How Disappearance in '84 Blighted Family in Iraq

December 31, 2003
By JOHN F. BURNS

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 30 — A month after American troops occupied Baghdad, the family of Dr. Taki al-Moosawi was gathered at his Baghdad home, watching one of the Arab satellite channels that have become popular since the toppling of Saddam Hussein made it possible for any Iraqi, not just the ruling clique, to have satellite receivers.

And suddenly there it was: Old film clips of executions looted from the archives of the General Security Directorate, the most powerful of Mr. Hussein's secret police agencies. There, too, in the last terrifying moments before he was blown apart by a grenade his executioners had taped onto his chest, was the nephew who had disappeared without trace more than 18 years before, Mehdi Salih al-Moosawi.

When the secret police came for him and other males in the family in December 1984, Mehdi was a quiet 22-year-old student at a Baghdad technical college, a karate champion just back from service as an infantryman in the Iran-Iraq war, the father of two infant children.

He was accused, along with Dr. Moosawi, of planting bombs in Karamanah Square in Baghdad, though Dr. Moosawi says that the charge was false and that the real offense was speaking, among friends, in ways that were critical of Mr. Hussein.

In all the years since Mehdi's arrest, there had been no rest in the search for his nephew by Dr. Moosawi, a British-trained physiologist. The doctor himself was released after several months, on the intervention of an acquaintance who was a cousin of Mr. Hussein, but he was haunted, he says now, by the anguish of having left Mehdi in the dungeons of the secret police headquarters in central Baghdad.

When he saw the tape on Al Jazeera, an Arab station that has frequently been criticized for whitewashing Mr. Hussein's rule, Dr. Moosawi said, he was overcome with anger and disgust, as well as shame that it had been Mehdi who died, not him. He also felt at that moment, he said, that any price Iraqis paid for the overthrow of Mr. Hussein, including the ravages of the American invasion, had been worth it.

"In my own mind, I was already dead from the moment that Mehdi disappeared," he said. "I wished only that it could have been me, sitting there in the desert. Only later on, when I remembered that the Americans had come here to end this terror, did I begin to think, well, we were all dead, but we have been resurrected, we have been born again."

What happened to Mehdi, and what became of his family as they balanced their quest for him with a relentless theater of fealty to Mr. Hussein, is a grim — and grimly familiar — parable of the terror inflicted on 25 million Iraqis during the 24 years of Mr. Hussein's rule.

The critical view the family now takes of the American-led occupation may also hold clues for the United States as it confronts a brutal insurgency and grapples for some formula that will bring American troops home.

"They did a very good job for America and for Iraq in getting rid of Saddam, and we thank them," Dr. Moosawi said. "Now, they are young boys lost in a foreign country, and every day there is a bomb in the road. They live a terrible time. So please tell them, we would like that they would leave our country as soon as possible, as soon as they have arranged a stable government to replace Saddam."

Dr. Moosawi embodies much of what America has brought to Iraq. On the instruction of American officials, all 63 of Iraq's universities and technical colleges held elections this summer for presidents, vice presidents and deans; Dr. Moosawi, once a pariah among his colleagues because of the taint he bore from his brush with the secret police, is now vice president of Mustansiriya University, a proud if dilapidated institution in Baghdad that was founded by one of the ruling caliphs of the Islamic world in the 13th century.

Through all the years of the search for Mehdi, the family's hopes had been sustained by contacts with a senior officer in the mukhabarat, one of the prime agencies in Mr. Hussein's constellation of secret police agencies, which exacted money from the family, saying it would buy food, clothes and medicine for Mehdi in an undisclosed prison. It was a deceit of a kind that became common as Mr. Hussein's government came ever more to resemble an entrenched mafia whose brutality and greed metamorphosed into unrelenting terror.

The Moosawis suffered as grievously as any other from that murderous terror, Dr. Moosawi said, listing 9 members of the extended family who were executed under Mr. Hussein, and 30 others who are still missing, presumed dead, after being taken away by the dictator's enforcers.

