The Weight of a Mustard Seed (20 page)

Adnan explained that he found his own behavior all the more mystifying because he had plenty of experience of the consequences of a Saddam threat. He had been in the Communist Party, he had taken part in the violent demonstrations in Baghdad in 1956 and been shot at. In 1963, while the Baathies were having their first coup in Iraq, he was in London taking witness accounts of murder, rape and torture; Saddam's name had come up in conjunction with the execution of a Janabi who was a Communist friend of his. He knew the Iranian opposition to the Shah, he had connections with the Algerian NLF, in Iraq in 1961 and 1962 he had met Kurds in the North.

“So I knew the game. I knew the underground and its violence. But in '74 when I was threatened I went home. I don't know. I really don't know why. I used to try and rationalize this behavior, but I don't think it's useful any more.”

In trying to comfort him, I began to tell him about the Stanford Prison Experiment and Stanley Milgram. In the early sixties Stanley Milgram, then a social psychologist at Yale,
had devised an experiment to test for the human hardwiring of obedience to authority. He gathered unsuspecting volunteers from the nearby town of New Haven, working class men, middle class women, a priest, a few students—a random enough mix—on the pretext of gathering research on how punishment affected learning. The volunteers were shown into a room with a board of electrical switches and a man in a white coat who oversaw and explained the procedure. In the next room was another man, ostensibly a volunteer, strapped into a chair. They were to ask him questions from a sheet of paper they were given and if they received a wrong answer they were to administer an electric shock to the subject. The board displayed a series of switches labeled from 15V “slight shock”; beyond 375V, “danger: severe shock”; to 450V, marked only “X X X.” With each wrong answer the subject was to receive an incremental increase of voltage.

The subject was portrayed as a volunteer, but in fact he was in on the experiment. There was no real electricity applied to his fingertips and he had a careful script to follow. He began by producing a few wrong answers and suffering the resulting “shocks.” As the shocks increased, he acted out more and more discomfort. He yelped and cried out, then screamed, then begged to be let out of the chair, then sobbed and let it be known he had a heart condition and that he was worried, then screamed agonizingly, then went silent and eventually, at 350 volts, became inert and unresponsive.

The purpose of the scenario was to see how far each person would agree to go along with the experiment. Most people (although not all) voiced disquiet at some point. Then they would invariably look over to the technician in the white coat and ask what they should do since the man was obviously in pain. The technician was scripted to assure the volunteer that the shocks,
while undoubtedly painful, would cause no permanent tissue damage and repeat four sentences in order: “Please continue,” “The experiment requires that you continue,” “It is absolutely essential that you continue,” and, “You have no choice, you must go on.”

In these empirical scenarios, there was no coercion, nor sanction if the subject refused to continue to shock the “learner.” The subject was told, for example, they would still receive their small stipend for participating. Over several weeks Milgram recorded that more than 60 percent of good and ordinary folk from New Haven continued to administer increasing amounts of clearly painful electric shocks, even as the subject appeared to lapse into unconsciousness, until the end of the switches and 450 volts had been delivered three times.

Milgram tried different set-ups and conditions for the experiment: he varied the proximity between “teacher” and “learner”; he put another, more sympathetic, person in the room with the technician and the subject; he moved the whole thing away from the auspices of Yale University, in case its hallowed reputation was influencing compliance. Each variation brought a slightly different set of results. A greater percentage of people found it easier to shock the “learner” the farther away from him he was, i.e., behind a wall or in a soundproof room. If other people, “peers,” in the room also questioned the necessity of continuing the experiment then a greater percentage of volunteers refused to continue and refused to continue earlier in the process.

Milgram found that the social context, the effect of “peers” creating a group reaction, could counteract the general determination to obey authority, but over the years the experiment has been repeated in different countries and cultures with different age and socioeconomic groups. Most people, when asked
in polls, don't believe that anyone would continue shocking a civilian “learner” just because they were told to do so by someone wearing a white coat. In fact New Haven's 60 percent compliance rate in the experiment at Yale turned out to be, in global terms, on the low side. Philip Zimbardo, picking up on Milgram's research in his own efforts to understand “The Lucifer Effect,” made another point. He noted that none of Milgram's volunteers refused to do the experiment from the beginning, all of them began the process of pushing switches which delivered increasing voltage to the “learner” and that even among the subjects who stood up and refused to continue because they felt they could not be part of something which was causing pain to another person, not one went to the aid of the shocked learner or attempted to intervene by going to higher authorities to demand that the whole experiment be stopped.

