Defector Says Sanctions Help Hussein’s Son

Saddam Hussein’s son and heir apparent, Uday, is pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars from a smuggling empire that illegally exports Iraqi oil and brings cigarettes and other goods into Iraq, according to a remarkable interview with his former personal secretary.

The statements by Abbas Janabi, who defected last spring and is said to be in hiding in Europe, give new details about Uday Hussein’s involvement in the sanctions-busting oil trade and insights into the personality of the 34-year-old. Janabi said he has seen Uday torture and kill his enemies.

Uday, who publishes Babel newspaper in Baghdad and controls a voluntary militia of fighters for his father, is perhaps best known in the West for surviving an assassination attempt in December 1996 that left him unable to walk without crutches.

But rather than the heroic victim celebrated by Iraq’s state-controlled media after that attack, the portrait of Saddam Hussein’s older son that emerges in the interview of one of his closest aides is of a determined man bent on accumulating power and characterized by greed, violence and extremism. The interview with Janabi is being published this week in installments by the pan-Arab daily Al Hayat, based in London. The newspaper said that Janabi fears for his life and has asked for asylum in an unspecified European country.

Abdel Wahab Badrakhan, an editor at the newspaper, described Janabi as a “man who was very close to Uday and knows everything about him.” He said the interview will “help people to understand some background of many, many events.”

The revelations will probably provide ammunition for the many in the Middle East who argue that maintaining U.N. sanctions, far from hurting the Iraqi leadership, has been a source of profits for Saddam Hussein and his immediate family.

Iraq in recent weeks has ceased cooperating with inspectors from the U.N. Special Commission, UNSCOM, whose job it is to certify that Iraq has destroyed all weapons of mass destruction. In response, the U.N. Security Council has suspended its periodic reviews on lifting sanctions--in effect keeping them in place indefinitely.

Although it has long been alleged that Iraq is selling oil illegally despite U.N. sanctions--in May, U.S. Undersecretary of State Thomas R. Pickering said such sales reached 200,000 barrels a day--Janabi’s statements provide fresh corroboration from someone with direct access to the inner circle of the regime. According to Janabi, Uday has built a “trade empire” that extends to Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iran and includes a flotilla of 50 ships for smuggling Iraqi oil through the Persian Gulf, an operation carried out in cooperation with parties in Iran.

Janabi accuses Uday of seizing much of the food and medical aid sent to Iraq from sympathetic European and Gulf Arab countries. A small amount is distributed for the sake of the media, he said, but most is stolen and sold.

All in all, “Uday is the biggest winner from the sanctions,” Janabi said, because he has been able to secure a monopoly on cigarettes, whiskey, chemical fertilizer and fuel.

Besides the Persian Gulf trade, smuggling also takes place by road between Iraq and Turkey, Janabi said, alleging that Uday has a “huge number” of cars and trucks taking fuel for sale in Turkey.

“The profits from these operations go to him personally, to his pocket. I estimate that he has made at least hundreds of millions of dollars.

“It is in Uday’s interest that the sanctions remain. He also controls all the aid that pours in from the emirates. He stores them now in the warehouse of the [Iraqi] Olympic Committee after distributing a small portion of it for the media to take pictures.”

Janabi invited investigators to go to Iraq to see for themselves aid products, still labeled as gifts from the United Arab Emirates, on sale at Baghdad street markets.

The 50-year-old Janabi is a former journalist who worked for the Iraqi national news agency and later became editor of Babel, the daily newspaper owned by Uday, before becoming his personal secretary.

Al Hayat did not provide details of Janabi’s defection but said he had escaped a kidnapping attempt in an Arab capital before succeeding in reaching a European country. Janabi said he decided to leave after he was accused by Uday of mishandling a business deal involving imported Western cigarettes, an accusation that Janabi considered tantamount to a “death threat.”

According to the interview, portions of which appeared in Al Hayat on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, Uday personally profited from Iraq’s seven-month occupation of Kuwait in 1990-91, stealing 160 cars, several boats, gold, jewelry and carpets.

Janabi said that Uday disagreed with his father’s handling of the Persian Gulf War, believing that Saddam Hussein should not have stopped in Kuwait.

According to Janabi, Uday wanted Iraq to mount a lightning strike on Saudi Arabia’s oil fields. That way, Baghdad could have blackmailed Western powers by threatening to set the world’s largest oil deposits on fire if they intervened.