Lies in the Absence Of Liberty
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By Fred Hiatt
Monday, April 14, 2003; Page A17The fear and moral corruption of life in a totalitarian state, so blessedly beyond the understanding of most Americans, was captured in a poignant moment in Baghdad on Wednesday as Iraqis came to realize that Saddam Hussein was gone. It was a reminder of how we underestimate, again and again, the lies that dictators tell and the lies that their subjects are forced to live, whether in Iraq, the Soviet Union or China.
An electrical engineer named Majid Mohammed, 47, proclaimed his joy at Hussein's fall -- and was promptly contradicted by his 12-year-old daughter. "I'm sad," she told The Post's Anthony Shadid. And, referring to the American soldiers, she added: "They stole our freedom."
Mohammed, pained at his daughter's remark, tried to explain. "Until now, I haven't been able to speak my feelings about him." Until now, that is, he dared not reveal what he thought -- who he was -- even in the most intimate privacy of his own home.
And no wonder: What greater fear could there be for a parent in a state such as Hussein's, a state where children were tortured in front of their parents and parents in front of their children, than a child inadvertently blurting a suspicious truth at school? One of the icons of Soviet propaganda was 12-year-old Pavlik Morozov, the Young Pioneer who ratted his father to the secret police for trying to hide grain for his family. The Baathist state similarly began indoctrinating at kindergarten age -- and similarly ensured that no sphere, no matter how enclosed, could be safe from fear and deceit.
Yet in the runup to the Iraqi war we read story after story purporting to tell us what Iraqis thought of President Bush, or of Saddam Hussein, or of the U.N. weapons inspectors. "We like our president," one Iraqi woman told a Canadian reporter. "Why does America want to enter our country and take our leader out?"
"Can a person live without water and air? We cannot live without Saddam Hussein," a teacher in Mosul told an American reporter, who in turn told all of us.
The more careful of the journalists who relayed such statements made sure to mention when they were, and were not, accompanied by government "minders." And surely not every such statement was a lie. Surely some Iraqis do love Hussein; many feared war; many doubted -- still doubt -- American intentions. Public opinion in Iraq, as everywhere, will prove complex.
But because our default position is to tell the truth -- might as well, unless there's some good reason not to -- we have trouble imagining people for whom that is not so, for whom even a whispered conversation far from officials or listening devices can never be considered safe. Though a father cannot speak the truth within his own family, we have trouble imagining that he will not talk frankly to a foreigner he barely knows.
And we assume, because of our blessed poverty of imagination, that their officials behave more or less as ours do, maybe lying when pressed, or when they think they can get away with it, but telling the truth when, all things being equal, there seems no reason not to. Thus Kofi Annan can journey to Baghdad and pronounce Saddam Hussein a man you can do business with. Hans Blix can bustle from minister to minister as if he might learn something serious.
Usually it is only the unfortunates living in such states who suffer from their leaders' lies. But sometimes others are put at risk. Neighbors feared that was the case when the Soviet Union withheld the truth of the Chernobyl radiation disaster. It seems again to be the case with SARS, a potential pandemic that started in southern China last fall.
"We feel that China is taking the measures now they can," David L. Heymann, a World Health Organization official, testified in Congress last week. "If these measures had been taken in November, perhaps the disease would not have spread."
Why would Chinese officials have concealed and dissembled last fall? Because they did not want to disrupt tourism or investment. Because in China, health data are state secrets. Because in dictatorships, that is what officials do -- the default position.
Even now, officials from the non-totalitarian world seem hard pressed to believe that the lies could be continuing. "With this high level of commitment, very soon we'll get some real answers," another WHO official said after his delegation had met with China's health minister.
At about that time a Chinese army doctor, Jiang Yanyong, was insisting that the health minister was still lying -- that there were many more deaths and illnesses even in Beijing than China was reporting. Officials were eager to persuade Chinese to travel for the May 1 holiday, a big tourism moment for the Chinese economy, though other doctors fear domestic travel could spread a disease that might otherwise, even now, be contained.
A state-run publishing house published on April 3 a book titled "SARS Is Nothing to Be Afraid Of." As of Saturday, 2,960 cases of SARS had been reported to the WHO from 19 countries on three continents. One hundred nineteen people had died. Or rather, 119 deaths had been reported.
e-mail: fredhiatt@washpost.com
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