When I read Milgram, I was very impressed with the idea that obedience to authority was a learned cognitive behavior that ran through almost every society.

“It seems empirically clear,” I told Adnan, “that most people do what they are told for no other reason than they are told to do it.” He listened, amazed, and nodded.

“This idea is helping me on some soul searching!”

“I am beginning to see that perhaps Iraqis are not crazy Arabs after all—imagine!” I said laughing, “They might be just ordinary human beings!” Adnan laughed back, “Yes, but all the same, they
are
crazy Arabs!”

“Solzhenitsyn said that there is a line separating good from evil that runs through every man.”

“Yes,” said Adnan, more serious now, but uplifted, as I was, by the emerging sunlit thought that there was perhaps, a universal morality, as there was a universal condition. “Human
nature is the same,” he said. “People are not good because they are taught in school to be good, there is a cultural impact over generations to make people comply, certain things are not acceptable, these norms are sanctioned under authority…Iraqis are repressed and exposed to violence; it's not strange to see what is happening now. The Americans don't represent authority and the Iraqis perceive them only as representing random violence.”

He told me that two days previously his house in the safe VIP compound adjacent to the GreenZone in Baghdad had been raided by American soldiers looking for one of his men who was not there. The soldiers took laptops and documents and stole $7,000, the life savings of one of his bodyguards who had kept them in the office because he thought they would be safe there.

“I think,” I told him, “that the Americans are no more uncivilized than the Iraqis are uncivilized.” Adnan smiled and took my hands in gratitude across the table.

“Yes,” he agreed, tenderly holding the thought, “I think we are all the same.”

A
DNAN'S ELDER BROTHER, WHO HAD BEEN SHEIKH
before him, was called Khalid; Kamel Sachet also had a brother named Khalid. No one ever spoke well of him. Most people dismissed him as living off his elder brother's uniform, a marginal, inveigling, figure.

“He drank a lot,” a Janabi Istikhbarat officer once told me, shaking his head. “He was totally unlike his brother. Khalid was crazy.”

At the end of 1999 Khalid fled to Jordan and made a public defection, claiming he had been an officer in the Mukhabarat (according to the Janabi Istikhbarat officer he had only ever been a driver) and offering information against Saddam's regime to the Jordanian intelligence services and Western journalists.

One day, during a Google trawl, I idly typed the name Khalid Janabi, hoping to understand a little bit more about Adnan's brother's death in Rome—Adnan had information from senior figures, rumors, bits of witness and suspicion, but he didn't like to talk about his theories—and instead came up with the transcript of an interview given by Khalid Sachet calling himself, more anonymously, by his tribal moniker, Khalid
al-Janabi, to Radio Free Iraq, part of the American government's Liberty Radio Network.

“Khalid al-Janabi” told how he had been part of an exterminating force ordered by Qusay to kill 2,000 prisoners in Abu Ghraib in the spring of 1998 to relieve overcrowding. He recounted how the prisoners had been hanged one after another in the five execution chambers; there were so many that they delegated a group of specially designated prisoners to shoot some in a separate room. He also described in detail how the Mukhabarat blackmailed senior army officers by sexually compromising their wives and daughters.

Khalid is not a reliable witness, but I quote this interview to illustrate the invidious techniques devised by Saddam's regime to terrorize and marshal its own officers. There were three concentric walls built to defend the fortress of obedience. The innermost wall was crenellated with the consequences of torture, imprisonment and execution. The middle wall was built of heavy threat bricks against family members. “We will kill you whatever happens, but you can spare her by confessing,” they would tell some bloody, beaten, shocked man forced to confront the scene of his wife or sister or daughter whimpering under the black and blue grip of a squad of lascivious Amn thugs. The outer wall was made out of videotape and photographs, eavesdropped transcripts and dossiers, and was designed not to repel so much as to ensnare, and by binding and entangling, disable any further assault on the dictator-keep.

