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___Saddam Husseinkeywords: Saddam Hussein Biography, Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq |
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President of Iraq |
Saddam Hussein |
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Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti has been the President of Iraq since 1979, Prime Minister, 1979-1991 and 1994 onwards. He was born in the village of Al-Auja, in the Tikrit District of Iraq, to a family of sheep-herders. Later in his life, relatives from his hometown would be some of his most influential and powerful advisors and supporters, and would gain the nickname "Tikriti mafia" as a result. He never knew his father, Hussein al-Magid, who died or disappeared before Saddam was born. His mother, Subha Tulfan al-Mussallat, remarried, and Saddam gained three half-brothers through this marriage. His stepfather, Ibrahim al-Hassan, treated Saddam harshly, and forced young Saddam to steal for him. At the age of 10, Hussein moved to Baghdad to live with his uncle, Khayrallah Tulfah, a devout Sunni. In 1955, he attended the nationalist secondary school in Baghdad and joined the Ba'ath Party. 1956 saw him take part in an unsuccessful coup attempt against King Faysal II. In 1958, a non-Baathist group led by General Abdul Karim Qassim overthrew the king. In 1959, following an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Prime Minister Qassim, Hussein fled to Egypt by way of Syria and was sentenced to death in absentia. He received some of his higher education at the University of Cairo law school. On his return to Iraq following the 14th of Ramadhan revolution (February 8, 1963) he was imprisoned in 1964 following a change in power, but escaped from jail in 1967. In 1968 he helped lead the successful and non-violent Ba'athist coup. He also gained a degree in law from the University of Baghdad in 1968. He was vice-chairman of the Revolution Command Council from 1968 and was appointed a General in the Iraqi armed forces in 1973. In 1979 the President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr announced his retirement (aged 66) and Saddam Hussein gained the posts of Chairman and President. A Baathist who dreams of unifying the Arab World as a single modern state, Hussein, on June 1, 1972, led the process of nationalizing western oil companies which had had a monopoly on Iraq's oil. Hussein actively fostered the modernization of the Iraqi economy, urging the construction of various developed industries and following their administration and execution. He also supervised the modernization of the Iraqi countryside, the mechanization of agriculture and the distribution of land to farmers. He affected a comprehensive revolution in energy industries as well as in public services such as transport and education. He also initiated and led the National Campaign for the Eradication of Illiteracy and the implementation of Compulsory Free Education in Iraq. Hussein, to the consternation of Islamic fundamentalists and the Islamic Republic of Iran, liberated women and offered them high level government and industry jobs. The Baathist government provided social services to Iraqi people unprecedented in other Middle Eastern country. Under Hussein's auspices, the government established universal free schooling up to the highest education levels, supported families of soldiers killed in war; granted free hospitalization to everyone, and gave subsidies to farmers. Earlier, Hussein's government had broken up the large landholdings in the first place and redistributed land to peasant farmers. Iraq is a highly fragmented society; according to some, it is tantamount to a Middle Eastern Yugoslavia (an analogy used often by Thomas Friedman). Over the past three decades, however, Hussein's authoritarian rule has kept the lid on pervasive tribal, class, religious, factional, and ethnic conflicts, and destabilizing forces externally, such as hostile powers like Iran and the United States. The cost, though, has been one of the more autocratic of the Middle East's many autocracies. Islamic fundamentalists, suppressed through classic carrot and stick tactics, and won over eventually by and co-optation and coercion, tended to reject the direction in which Hussein has been leading the country. And the region's traditional aristocracies, both Sunni and Shiite (the kinds of aristocracies that still rule the other Arab Persian Gulf states with an iron grip), rejected the populist nature of his policies which have undermined and largely eroded aristocratic privilege. In short, large segments of Iraq's population tended to reject modernization even though it has dramatically raised living standards in the aggregate. The secular and socialistic nature of his government thus explains his authoritarian rule. But the modernizing, socialistic nature of his government also explains Iraq's impressive development, at least before the Iraq-Iran War, the Gulf War, and the ensuing 12 years of santions. Since the nationalization of oil fields and refineries, electricity has been brought to nearly everyone in Iraq, including those in far outlying areas. The government has made great progress in building roads, establishing mechanized agriculture on a large scale, promoting mining and other industries diversify the oil-dependent economy. Iraq is the only country in the Persian Gulf region not to be ruled according to Islamic law. Hussein provided both Arab and Western style banking systems to give the people a choice between these interest-bearing and non-interest-bearing