closed, have irreparably damaged the image of the US in Baghdad. - Sapa-DPA
- SAPA
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