Scarred by Terror, but Daring to Hope

Naji Abbas headed out for a couple of hours one day in 1985 to buy some medicine and never returned. Thirteen months later, family members say, the police told them they could pick up his body at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

Abbas, who, according to relatives, was guilty of nothing more than being a Shiite Muslim in Sunni-ruled Iraq, had been tortured, an eye poked out, an arm broken and his chest burned with electrical wires. The regime of Saddam Hussein then delivered the clincher: Family members were asked to pay 30 dinars, a month’s wages, for the bullets that killed him.

“They destroyed our family,” says Mazen Naji Abbas, 23, his son.

The advance of U.S. and British troops across Iraq has opened a window into how average Iraqis have lived for the last three decades under the rule of Hussein’s Baath Party. It’s not a pleasant view.

With each passing day, Iraqis grow less fearful and more willing to talk about what passed for normal under the Hussein regime. Healing the psychological wounds will probably take years.

The Baath Party completely dominated life in Iraq. Until this week, every neighborhood had a Baath official who kept tabs on the area, ran a network of informants and recruited members into the party, say Iraqis. It wasn’t difficult to figure out who they were: They had the best cars and the nicest houses and they had money to throw around.

Party members entered into the fold with the title of “follower” and rose through the ranks to active member, party trustee and branch leader. The higher your rank, the more you were expected to show your loyalty and commitment and, at the upper levels, brutality, Iraqis say.

It didn’t take much to run afoul of the party. A wrong word or chance comment within earshot of an informant often was enough to earn an interrogation or worse, according to residents of southern Iraq. There was little accountability, charges were difficult to counter and informants were eager to turn in “troublemakers” to prove their own value.

Senior party officials, meanwhile, seemed to seek evidence of anti-Baath conspiracies behind every date palm, with even the hint of disloyalty a cause for extreme punishment.

“Every second person in Iraq has been a spy,” said Hamza Abbas, the executed man’s brother.

Ordinary people living in this kind of pressure cooker, where any misstep could be fatal, generally avoided sharing their true feelings with anyone but their closest friends and relatives. Making sure children didn’t say an errant word before they understood the implications was also an essential survival tactic.

“You only talked when you were sitting with your very, very closest friends,” said Raheem Khagany, 24, an assistant engineering professor. “If a Baath member heard you, you could be executed.”

A big part of the regime’s strategy was to drive a wedge between geographical, religious and tribal groups in a divide-and-conquer strategy.

Baath members actively recruited new members, and turning down a party official’s invitation to join could be awkward or dangerous. Membership in the party was a must for anyone hoping to get a well-paying government job or academic position. Those who crossed the party, could, at the very least, expect their children’s school grades to suddenly deteriorate, have their career options blocked and see business opportunities dry up.

As U.S. and British military officials try to figure out where members of the Baath Party have gone in the confusion of the war, Iraqis are quick to make a distinction between low-level members who joined out of necessity and more senior, ambitious members who relished the opportunity to lord it over their countrymen.

Many ordinary Iraqis say as a matter of course they generally tried to have as little to do with the party and its representatives as possible. “They came looking for you after you hit sixth grade,” said Mohamed Madi, 52, a retired oil company worker. “You tried not to ask them for anything.”

As much as the Abbas family suffered under the Baath regime, they in some ways consider themselves lucky. At least they were able to retrieve their relative’s body, they say. Many other Iraqis simply disappeared.

“We know of entire families buried alive,” said Mazen Naji Abbas, the son of the executed man. “There are cases where they put them in acid baths and disappeared without a trace.”

After the family recovered Naji Abbas’ body, they realized he hadn’t been killed by gunfire, despite the state’s “bullet charge,” but rather by hanging, a further indignity.

Given the chaos of the war, it is impossible to independently verify all of the allegations of the Abbas family. But their account is consistent with a pattern documented by human rights experts.

After Naji Abbas’ death in 1985, the family says, it was blacklisted and humiliated. His older brother, the family breadwinner, was fired from his job as an engineering professor and forced to work as a nighttime security guard, the only position the party allowed him to keep. He now makes about $10 a month, he said, or about 5% of his old wage.

Naji Abbas’ parents died shortly after he did, broken by shock, relatives said. Other family members have been forced to endure regular police grilling and have been shunned socially. Other Shia friends have also been executed, they say.

At their house in Imanas, an impoverished town in the shadow of the Shuaybah oil refinery, the costs of crossing the Baath Party are immediately apparent. Twenty family members share two rooms in a rented house made of mud bricks hidden behind a dirt wall.

Inside, the house is devoid of furniture other than a crib made of welded steel rods, a wood vinyl cabinet and a large pile of sleeping rugs against the wall of the inner room that are unfolded and spread out each night.

There’s no glass in the windows. Plaster flakes hang from the ceiling. Frayed wires wend their way to a single fluorescent light.

The small yard is dominated by a bomb shelter dug by hand shortly before Britain and the United States invaded last month.

“We’ve had to sell our furniture, borrow and live a very low life,” said Hamza Abbas, the dead man’s brother.

Rasmia Abdel Kazem, 40, sits beside a picture of her husband and recalls the emptiness of not knowing for 13 months what had happened to him. “I had to consider how I was going to survive,” she said, adjusting her black headscarf. With four children younger than 8, she moved in with her in-laws.

As the family tries to piece together what happened to Naji Abbas 18 years ago, they speculate that he was turned in by an informer. Naji Abbas was deputy head of a local Shiite group and never did much to hide his dislike for the Baath Party, family members recall, which he saw as an inhumane organization with twisted values.

Over the years, the Baath Party has urged family members to write pro-Saddam slogans such as “Yes, Yes, to the leader Saddam Hussein!” on the walls of their house. The family balked, prompting the local Baath Party officials to paint the slogans themselves. This week, one of the first steps the family took was to scrape the slogans off.

For 18 years, the family also hid symbols of their Shiite faith, including a picture of the revered figure Imam Abbas. They pulled it out of a drawer on Shiite holidays only after securing the shades and ensuring that no prying eyes were about. With the Baath regime all but gone this week, the picture of their imam on horseback with a gold shield and a red spear was placed in a position of honor high on the wall.

Family members say they’re hoping people like them will soon be able to enjoy life in a more humane Iraq. Naji Abbas’s death certificate No. 326624, with its frayed edges and dulled script, embodies their hope that Hamza Abbas can get his job back at the university and that they may one day recover their stature in the community.