Years of Pain, And the Words To Describe It
Hidden Writings Portray Life as Enemy of Hussein

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By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 8, 2003; Page A01

BASRA, Iraq -- Ihssan Wafiq Samarrai talked excitedly, all smiles, for he had made it through to the end of a long tunnel. He talked sorrowfully, his eyes filling with tears, because he could not shake the memory of his murdered comrades, and what he considers a generation lost to Iraq. He talked passionately, his hands moving quickly, for now he had the chance to describe his life under Saddam Hussein and the secret enterprise it had moved him to undertake.

Samarrai, once a prominent Baath Party official, was jailed by Hussein in 1979. During nearly five years behind bars, he thought obsessively about what was happening to him and his country under Hussein's rule. During a period of isolation and virtual house arrest that followed his release, he began putting his obsessions on paper. For 20 years, he scribbled furiously. Novels, short stories, poems, parables, historical accounts. Thousands of pages, written in longhand, then typed, then hidden.

Samarrai stashed some of his works in a hole beneath the kitchen tiles. He shipped others to a faraway town or gave them to a trusted friend. He kept personal journals in precise Arabic script behind false panels in the ceiling of his library. He told only four people of his toil and worried each time the security services knocked.

But now Hussein was gone and Samarrai's manuscripts were in full view. They spilled from manila folders piled high on wooden shelves where space had been cleared for their welcome. When Basra fell to British forces on April 7, Samarrai felt safe enough to thumb through an entire work without fear. When the Baghdad government collapsed two days later, he saw what looked like deliverance and reunited his works in plain sight.

"I said to myself," Samarrai recalled, "This is the time of the manuscripts!"

Samarrai, 63, grinned as he said this. Over two nights, in a house filled with books and memories, he revealed things he has long wanted to share, but dared not. He had been banned for 24 years from meeting foreigners, but here he was pouring out his stories in a jumble, sharing the writings he had hidden for so long.

"Before," he explained, motioning toward his friend, playwright Khalid Sultan, "I could only talk with Khalid. But now I can express myself. Something has finally escaped from my mind."

The words flowed, about the Baath Party, about his incarceration, about Iraqi society and about his writing. He has submitted a detailed history of modern Iraq to a foreign publisher and published a series of well-received historical articles about Basra. But, like other Iraqi artists and writers, he is counting on the post-Hussein political opening to give voice to the secret works he cares about most.

Samarrai wrote in rich images and stream of consciousness, allowing his mind to play silently on topics too dangerous for public discussion. Conscripted to fight in the Iran-Iraq war, he wrote about what he called "complete savagery," describing gruesome scenes of battlefield plunder. For a novel about what might have been, he chose the title, "A Colorful Scenario for a World in Black."

"I stretch on the edge of the window and gaze into the current, looking for a meaning for 'survival,' " Samarrai wrote in one work. "Where is this flood heading? This -- 24 hours of torture, hunger and horror -- continues pushing forward mercilessly. Thirty years have passed. Memories press on me tonight and fall like rain. As soon as I know that I am alone, hymns rise and the buried memories play with me gently. I look at the wall. My eyes steer the boat's sail in a destructive storm."

Sultan, his friend and unofficial editor, said Samarrai could benefit from a red pencil but expressed belief he will find an audience. An English professor at Basra University, Adil Thamiry, who spent several hours paging through the manuscripts the other day, agreed. He described Samarrai's work as so poetic that some of the fictional stories hardly seemed like prose. He predicted, however, that Samarrai would become best known for a work of nonfiction -- his own pained story.

Witness to Murder

The most chilling moment came in July 1979, when Samarrai was arrested and ordered to confess, although no one would tell him his crime. He recalled standing bewildered with fellow Baath leaders who did not yet realize Hussein's infamous purge of potential rivals had begun.

A security officer brought in a blindfolded prisoner and announced that this man, too, had failed to admit his guilt. Samarrai said he heard the command, "Shoot him," and watched a guard raise the barrel of his AK-47 assault rifle to the prisoner's neck. "The gunpowder and the blood were in my face," he recalled. "They shot three people in three minutes."

The security chief told the others their fates would be the same if they refused to confess. "Then," Samarrai said, "they returned us to our cells."

Once a true believer in Baathism and Hussein, Samarrai never conceived of such a fate when he joined the fledgling party as a middle-school student in 1956. He was a teenager in 1958 when the British-installed monarchy was overthrown and barely in his twenties when he was arrested with a Baath group trying to seize the Basra radio station in 1963 during resistance to the military government then in charge.

In prison, he met Hussein, who had gained renown for taking part in an assassination attempt against Iraq's leader. Conditions behind bars were passable and the inmates debated politics. Samarrai found it exciting to be around the young militant, especially in contrast to the more sedate party leaders he knew best. Hussein remembered names. He took an interest in lower-level activists and made them feel special.

"When Saddam got you, it was, 'Come on, what do you know? What's the problem? We will solve it,' " Samarrai said. "Achievements were very rapid with Saddam."

He recalled a party conference in the 1970s when Hussein, already the deputy national leader and seeking political support, sent a waiter over with three pipes on a tray as a gift. "It was a message, and not to me only, that I was a favorite of Saddam's and that I should feel proud that such an important man would recognize me and believe in me," recalled Samarrai, the son of a middle-class policeman. "And it was a message to the others that they should vote for him, too."