accounts, created a fair, western style legal system, and abolished the old Mosaic law courts except for personal injury, small court claims. Because of the Iraqi regime's modernizing nature under Hussein, the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran threatened to divert Iraq from this progressive path of development. After all, Shiites, many of whom were sympathetic to Iran's Ayatollahs, accounted for the majority of Iraq's population. The pretext for the bloody, protracted Iran-Iraq War was a territorial dispute, but most attribute the war as an attempt by Hussein, supported by both the US and the USSR, to have Iraq form a bulwark against the expansionism of radical Iranian-style revolution. And though the war was a stalemate, Islamic Revolution did not spread and Iraq would not be diverted from its modernizing path. The war with Iran left Iraq bankrupt. Faced with rebuilding its infrastructure destroyed in the war, Iraq needed money. No country would loan it money except the US. Borrowing money from the US made Iraq its client state. According to some, the costs of the Iran-Iraq War would later explain Iraq's confrontation with Kuwait and the United States. According to many historians, Iraq has always been hostile to Kuwait, because Kuwait was created by the British from land that was originally part of Iraq and Hussein needed the seaport in Kuwaiti territory. Kuwait had already offered its seaport to Iraq, and it was using Iraq's fleet of oil tankers to transport its own oil abroad, as were many other oil countries. This gave them an indigenous industry, independent of outside European and American tankers which demanded higher fees. Thus Kuwait and Iraq were in the oil tanker business together, Iraq furnishing the tankers, Kuwait furnishing the port. Iraq had borrowed a tremendous amount of money from other Arab states, including Kuwait, during the 1980s to fight its war with Iran. Saddam Hussein felt that the war had been fought for the benefit of the other Gulf Arab states as much as for Iraq, and so all debts should be forgiven. Kuwait, however, did not forgive its debt and further provoked Saddam by slant-drilling oil out of wells that Iraq considered within its disputed border with Kuwait. In 1990 Hussein complained to the United States State Department about Kuwaiti slant-drilling. This had continued for years, but now Iraq needed oil money to pay off its war debts and avert an economic crisis. Hussein ordered troops to the Iraq-Kuwait border, creating alarm over the prospect of an invasion. After talks with April Glaspie, the United States ambassador to Iraq, assured him that the US considered the Iraq-Kuwait dispute an internal Arab matter, Hussein sent his troops into Kuwait. The US and Britain, two of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, stirred a reluctant Security Council into declaring war on Iraq, which President George Bush declared was "for the New World Order." Prior to that point, however, Iraq's stances in the international community had really irked the Western powers. Iraq was the leading country in forming the Arab League, similar to the European Economic Community, an alliance of European countries. All oil nations would share and work together and plan their own army that would include no Europeans. In effect, Hussein was striving to pay off the debts accumulated during the Iraq-Iran War by pushing oil-exporting countries to raise oil prices and cutback production. That, of course, would be intolerable to the West, considering the very destabilizing effects of the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s. A United Nations trade embargo has been in place continuously since the Gulf War. In 1996 the Iraqi parliament accepted a Security Council plan authorizing Iraq to sell limited amounts of oil in order to meet its urgent humanitarian needs. According to official reports, Hussein appears to enjoy extremely widespread popularity within Iraq. A 2002 referendum, asking whether he should continue to lead Iraq, claimed 100% of voters thought he should, and that the turnout was 100%, with international media releasing pictures of Iraqi women voting in their own blood. However, he was the only candidate on the ballot and voting was mandatory. Hussein currently has three wives. His first marriage to his first cousin Sajida Talfah, a former teacher, occured in 1963. This union with the eldest daughter of Khairallah Talfah, the uncle who raised Saddam, produced two sons, (Uday Saddam Hussein and Qusai Hussein) and three daughters. Sajidah was put under house arrest in early 1997, along with daughters Raghad and Rana, because of suspicions of their involvement in an attempted assisination on Uday in December 12, 1996. He also married two other women: Samira Shahander, whom he married in 1986 after forcing her husband to divorce her (she is rumoured to be his favourite wife), and Nidal al-Hamdani, the general manager of the Solar Energy Research Center in the Council of Scientific Research, whose husband apparently was also persuaded to divorce his wife. There apparently have been no political issues from these latter two marriages. (Source: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia) |
Born April 28, 1937, Al-Auja President of Iraq since 1979 Saddam Hussein is currently married with three wives: Sajida Talfah, Samira Shahander, and Nidal al-Hamdani Human Rights Watch: Justice For Iraq HRW has long advocated the prosecution of Saddam Hussein Biography of George W. Bush ...back to the war against Iraq page | |
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