Irish minister for finance Charles Haughey in which the country’s human rights abuses simply went unrecorded. It was not difficult to see why. ‘An enormous potential market for Irish produce,’ it began, ‘including lamb, beef, dairy products and construction industry requirements was open in Iraq … Charles Haughey told me on his return from a week-long visit to that country.’ Haughey and his wife Maureen, it transpired, had been ‘the guest of the 9-year-old socialist Iraqi government’ so that he could inform himself ‘of the political and economic situation there and to help to promote better contact and better relations between Ireland and Iraq at political level’. Haughey, who had met ‘the Director General of the Ministry of Planning, Saddam Hussein’, added that ‘the principal political aspect of modern Iraq is the total determination of its leaders to use the wealth derived from their oil resources for the benefit of their people …’ The Baath party, the article helpfully informed its readers, ‘came to power in July 1968 without the shedding of one drop of blood’.
The British understood the Iraqi regime all too well. In 1980, gunmen from the ‘Political Organisation of the Arab People in Arabistan’ – the small south-western corner of Iran with a predominantly Arab population, which is called Khuzestan – had taken over the Iranian embassy in London; the siege ended when SAS men entered the building, capturing one of the men but killing another four and executing a fifth in cold blood before fire consumed the building.* Less than three months later, however, on 19 July 1980, I was astonished to be telephoned at my Baghdad hotel and invited by the Iraqi authorities to attend a press conference held by the very same Arab group which had invaded the embassy. Nasser Ahmed Nasser, a 31-year-old economics graduate from Tehran University, accused the British of ‘conspiring’ with Iran against the country’s Arabs and demanded the return to Iraq of the bodies of the five dead gunmen.
Nasser, a mustachioed man with dark glasses, a black shirt and carefully creased lounge trousers, spoke slowly and with obvious forethought when he outlined his group’s reaction to the killings. ‘We will take our vengeance,’ he said, ‘because now our second enemy is England.’ He claimed that he had been sentenced to death in absentia in Iran. But his arrival for the conference in the heavily upholstered interior of the Iraqi information ministry made it clear that the Baghdad government fully supported his cause and must have been behind the seizure of the embassy in London. A senior official of the ministry acted as interpreter thoughout Nasser’s resentful peroration against Britain and Iran.
The Arabs of Khuzestan had been seeking autonomy from Khomeini’s regime, and many Arab insurgents in the province had been executed or imprisoned, Nasser said. It was to demand the release of the jailed men that the gunmen had attacked the embassy in London. Nasser agreed that there was a ‘link’ between the insurgents and the Iraqi Baath party and we should have questioned him about this. ‘Iraq’s Arab Socialist Baath Party’s motto – one unified Arab nation – is a glorious motto and we are Arabs,’ he said. ‘We follow this motto.’ What did this mean? On reflection, we should have grasped its import: Saddam was preparing a little Sudetenland, another Danzig, a piece of Iran that he might justifiably wish to liberate in the near future.
But of course, we asked about the siege in London rather than the implications of Iraq’s support for the rebels. ‘When we went to the embassy in London, our aim was not to kill,’ Nasser said. ‘We were not terrorists. We selected the British government as our negotiator because Britain is a democratic country and we wanted to benefit from this democracy. The British knew – all the world knew – that we did not intend to kill anyone … But for six days, they did not answer our requests or publicise our demands. They cut off the telex and the telephone … They did not have to kill our youths – they could have taken them prisoner and put them on trial.’ Nasser blamed Sadeq Khalkhali, the Iranian judge, for the torture of Arabs in Khuzestan – ‘he employs torturers who break the legs and shoot the arms of prisoners before knifing them’ – and claimed that Arabs in the province had first accepted the Iranian revolution because ‘it came in the name of Islam’ but that they now wanted autonomy ‘just like the Kurds, Baluchis and Turks’. When we asked how the Arabs in the Iranian embassy had brought their weapons into Britain, Nasser replied: ‘How did the Palestinians get guns into Munich? How do Irish revolutionaries bring guns to Britain? We are able to do the same.’ Again, no one thought to ask if the guns reached Britain in the Iraqi diplomatic bag. Nasser himself came from the Iranian port of Khorramshahr, for which he used the Arab name ‘Al-Mohammorah’. So was al-Mohammorah going to be Danzig?
Britain, however, made no protest to Iraq over the siege – or over the extraordinary press conference so obviously arranged by the Iraqi government in Baghdad. It was an eloquent silence. Of course, there were those who questioned Britain’s cosy relationship with Iraq. There was an interesting exchange in the House of Lords in 1989 – a year after the end of the eight-year Iran – Iraq war and shortly after the arrest in Baghdad of Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft and his friend, the British nurse Daphne Parish – when Lord Hylton asked how the British government ‘justify their action in guaranteeing new credits to Iraq of up to £250 million in view of that country’s detention of British subjects without trial, refusal to release prisoners of war following the ceasefire with Iran and its internal human rights record’. For the government, Lord Trefgarne replied that ‘the Iraqi Government are in no doubt of our concerns over the British detainee, Mrs Parish, and over Iraq’s human rights record … we are a major trading nation. I am afraid that we have to do business with a number of countries with whose policies we very often disagree … we do not sell arms to Iraq.’ Hylton’s response – that ‘while I appreciate that this country is a trading nation … is not the price that we are paying too high?’ – passed without further comment.
Bazoft, who was Iranian-born and held British identity papers but not citizenship, had visited the Iraqi town of Hilla in Parish’s car in a hunt for evidence that Iraq was producing chemical weapons. He was arrested as he tried to leave Baghdad airport, accused of spying and put on trial for his life, along with Parish. A month later, Foreign Office minister William Waldegrave was noting privately of Iraq that ‘I doubt if there is any future market of such a scale anywhere where the UK is potentially so well placed if we play our diplomatic hand correctly, nor can I think of any major market where the importance of diplomacy is so great on our commercial position. We must not allow it to go to the French, Germans, Japanese, Koreans, etcetera.’ He added that ‘a few more Bazofts or another bout of internal repression would make it more difficult’. Waldegrave’s words were written only months after Saddam’s gassing of the Kurds of Halabja. Geoffrey Howe, the deputy prime minister, decided to relax controls on the sale of arms to Iraq – but kept it secret because ‘it would look very cynical if so soon after expressing outrage about the treatment of the Kurds, we adopt a more flexible approach to arms sales.’
Bazoft was sentenced to death on 10 March 1990. The Observer attacked Saddam over the conviction – not, perhaps, a wise decision in the circumstances – and British foreign secretary Douglas Hurd offered to fly to Baghdad to meet the Iraqi president. Saddam, according to the Iraqi foreign ministry, ‘could not intervene while under political pressure’. But by then, a grim routine had begun, one of which my own research back in Beirut had made me painfully aware. Back in 1968, convicted Iraqi ‘spies’ would confess their guilt on television. Then they would be executed. In 1969, the lord mayor of Baghdad had confessed – on television – to ‘spying’ and he had been executed. And Bazoft had appeared on television, and confessed to spying – only later did his friends discover that he had been tortured with electricity during interrogation. In February 1969, before the execution of seven ‘spies’, Baghdad radio had announced that the Iraqi people ‘expressed their condemnation of the spies’ – they were then put to death. In May 1969, the farmers’ trade union delegates had applauded President al-Bakr’s decision to ‘chop off’ the heads of a CIA ‘spy ring’. They were duly hanged. Now, on one of his interminable visits to Iraqi minority groups, Saddam asked in front of a large group of Kurds if they believed that the ‘British