Yet nothing had prepared the family for seeing the horror of Mehdi's end in the secret police film, which is available on a compact disk that sells on handcarts in bazaars all over Iraq. Dr. Moosawi, 50, hands copies of the CD to visitors to his university office, although he says he and most other members of the family, including Mehdi's father, Salih, and his mother, Zeineb, have never been able to watch through to the film's dismal end.

The CD shows Mehdi, sometime in 1985, emerging with two other young men from a white van, at what is said by the narrator to be an execution site in the flat, hot desert outside Baghdad. Their hands are bound behind their backs, and they have rags, in Mehdi's case a green bandanna, for blindfolds.

A group of men led by Ali Hasan al-Majid — Mr. Hussein's cousin, known as Chemical Ali for his role as commander of Iraqi forces that used chemical weapons to attack a Kurdish town, Halabja, in 1988 — stand at ease, cheering and clapping as the death sentences are read.

But these, it quickly becomes clear, are to be no routine deaths. The revolutionary court has condemned the three young men to hanging, the narrator says, because of their complicity in bombings that killed many people, including "women and children," in Baghdad. But President Hussein has ordered an exemplary punishment: that the condemned will be "blown to pieces," the narrator says, quoting from the document being read to the men in the desert.

One by one, the men are led forward to a mound of earth bulldozed as a sort of blast shield, and forced to sit down, cross-legged, on the ground. A man wearing a watch with Mr. Hussein's face on the dial then approaches, slips a grenade into the breast pocket of each of the victims, then closes the pocketby securing it with white medical tape. A wire runs back toward the execution party, linked to a battery and a detonator.

Each of the first two men is blown apart within seconds, their dismembered bodies lying in the fold of the earthen mound as Mehdi, in a brown track suit top, is led forward to his end. As the grenade is fixed and the tape secured, his bandanna, around the lower part of his face, slips further. Moments before the end, he looks up to his left, a slight, lightly moustached young man with a look of terror in his eyes, and says four or five words to the man leaning over him. On the tape, the words are indecipherable.

Then the detonator is pressed, and Mehdi disappears in a cloud of smoke and dust. The execution party walks away, led by Mr. Majid, laughing and congratulating each other. Mr. Majid, who later commanded troops who occupied Kuwait in August 1990, is now a prisoner himself, captured by American troops in Mosul in August. He was No. 5 on the list of 55 "most wanted" members of Mr. Hussein's leadership, and is likely to be among those, along with Mr. Hussein, who was captured himself on Dec. 13, who will face war crimes trials before Iraqi courts.

In the Dungeon

After 19 Years, Memory Still Stuns

Dr. Moosawi is a busy man these days. In his outer office at Mustansiriya University sits an American-trained Iraqi bodyguard with a pistol in his waistband, surrounded by dozens of petitioners seeking dormitory rooms, jobs as teachers and guards, scholarships and other favors that Dr. Moosawi can grant as the university's chief administrator. He also supervises postgraduate students in physiology at the medical school.

By his own account he is a quiet man, scion of a prominent Iraqi Shiite family respected for lineal ties that reach back to the Prophet Muhammad, and to a school of Islam that emphasizes tolerance, humanity and progress.

But when he sat down to tell Mehdi's story, and his own, he appeared to move into another world, speaking in a monotone that continued for two hours and more at a time, without interruptions from others in the room, without inflection or overt sign of emotion beside a gaze fixed on the carpet and the occasional wringing of his hands.

His descent into the gulag began at the University of Dundee, in Scotland, where he completed his doctorate between 1977 and 1984. They were years that bracketed Mr. Hussein's ascent to the presidency in 1979, and the Iraqi attack that began the war with Iran in 1980, leading by 1988 to a million dead on the two sides. As Dr. Moosawi told it, he left an Iraq at peace, in the middle of an oil boom that financed great progress in education, medicine and other fields, and returned on holiday in 1981 to a nightmare.

"I had a problem with Saddam right from the start," he said, speaking in a sometimes rusty, slightly Scottish-inflected English. "There were all those wounded people from the war, with no medical attention at all. There was no care for the families of the soldiers killed. On the radio, there were these songs with words that talked of the war as your lover. I was confused. War means killing, war means death. How can it be your lover?

