On July 22, 1979, the Ba'ath Party leaders were called to a meeting. They had no agenda and no idea what was going to be covered. They didn't know why they were there. They entered a large room where cameras were set up, and people were prepared to record what was about to happen. They sat down... and waited.
But first, to understand the importance of this event in 1979, you have to know a bit about Saddam Hussein. Who he was, where he came from, and how he came into power. So, let's go back in time a bit.
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| Saddam in his youth, image via Wiki Commons |
Saddam was born on April 28, 1937 in Tikrit, Iraq. His father, a shepherd, disappeared a few months before Saddam was born (though I have seen it reported that he died of cancer, so I'm not sure if he disappeared or died from an illness, as I seem to be hitting 50/50 on this particular point). Shortly after he disappeared, Saddam's older brother died from cancer. Saddam's mother, Subha, was overwhelmed with depression due to all of this and couldn't care for her infant son, so at three years of age, the boy was given to an uncle named Khairallah Talfah in Baghdad.
Talfah was a devout Sunni Muslim and an Arab nationalist, and ended up having a huge impact on Saddam's worldview. Saddam ended up attending a nationalist school in Baghdad, and he joined the Ba'ath Party when he was twenty. The main goal of the Ba'ath Party at that time was to unite the Arab states in the Middle East. On October 7, 1959, Saddam and others in the Ba'ath Party attempted to assassinate the then-president of Iraq. As you can assume from the word "attempted" in the previous sentence, this didn't really work out as planned.
The president's name was Abd al-Karim Qasim, and his refusal to join the United Arab Republic the Ba'athists were dreaming of, and form an alliance with Iraq's communist party was not what the Ba'ath Party and Saddam's cohorts envisioned, so they took action.
During the assassination, a few people were wounded, including Saddam, who was shot in the leg. Some were arrested and some were executed, but Saddam and several others managed to escape justice by fleeing to neighboring Syria, and then on to Egypt.
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| Saddam and Ba'ath Party students in Cairo, 1959-63 via Wiki Commons |
In 1963, the government was overthrown in the Ramadan Revolution and Saddam came back to Iraq. He remained involved in politics, and the Ba'ath party. He was arrested, and then escaped prison, and throughout it all, remained somewhat a rising star in his political party, gathering his power around him and rising through the ranks. In 1968, he participated in a successful, and bloodless, coup, wherein the government was overthrown and Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr was installed as president and Saddam his deputy.
During al-Bakr's reign, Saddam proved himself to be quite useful. He set himself to the task of modernizing Iraq. Saddam nationalized the oil industry, and boosted the nation's revenue by orders of magnitude. However, he also created his first chemical weapons, and created a police and paramilitary force that was used to guard against coups and threats to the government.
This particular last point is important to how he gained power. Saddam gathered a base around him and used them. This Ba'athist paramilitary group and the People's Army were two separate organizations (from what I could find on them) but they were beholden to Saddam, and they were ruthless, using fear, torture, rape, and assassinations to achieve its goals. You see this in a lot of rising tyrants, dictators, and the like. They will gather their power around them before they make their move, and create military and/or police forces that are beholden to them and only them. Then, when they act, they have the force required to do so, if they should will it by violence.
In 1979, President al-Bakr was on the cusp of uniting Iraq and Syria, and Saddam was Very Against This. Basically, if this happened, Saddam would lose all his power. So, he forced al-Bakr, then elderly and ailing, to abdicate under threat of force (remember, he had a paramilitary group and the police under his thumb, this was not an idle threat), and Saddam stepped into his role as president. On July 16, 1979, Saddam rose to power in Iraq. The only person who stood against this change in leadership was a man named Muhyi Abdel-Hussein. He becomes important, so remember that name.
One week later, we come to a room full of Ba'ath Party leaders, sitting anxiously, waiting to learn why they are there. The police locked the door behind them. There was no entering and no leaving.
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| Image from the Ba'ath Party Purge video, linked at the end of this post. |
Then, Saddam starts speaking. He says he has uncovered a sad and tragic plot, a fifth column, if you will. A moment later, a man named Muhyi Abdel-Hussein (Remember him? The one guy who stood against him when he took power.) walks onto the stage. In the video (link at the end of this post) you can see how frightened this guy is. Once the general secretary of the Revolutionary Command Counsel, he'd been arrested a few days before. In prison, he was tortured brutally and his family was threatened with rape and execution before he finally confessed he was the purported mastermind of this plot Saddam was telling his Ba'athist Party about.
