Marie Colvin - On the Front Line

Critics are silenced as Saddam rebuilds Iraq

BAGHDAD

4 October 1992

Arc lights on the roof of the National Conference Palace shone through the night and into the pink dawn last week as construction workers hammered and welded round the clock to repair the bombed building. It might have been an unremarkable scene in a city recovering from 43 consecutive days of air attack, except for one thing: it was the last important building to be restored.

Little more than 18 months after the Gulf War ceasefire, you have to scour the back streets of Baghdad for any sign of the heavy bombing it underwent. Iraqi engineers have repaired all but one of the bridges destroyed during the hostilities and rebuilt the 14-storey central telephone exchange on the bank of the Tigris, bombed so often that by the end of the conflict it was just a concrete shell with steel and wires curling from the windows. Gutted ministries have been reconstructed, rubble removed.

The main power plant, which was lit almost nightly by flashes from explosions, is working at 90% of its pre-war capacity. Soon after the bombing ended, an engineer at the plant said it would take at least two years to get it working again; but there was not one blackout during the blazing hot summer, when Baghdadis ran their air-conditioning at full blast.

The list of achievements goes on. Oil production is back to about 800,000 barrels a day, although United Nations sanctions prohibit Iraq from selling its petroleum abroad. Restored refineries supply more than enough petrol and heating oil for Iraq’s domestic needs and exports to Jordan. Iraqi experts say they could now pump 2 million barrels a day.

The six-lane highway from Baghdad to the Jordanian border, littered with craters from nightly raids, is now a smoothly surfaced superhighway. Three weeks ago the evening news showed Saddam Hussein congratulating workers for finishing repairs on the presidential palace.

In fact, much of the current construction in Baghdad is of new buildings. Enormous villas are sprouting in the wealthy Mansour district, financed by war profits. Newspapers report the progress of the Third River project, the construction of a 350-mile canal that will drain the rising water in the Tigris-Euphrates basin to reclaim land.

Yesterday, Saddam announced that construction would resume, using Iraqi designs and expertise, of an enormous petrochemical complex which the war forced foreign companies to abandon. When finished, it will be the largest in the Middle East.

What happened? Just 18 months ago, Saddam sat in a windowless bunker, wrapped in a heavy woollen greatcoat because there was no heat and in dim light because even the president had to rely on a diesel-fuelled generator for electricity. Outside, his country lay in ruins. The electricity grid was destroyed. Sewerage and water systems, telephones, even traffic lights did not work. His oil refineries were reduced to tangled machinery and holed tanks. He had just been kicked out of Kuwait, his army was in disarray, a rebellion raged in 14 of his 18 provinces, and much of his air force was parked on the territory of his enemy, Iran.

Since then, Iraq has been rebuilt without money from oil exports, without the teams of foreign experts that once staffed the military and civilian industries, without the $4 billion of assets frozen in overseas banks, and under strict sanctions that ban the import of spare parts or construction materials.

The key to the revival is Saddam. According to those around him, he did not even falter in the face of devastation so massive that allied leaders believed his downfall to be inevitable. Saddam never, ever, gives up, they say. This mentality was a liability during the Gulf crisis, when he refused to leave Kuwait, but it was crucial to the rebuilding of Iraq. He went from the Mother of all Battles to the Mother of all Reconstructions without missing a beat.

Saddam emerged unrepentant from his bunker and ready to rebuild. The 53-year-old president knows his people well. He needed to remove the daily reminders of the war, and his responsibility for it. ‘I don’t want to see any war damage in the capital,’ an Iraqi official quoted him as saying. In a dictatorship as absolute as Iraq, such an order concentrates the mind. Construction crews began working 24 hours a day, even on Saturday, the Muslim Sabbath.

Saddam was fortunate in the resources he commanded. When UN sanctions were imposed in August 1990, Iraq had two years’ supply of spare parts in storage. There were millions of dollars in overseas slush funds, which his brother, Barzan al-Tikriti, Iraqi representative to the UN in Geneva, used to buy spare parts that were smuggled in through Jordan. Perhaps most important, Iraq is home to the best educated and disciplined people in the Arab world. He had no need for foreign technical expertise.

Saddam identified himself with the reconstruction effort. News programmes regularly broadcast East-European-style footage of him inspecting repaired factories.

A special Order of the President was created to reward those who excelled in the rebuilding effort, and the annual conference of the ruling Ba’ath party was named the Jihad (Holy War) of Reconstruction Congress.

Nothing proved too insignificant for Saddam’s attention. During a nationally televised meeting, he advised education officials to ‘give special attention to sanitary facilities for students. The student who cannot go to the bathroom all day because it is dirty cannot concentrate.’

There has been no let-up in the momentum. Saddam warned his ministers last month: ‘From now on, those government officials who fail in their responsibilities will be considered as being involved in economic sabotage. Stringent measures will be taken against them, similar to the strict measures taken against the traitors who were involved in profiteering and monopoly.’ It was an undisguised reference to the 42 merchants executed in July for profiteering.

The success of the reconstruction has won Saddam the admiration of his greatest critics. Ordinary Iraqis, who love their bridges and modern buildings the way Europeans love their nation’s art treasures or scenic vistas, are proud that Iraq has rebuilt its infrastructure quickly, and without outside help.

The country still has serious problems, though. Inflation has wrecked the economy, with prices spiralling higher almost daily – last week rice sold for 8½ dinars ($25) a kilo, a spare tyre for 2,000 dinars. The country’s future wealth is mortgaged to old debts and war reparation. On Friday, the UN security council voted to seize $1 billion of Iraq’s frozen assets to pay for UN operations.

But the dissatisfaction of Iraqis with their financial lot is irrelevant. Along with his bridges, Saddam has reconstructed his formidable security apparatus. The army has been restored to 40% of its pre-war capacity, with about 400,000 troops under arms; the ubiquitous Mukhabarat security men are back on the streets. The south is under undeclared martial law; generals have replaced civilians as governors in every southern province.

Saddam’s success has also undermined Washington’s attempts to persuade Iraqis to oppose the regime. I heard again and again in Baghdad, albeit in hushed tones, that Saddam and Bush had a secret deal: why else would the allied forces have stood by as the Republican Guard crushed the rebels?

In case anyone in Baghdad needed a reminder that Saddam’s rule has been restored as surely as his capital, they need only look to the shore of the Tigris in the exclusive Adamiya district of Baghdad. An enormous building, designed on the lines of a Sumerian palace, has begun to emerge from its scaffolding. It is a new presidential palace.