'Modest' Saddam Pens 'Great Artistic Work'
PUSSSYKATT
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A new novel just published in Iraq, combining romance and
Iraqi politics after the Gulf War, is widely believed to be the second book
written by President Saddam Hussein.
Al-Qala'ah al-Hasinah (''The Fortified Castle'') appeared this week in
bookshops and all public libraries in Baghdad and was hailed on state-run
television and by the newspaper al-Jumhouriya as a ``great artistic work.''
The cover gives no clue to the writer's identity, saying cryptically that it is
a ``novel by its author,'' while a note inside explains that the writer ``did
not wish to put his name on it out of humility and modesty.''
But the official press has been heavily promoting the 713-page paperback, which
sells at 4,000 Iraqi dinars (1.25 pounds), and rave reviews in the Iraqi media,
which called it an ``innovation which nobody has managed to achieve during the
past century,'' leave little doubt as to its authorship.
An opening paragraph that reads: ``The novel is a trip in the world of struggle
and virtue and a fight against injustice,'' makes it reasonably certain that
the style is Saddam's.
In the story, the hero is a militant who took part in the 1980-88 Iraq-Iran war
and the Gulf War. He was wounded in the war with Iran and was captured by the
Iranian forces but he managed to escape from his jail and return to Baghdad.
He rejoins his university studies in Baghdad, where he falls in love with a
Kurdish girl from northern Iraq, which her family fled after the Gulf War
because of unrest.
His marriage cannot be completed for lack of some legal papers that she cannot
obtain from her northern hometown of Sulaimaniya, where she cannot go because
of death threats as her family opposes the political system there.
Northern Iraq has been outside the control of Saddam's government since soon
after the Gulf War.
Saddam last month urged opposition Kurdish parties to open dialogue with his
government.
The novel also describes the ``extraordinary'' situation in northern Iraq and
how the U.S. and British warplanes bomb targets and Iraq's military
concentrations in nearby places such as Mosul.
U.S. and British jets patrol no-fly zones set up after the expulsion of Iraqi
troops from Kuwait in 1991 to protect a Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq and
Shi'ite Muslims in the south from possible attacks by Iraqi forces.
The novel also has a sub-plot about a servant who betrays his master by trying
to kill him and escapes with his sister whom he loves and his animals.
The master recovers from his wounds and searches Iraq's desert until he finds
the servant and his sister in a place near the Gulf and takes his revenge by
killing them both.
This is seen as an allegory of Iraq's claim to have been betrayed by Kuwait,
which it regards as its 19th province and accused of stealing its oil, and
Baghdad's invasion of it in 1990.
The occupation lasted until a U.S.-led multinational alliance based in Saudi
Arabia drove Iraqi forces out in February 1991.
If the novel is Saddam's it is his second after ``Zabibah wal Malik'' (Zabibah
and the King) which was published late last year to equally rapturous reviews.
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John Savard
readable, doubtless he had help from a truly anonymous ghost writer.
Who takes no credit, not out of humility and modesty, but because of
the danger of becoming truly a ghost.