Muhyi Abdel-Hussein appears on stage with a speech, where he confesses everything, claiming he was involved in a Syrian plot against the regime. He says he was involved in said plot with numerous people who sat in that very room. And then, to a stunned, trapped, and recorded audience (remember, Saddam ordered the entire event to be videotaped), he began reading off names of people involved with him. As he read out these names, the police (now headed by Saddam's brother-in-law), marched out, and grabbed the men listed, forcing them from the room.
In all, 68 names were read, and if you watch the video, you can see how terrified the audience was as this was happening. Cries praising Saddam, the government, Iraq, and undying loyalty become more and more fever pitched as events play out. No one knows what is going to happen, but they all know they don't want to be one of the men on the list, and half the terror is, no one knows who is on the list. No one knows who is next and there is no way out.
All through this, Saddam sits at a table on the stage, smoking a huge cigar and smiling. Occasionally he sort of chuckles. He looks completely relaxed, like the terror in the room before him is icing on a cake he's been wanting to eat for a very, very long time.
So what happened to these 68 men?
They were brought before a court and tried as a group. Twenty-two of them were sentenced to death. However, because tyrants are tyrants, Saddam couldn't just let them go quietly into that good night, neither could he let the other convicted individuals who had avoided execution go freely. Instead, he ordered those who had not been sentenced to death to execute the ones who had.
You see this sort of dynamic over and over again in dictators and tyrants. The rise to power is a heady thing, but one way to ensure loyalty and conviction is to make sure the blame is spread evenly. In this move, he ensures everyone has blood on their hands. He sends a message to everyone else, and it's not just a message, the terror is recorded on video and he sends the video to everyone he can across the whole country. He isn't shy about what he's doing. He is saying, "this is what happens if you stand against me." Further, by making the convicted execute their cohorts, he's ending some lives, and then ensuring mental anguish of others.
The meeting is about 35 minutes long (again, link at the end of this post and it has English subtitles). Perhaps that's what makes this purge of the Ba'ath Party so memorable. Most purges seem to happen behind closed doors. Stalin, for example, purged basically the entire country, but he never stood at the head of the table and said, "Let's record it for posterity." Maybe if that technology had been widely available when he'd been alive, he would have, but with his penchant for quietly disappearing undesirables off his pictures when they fell out of favor with him, I somehow doubt it.
According to Wikipedia, By August 1, hundreds of high-ranking Ba'ath Party members had been executed. On August 8, the Iraqi News Agency announced that twenty-one of the twenty-two Iraqis were executed by firing squad for "their part in a plot to overthrow Iraq's new president". The twenty-second man was condemned to death in absentia because he was "nowhere to be found", the agency said. A tape of the assembly and the executions was distributed throughout the country. "On an August afternoon in 1979, his face tense and somber, Saddam Hussein from the balcony of the presidential palace in Baghdad "informed a chanting crowd of 50,000 supporters "that he had just witnessed the punishment in the state court and had ordered for 21 of those me: They had been executed by firing squad. The crowd cheered."
This event established Saddam as a man who would tolerate no dissent, had no qualms about resorting to fear to ensure loyalty, and had absolutely no problems whatsoever with public displays of violence.
In some ways, Saddam and Stalin were similar. Both of them merged the political structure in their respective countries into a one-party system. Both of them had cronies, family members, close friends and loyal hangers-on in their closest circles. Both of them were absolutely ruthless in their effort to secure loyalty.
Saddam, however, was a different creature altogether. Part of why, is because he came to power in an age where things like television news was far more common, and technology was more modern. I do wonder if Stalin had existed in a world where he had access to the same kind of technology as Saddam did, how things would have differed. The biggest reason why they are different, however, is because Iraq and the USSR are two vastly different places and they were functioning on two vastly different political ideals. While there are some similarities between Stalin and Saddam, from what I've read, Saddam tended to lean more socialist than communist (no, they are not the same thing). He was a nationalist through and through, whereas Stalin was on the other side of that particular sliding scale. Stalin managed to fully centralize his economy, yet Saddam nationalized some aspects of it (like oil) and allowed private ownership in other aspects of land and business, which was not something that could be done under Stalin's leadership.
Saddam's arrival on the scene upset the balance of power in the Middle East. He was not afraid of conflict, and spent most of his time in office engaged in wars with others, like the Iran-Iraq war, or engaged in violent humanitarian crimes against his own people, and sometimes both. He had never served in the army, yet wore uniforms decorated in medals. He saw himself as a superpower in his region, and had no problems flexing his muscles to establish that position.
We all know how his reign ended. What will happen to Iraq is unknown, but Saddam's first true act of power was a bloody one indeed, and it set the stage for a brutal dictatorship that has left scars across the world.
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