"Everything had changed. The attitude was, 'Either you are fighting, or you are not an Iraqi citizen.' Everything was military, and everywhere the color was khaki. All your friends were in the army, or the people's militia. A lot of bad habits had been initiated among the ordinary people, like cheating, telling lies and spying. Schoolchildren were encouraged to spy on their parents, and wives on their husbands, and of course this led to the destruction of the family."

Back in Scotland, Dr. Moosawi spoke to fellow Iraqi students of his contempt for Mr. Hussein. Then, in June 1984, he returned to Iraq.

The first sign of trouble came when the Health Ministry refused to certify his Ph.D., barring him from working. Then, in December 1984, he said, 50 armed men from the secret police burst into the home of his older brother, Salih al-Moosawi, Mehdi's father, and arrested the two brothers, a cousin and two of Dr. Moosawi's nephews, one of them Mehdi.

His vision blinded by blackened, wraparound glasses, Dr. Moosawi said, he was driven to the General Security Directorate, which was then scattered around a score of old buildings in one of Baghdad's most historic sections and known as the White Palace, after a porticoed mansion once owned by a queen of Iraq. Long ago the houses had been owned by Jewish merchants; by the 1980's, the Jews were all gone, and the mansions had been converted to interrogation centers.

"They said, 'All of you have to be executed; all of you have to be destroyed,' " Dr. Moosawi said. " 'None of your family has to stay alive.'

"Before we got in the car, a very bad man pointed his gun at me and said, `You are to be killed now.' An officer came out and said, `What are you doing?' and he said, `He swore against Saddam Hussein.'

"It was not true, of course. The officer told the man to put his gun away."

At the interrogation center, the men were taken down stairs into a pitch-black basement, then separated. Dr. Moosawi's cell was just large enough for one man to sit, and two to stand, with an earthhole in the corner for a toilet. Mehdi was taken to another cell, and never seen again. It was bitterly cold and damp, Dr. Moosawi said, and women could be heard weeping somewhere in the dark.

Weeks passed, then months. Between interrogation sessions, the only contact with guards was when bread crusts were thrown into the cell.

"We didn't know if it was night or day," Dr. Moosawi said. "I told my nephew and my cousin, 'This is the time of our death, and we have to be patient, and strong.' "

Guards taunted them. "They said, 'Well, you are a doctor,' " he recalled. "I said, 'Yes,' and they laughed and said: 'Forget about it. It's all over for you. You will be buried here.' "

Finally, he was taken from the cell, up the stairs and into the presence of an officer, who told Dr. Moosawi he was to be released.

"Up the stairs I saw something I had forgotten, the sunlight," he said. "I thought, they will drive me to another place of execution. I said to the officer: 'Would you do me a favor, please: execute me here. I don't want to wait.' And he said: 'Dr. Taki, you are my friend. Honestly, you will not be executed. You are free.' "

Later, Dr. Moosawi learned that an Iraqi he had met in Britain — a cousin of Mr. Hussein's, though Dr. Moosawi says he did not know that — had visited his Baghdad home by chance, learned of his arrest, and intervened to have him released. Also freed were Mehdi's father and the two other men, but not Mehdi. Dr. Moosawi's name was placed on the secret police's special watch list of potential traitors.

After the Dungeon

A Time of Searching, a Time of Hate

At home Dr. Moosawi found the women in black, mourning men they had presumed lost forever. Remembering that, he paused, and wept silently into a handkerchief. After a full minute, he resumed.

Eventually, Dr. Moosawi got a job teaching at Mustransiriya, but colleagues avoided him. Friends stopped contacting his family, except for a few who came late at night or telephoned using false names.

Payments were made to the secret police officer who promised to look after Mehdi. But asking about his whereabouts, at secret police headquarters and prisons, was dangerous. "We'd say, 'Give him to us, and let us have a gun, and we will kill him,' " Dr. Moosawi said. "Of course, it was a lie."

