Saddam Hussein’s Forgotten Victims

Abu Jassem planned it carefully.

Two days earlier, he had gone out to buy the rope. He waited until there was no one else around. He put all his money, about $450, in his pocket, and locked the doors of his dingy basement apartment in the poverty-stricken neighborhood of Jabal Jofef.

Using two scarves, he strangled his 7-year-old son and his wife; there were no signs of a struggle.

Then he used the newly bought rope to hang himself from a ceiling fixture.

“The family was desperate and frustrated because they wanted to return to Iraq but could not,” a police official said of the tragedy two weeks ago.

In words that aptly describe tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees in limbo in Jordan, the official said the family was “financially and psychologically frustrated.”

They are Saddam Hussein’s forgotten victims.

Since the Persian Gulf War five years ago, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens have run away from the dictatorship that has turned one of the richest countries of the Middle East into a zone of starvation, paranoia and terror.

Up to 150,000 are in Jordan, Iraq’s neighbor and only outlet to the rest of the world.

The escapees include the country’s leading cultural lights.

Walk into the Phenix gallery in Amman and stumble upon the cream of the Iraqi artistic world, idling away time, drinking tea and selling their works just to live. Some say the suffering has helped their art.

“Most of our best poets are in exile,” shrugged Abdul Wahab Bayati, one of the world’s foremost Arabic poets.

It has been five years since he visited his native Iraq, and he never thinks about going back, he said.

“I am free,” he said. “I like to be free. There is no difference between home and exile.”

In an atmosphere reminiscent of the movie “Casablanca,” the majority of exiles are trapped in Jordan because they cannot get visas to anyplace else.

Some pay thousands of dollars to smugglers to slip them into Western Europe. Some peddle cigarettes on street corners. Others hang out in cafes and look over their shoulders before they speak, knowing that Hussein’s spies are about.

Like Abu Jassem, a few despair and kill themselves. The more determined plot for the day when they will topple Hussein and return in triumph to Baghdad.

The exiles complain bitterly about their treatment once they leave Iraq.

Tarnished by their Iraqi passports, presumed to be potential terrorists, they are routinely rejected by every embassy they approach for visas, even in the Arab world.

Libya, Yemen and a few Southeast Asian countries looking for skilled professionals are the exceptions.

Otherwise, they have virtually no option but to stay in Jordan. Even here they cannot legally obtain work, and the result is a tenuous existence.

“There is the dictator behind us and closed doors ahead of us. This is the dilemma,” said Haroun Mohammed, an Iraqi journalist active in the exiled opposition.

Jamal Mohammed, 37, a bookish-looking man with a sad smile, got out of Iraq five months ago.

“I had to sell everything,” he said. “I sold my furniture, my wife’s gold earrings, everything I had in order to have a few thousand dollars to spend here, because I don’t think I had any future in my own country.”

During the late 1970s, Mohammed studied engineering in London. But, inexplicably, he was denied permission to go back for his final year of studies and was later conscripted into the army for the 1980-88 war against Iran.

He survived, but in 1991 found himself back in uniform, dodging U.S. bombs, after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

“I lost nine of my best years in the army,” he said.

After the war, Iraqis believed that life would get better. But the economy went into a sharp downward spiral that the government blamed on greedy merchants and international sanctions, he said.

The wartime footing--with informants everywhere, midnight arrests and government propaganda claiming that the country was under siege by foreign enemies--never ceased.

“People live day by day. They cannot plan,” Mohammed said. “Wages have doubled, but prices are up 200 times. . . . When people meet each other in the morning, the first thing they ask is: ‘What is the price of sugar today? What is the price of rice?’ This is the main topic for everyone.”

As Mohammed described it, Iraq is a society in breakdown.

Doctors work 10 hours daily, he said, but at month’s end take home only enough to feed their families for two days. Work goes undone, offices close early, teachers don’t show up--all because people are preoccupied with scraping together enough extra money to get by.

Holding several jobs, trading in the markets, resorting to corrupt practices or becoming police informants--reporting on fellow workers and students--are the ways people earn something extra. Crime is worsening, he said, and the police won’t even show up unless there’s a bribe in it.

Under these circumstances, Mohammed said, he made the painful decision to leave.

“It wasn’t pleasant at all--to sell my house and my furniture, to lose all my memories, my parents, my own beloved friends, the stories we told and the times we would go for a picnic along the river,” he said. “We each had hopes, which have been lost.”

The price of an exit visa was 1 million Iraqi dinars, then the equivalent of $1,300. Mohammed also paid a series of bribes to make sure his permission to leave was not “lost” at the last minute. That cost $300 more.

Now he shares an apartment in Amman off swanky Garden Street with an older man, a once-prominent Iraqi who saw his life demolished when he was hauled off to prison by intelligence authorities.

Eighteen months later, at half his original weight because of a diet of rice water and with a damaged throat as a result of weekly beatings, the older man was let out in a political amnesty.

With Mohammed’s wife and the older man’s wife and preschool-age daughter, the combined household struggles to make ends meet and obsesses about where in the world they will find a permanent foothold.

Mohammed said he is tempted to accept the offer of a “travel agent” to sneak him into Western Europe illegally by way of Turkey and Romania. The price is $7,000.

Others have succeeded, he said, but the risk is enormous. If he is caught, Jordan will not take him back, and the authorities could deport him to Iraq. There the penalty would be prison, or worse.

The Iraqi opposition around the world is characterized by its divisions.

In northern Iraq, there are the Kurdish rebels, who control three provinces adjoining Turkey and Iran. There is also strong fundamentalist resistance among Shiite Muslims, with a base in London and links to Tehran. And now Jordan has allowed a Sunni Muslim opposition group, the Iraqi National Accord, to set up an office in Amman.

Reflecting a fear of Saddam Hussein that transcends Iraqi borders, visitors to the office in a suburban villa are searched with a metal detector, and young guards in plain clothes scrutinize cars passing on the street.

“We are facing a uniquely dangerous ruler,” said Noori Badran, one of the organization’s leaders. “We know that, we are prepared for it, and it will never stop us in carrying out our responsibility.”

Downtown Amman around the Al Husseini mosque is a bustling quarter of falafel shops, spice stores, fruit juice stands and cheap hotels. Many of the latter are now occupied by the Iraqi diaspora, for the most part poor people living hand to mouth.

Men in well-worn clothes and grizzled faces sit in a row on a low fence, offering used watches and odds and ends for sale on handkerchiefs laid at their feet.

The sight of a reporter asking a young Iraqi about his life in Jordan attracts a crowd almost instantaneously.

Eyeing his unexpected audience, the youth begs off and summons another friend, who knows what to do.

“I prefer my country,” the newcomer declares, loud enough for anyone to hear.

Even on the streets of a foreign capital, Iraqis cannot shake the suspicion that they are being watched.