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Zainab
Salbi was forced to grow up fast. As she reached adolescence, Saddam Hussein
became president of Iraq and her father was made his personal pilot. She
met the new dictator when she was 12, and the introduction marked the
start of a confusing bond: intimate familiarity with a hated figure.
Salbi's memoir describes the horror of Saddam's regime through the eyes
of a young Shia girl accepted within his circle of "friends''. At
once she tackled puberty and the truth about Saddam. As she learnt of
Muslim divisions, she learnt of Saddam's atrocities to Shias; as she became
a woman, she heard of Hussein rapes. Yet she could confirm nothing. In
a regime filled with spies, her parents refused to discuss Saddam. They
would not even name him: to the Salbis, he was known by his code name,
Amo, meaning "uncle''.
There have been many insider accounts of brutal regimes, but Salbi's perspective
is extraordinary. She was not Saddam's employee but his employee's daughter.
She was not his niece, but she had to call him Uncle. While she was always
one step removed, she was also loyally bound to the man who "protected''
her family. Salbi's text is not translated and speaks with neither a relative's
bias nor the protection of a pseudonym. Its sense is as raw as the story
it tells, and the words ring with no less risk. The author's vulnerability
followed her from Iraq. The founder of Women for Women International,
which supports women in war-ravaged areas, she has kept her past secret
until now for fear of it tainting her new identity.
Until she met Amo, Salbi lived a blissful middle-class childhood in Baghdad,
though the bliss did not quite end with the meeting: "He was not
just compelling, he was affable.'' And, dangerously, he was fond of Salbi.
Her mother quickly identified the favouritism as a more sinister singling
out, but little Salbi assumed "that special smile'' he gave her meant
she had succeeded in pleasing him. Pleasing Saddam was all that any good
Iraqi, child or adult, had in their best interests, especially those in
his close circle. "There was nothing you'd rather do than spend time
with him.''
The Salbis spent nearly every weekend with Saddam, surrounded by his family
and "friends''. At once excluded from Saddam's real family and uninterested
in the gossip of the spoilt children of other employees, however, Salbi
made better friends with the ducks on his reservoir. The one cheerful
day she remembers was when Amo took her and the other girls for a ride
in his sports car.
But then signs of the leader's other side became clear, even to Salbi.
Certain Shia friends started disappearing and Amo, safe within his complex,
surrounded by admirers and tight on Chivas Regal, would boast of his killings.
Salbi gradually began to realise she had been duped. "I have tried
to identify the moment in which I first realised that the man I greeted
with kisses on the hollows of his cheeks was a murderer, but I don't think
there was one.''
If Amo's own gloating at atrocity didn't confirm Salbi's worst fears,
his contempt for other creatures helped. Watching a duck hunt, from the
ground, Salbi describes seeing five men led by Amo, including her little
brother, shooting from circling Sikorsky helicopters and laughing at the
"screaming'' birds flying every which way. Sobbing, Salbi cried out:
"This is nothing to laugh at! This is a massacre!'' before her mother
muffled her cries so the security guards wouldn't hear.
On a weekend trip to a lake, Salbi made sure she was heard. Having deliberately
left behind her very "suggestive'' red bathing suit, she refused
to get into the water when asked, saying she had forgotten it. Saddam
insisted: "Just go up to my room and put on one of mine with a T-shirt!''
Again she declined, this time with a woman's excuse.
Even after Salbi escaped from Iraq, Amo's shadow hung over her. In Chicago
her arranged husband, a Shia Iraqi refugee, abused her when he realised
her identity. "Fakhri was doing to me what the whole of the exile
community wanted to do to Amo.'' What is desperately moving is that after
all this, Saddam remained "Amo''. Until recently she could not even
speak the words "Saddam Hussein'' in her home. Her sense of guilt
is staggering. Salbi now works to alleviate the confusion of other women.
She has, by finally speaking up, begun to alleviate her own.
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