Another war came in 1991, after the Iraqi seizure of Kuwait, and Mr. Hussein's grip tightened still further. Economic conditions worsened under the United Nations sanctions imposed after the Kuwait invasion. Virtually the whole economy turned into a black market, controlled by Mr. Hussein and two of his sons. By the mid-1990's, with the Iraqi currency thoroughly devalued, Dr. Moosawi's salary as a full professor came to be worth barely $2 a month.

But he had something most Iraqis did not: a certain immunity to fear.

"I had learned, No. 1, that I wasn't afraid of death; No. 2, that I wasn't afraid of a hard life," he said. "I'd seen the worst, and I believed I should give as much as I can. I worked day and night at the medical school, and tried not to think about anything else."

A marked feature of Dr. Moosawi's account was that for long periods he barely mentioned the name of the fallen dictator, as though unwilling to invoke it.

Now, nine months after the American occupation began, mass graves are being exhumed all across the country, and charges of war crimes and genocide weighed against Mr. Hussein, whose secret police, by estimates of Iraqi human rights groups, may have killed 300,000 to one million Iraqis.

Though American troops captured Mr. Hussein in a bunker near Tikrit, many Iraqis say privately that he still casts a long shadow, and that his loyalists, insurgents now, can still strike with ambushes, assassinations and roadside bombs. Dr. Moosawi said any killer could enter his office in the throng of petitioners, and that, for his family's sake, he should be careful when saying anything about Mr. Hussein.

Still, the picture he painted of Iraq's last years under the dictator suggested that Mr. Hussein's psychological hold on Iraqis, through the terror, had eroded fast after the 1991 war over Kuwait.

"If you had come to me and asked me about Saddam Hussein a year ago, I would have told you that he was a hero, that the Iraqi people love him," Dr. Moosawi said, "because if I tell you the truth I'll be finished. They will kill me."

But secretly, Dr. Moosawi said, Iraqis had decided, after Kuwait, that the dictator had to go. "After the war with Iran ended, with nothing gained and everything lost, people thought Saddam would become like a priest, that he would pay for what he had done by becoming a very good man. Then, in two years, he attacked Kuwait, and even people who had doubted it understood that the government of Saddam was against the people."

Secretly, Dr. Moosawi said, he began meeting with others at the university, forming the nucleus of a group of intellectuals who have since formed a society to work for a re-birth of Iraq. At home, a year ago, he and his family watched the drumbeat of yet another approaching war, this time with the Americans coming to overthrow Mr. Hussein.

Their fear, he said, was that President Bush would compromise with Mr. Hussein at the last moment, giving him a reprieve of the kind he gained when American troops stopped at the Iraqi border in 1991.

"We wished that Saddam would leave without a war, but unfortunately this didn't happen," Dr. Moosawi said. "So we Iraqis came to a place where we said, 'We will have to sacrifice something to have our freedom,' and the war fought by the Americans was the price."

When American advance columns arrived in Baghdad on April 9, he said, and appeared on television assisting in the toppling of Mr. Hussein's statue in Firdos Square, there was joy among the Moosawis that there had not been since Mehdi disappeared.

"I went to my brother to congratulate him", he said, speaking of Salih, Mehdi's father. "It was like we were dreaming. There were tears and smiles. Everybody was laughing and crying."

But in the months since, the mood among the Moosawis has soured, and not only because of the bitterness of learning, after weeks of visiting virtually every secret police station in Iraq, and scanning lists of political prisoners posted on lampposts and trees, that Mehdi would not be coming back. The Americans, Dr. Moosawi said, have failed the high expectations of Iraqis and have sunk so low in popularity that most cannot wait to see them go home.

"It is freedom the Americans have given us, but it is not good freedom," he said. "Yes, we wanted freedom against dictatorship, truth against lies, education and progress instead of pushing the intelligentsia down. But what have we got? There is no law, we live in the dark without electricity, there are no police to stop the thieves, nobody to control the traffic, no gasoline.

"In those respects, we say, 'Things were better under Saddam.' "

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company