It was only later that Samarrai, in his dealings with Hussein, came to see him differently: "He suffers from a double identity," he said, "like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."

A Turning Point

Samarrai commanded a military brigade in Basra when the Baath Party seized power in Iraq in 1968. For the next 11 years, until his arrest, he ascended through the ranks of the local party, accumulating so many titles that he now finds it embarrassing to list them. He was a member of the ruling council, editor of the city's main newspaper, editor of the principal magazine, director of the television station and deputy commander of the party's militia, where he also ran the intelligence operation. He luxuriated in his own prominence.

According to Basra residents who remember him, Samarrai was feared. He had access to documents and secret files and the ear of the all-powerful party leaders in Baghdad. He acknowledged being a part of the increasingly ruthless party apparatus, but he maintained that he tried to distance himself from its excesses. In fact, he believes he owes his imprisonment in 1979 to complaints he lodged about the party's direction.

"It was really hard to balance my true feelings against my duties," said Samarrai, who mulled quitting his party role for advanced study in literature in East Germany, but never did. "After a while, I saw there was a gap between the slogans and the reality; the ideals and what was achieved."

In 1977, Samarrai commented that a new Baath Party museum in Baghdad gave too much prominence to events in Baghdad and central Iraq. He argued that Basra, too, should be represented, and he provided two sacks of exhibits about exploits in the south. Word of his opinions reached Ahmed Hassan Bakr, then the Iraqi president, who seemed to agree.

Hussein, then the second-most powerful man in Iraq, soon summoned Samarrai to his office. Bakr had evidently told Hussein to make a place in the museum for Basra, and he was furious. To Samarrai, it seemed Hussein felt his own authority had been challenged.

"I think it was a turning point in my career," Samarrai said, dragging on a cigarette in the fading light of his living room. "When he has hard feelings, he will hold them forever."

There were other conflicts with Hussein. In early 1978, Samarrai wrote to Hussein to say it was "shameful" how the party was distributing compromising information from an informer about a member of the Baath Party command. He threatened to resign and spent the next week at home.

Samarrai said party officials were dispatched by Baghdad to pull him back into the fold. Angrily, he told them he opposed such repressive tactics. The use of informers, blackmail and pressure tactics, he said, was a "fascist way of doing things."

That phrase would become attached to him like an indictment. Hussein became president on July 16, 1979. Four days later, Samarrai and a Basra colleague received orders to drive through the night to Baghdad for an emergency party meeting. They arrived to find a confusing melange of Iraqis, from military officers and political apparatchiks to tribal leaders.

A squad of soldiers strode into the room, encircling the group. Hussein appeared on stage and began to make a speech about a plot against the party and Iraq. Samarrai thought it made little sense, but Hussein then began reading from a list of names. When a person's name was read, he was taken into custody.

Then he heard Hussein call his name. Soldiers blindfolded him and drove him with the others to a building in Baghdad, where the new prisoners were beaten and called traitors. "They asked us to confess, without any discussion. We didn't know what to confess to," Samarrai said. An officer making notations asked him what he had done. He replied, "I don't know."

The sudden executions happened on the first or second night. The prisoners, perhaps 40 of them, were gathered from their cells. After the first prisoner was killed, two more were yanked from the group and shot.

Samarrai's share of the trial two weeks later lasted not much longer than a minute. There were no formal charges, no defense attorneys. Not even a reason given for his arrest. An official simply asked whether he was guilty. He said he was not.

"We were dismissed," he said. "When we came back, the court had decided. I was sentenced to 10 years in prison."

Those years behind bars remain difficult for the voluble Samarrai to discuss. He described spoonfuls of rice, cramped conditions and beatings. The solitude tormented him. He has written a manuscript about the experience titled, "There is No Echo in a Human Cave."

After Samarrai had been in prison for six months, he received a visit. Blindfolded, he listened as the man explained that he had the power to kill him. As they were talking, he heard someone else enter the room.

"I knew his voice. It was Saddam," Samarrai related, his sitting room now illuminated only by an oil lamp in a city still without electricity.

Hussein asked him a question: "Do you want to know what your treason was?" Samarrai said he did. Hussein said word had traveled that he was a big man in southern Iraq: "We have heard that they call you Saddam of Basra."

Samarrai winced now as he continued the story.

"He said, 'You accused us of being fascists,' " Samarrai said. "I said, 'So, if I am a traitor, just kill me.' He said, 'You want to be killed?' I said, 'Yes.' He said, 'I will put you in prison until all your hair falls out. I will kill you every day, which is better than just once. I'll tell you something: I liked you before, but you betrayed us. You accused us. This may cause me to cut out your tongue.' " On April 28, 1983, Samarrai was freed in the first of Hussein's birthday pardons. He was sent back to Basra. But, except for a stint in the army, he was forbidden to travel from the city or move far from his home. Feeling more artist than political figure, he began to write and never stopped.

Samarrai's greatest hopes now, he said, are to publish and to travel. Iraq's downtrodden writers and poets, who have endured a quarter-century of censorship and surveillance, could board "a big ship, like Noah's Ark," he suggested, for a six-month trip around the globe. Even another desert, he said, would be a welcome change.

"We want to feel some salvation. We want the freedom to speak, women to talk to," Samarrai said. "My question is that, even if this dream is fulfilled, can we see things differently? We have so many dead friends. This is our regret, our calamity. We only want to forget this nightmare."

© 2003 The Washington Post Company