Violation, blackmail. The disgrace of a female family member is the greatest dishonor an Iraqi can endure. The shame could stain an entire family. Sisters would be refused by eminent suitors, perhaps the best they could hope for in the shadow of a scandal would be some ugly, poor cousin willing to debase himself for a cash enticement. Brothers would be humiliated, their positions within their tribe and community compromised and sullied. It is a wound that we in the West, long unbonded
from the idea of the extended family as a collective of social, financial and moral responsibility, cannot really understand. But dishonor remains, for many Iraqis, a nasty flesh wound, a laceration that suppurates and scars and takes a very long time, sometimes a generation or more, to heal.

A
BOVE ALL KAMEL SACHET TRIED TO PROTECT
his family.

By the mid nineties, the net was closing. The Sachets' phone was bugged—this they took for granted—and there was often a car parked outside with two men watching. When he rose early to drive to the mosque for dawn prayer an agent on a bicycle followed him. The surveillance permeated the house and kept the family under protracted strain. Sometimes the telephone would start ringing at one or two in the morning but when it was answered no one was on the line. One day all the keys to the house disappeared; they changed all the locks but it was chilling to think someone had stolen into the house to take them. Their back gate neighbors moved out and were replaced by an odd household of men who seemed to be spying on them. Kamel Sachet warned his children there were microphones in the house and informers among their close friends. Fewer visitors came and when they did there were ellipses and sideways remarks and superficial pleasantries instead of conversation. At night Kamel Sachet instituted a system of watches, just like he was on a battlefield expecting an enemy attack, so that someone in the house was always awake. It was difficult to sleep through the tension, any noise or voice would make them
sit up in their beds, waiting for the knock. Um Omar suffered from headaches and insomnia.

“I could tell by his face that he was angry,” she told me. “I said to him, why are you angry?” But he would only answer, “How do you know I am angry?” and refuse to discuss anything further. Kamel Sachet kept his face in a mask and tried to brazen it out with his self belief that was in fact only his belief in his trust in Saddam.

More than once he saw a white sedan in his rear-view mirror and riled, stopped his car and walked back to confront the agents. He even dared to complain to Saddam's secretary: “Why am I being followed?”

Saddam's secretary blithely told him that it was for his own protection.

One morning Dr. Hassan spotted Kamel Sachet's Mercedes ahead of him on the highway as he was driving to work. He did not want to drive up alongside him and wave, it would seem rude and brief, so he hung back and tried to drive slowly. For several kilometers Kamel Sachet also drove slowly, he had noticed the car following him. Dr. Hassan decided to end this awkward chase by pulling into a petrol station for a few moments, but when he drove off again he soon caught up with Kamel Sachet. Finally he ended up drawing alongside him at a traffic light. Kamel Sachet turned and recognized his old friend and when Dr. Hassan explained his embarrassment the two of them laughed like boys with relief.

But the shoulder hunch knotted. Dr. Hassan said that in these years the only times he was able to talk openly with Kamel Sachet was when he came to his office and Kamel would release his driver from waiting so that he would have an excuse to ask him for a lift home and they could chat in the car. When they arrived at his house, Kamel no longer invited him
in. Dr. Hassan said once or twice he tried to urge him to leave the country, but that he always refused to consider flight. “Let them arrest me. I have nothing to be afraid of because I have done nothing wrong.”

He drew his family close under siege. He would not let Ali join the army although national service was obligatory. Ali admired the strutting officers he saw visiting his father, he envied their pistols and their new cars, their privilege and superiority. He asked his father if he could enroll in the Military College, but his father refused, stating unequivocally the inversion and negation of the value of the entire patriotic effort of his career: “Those who become close to them become criminals just like them.” To get Ali out of conscription Dr. Hassan wrote a report stating that Ali Sachet was suffering from depression and was mentally unfit for service. The Amn came to ask him questions about this, but he defended his diagnosis and the investigation lapsed.

Shadwan had gone on to university after completing high school, but Kamel Sachet forbade it for his younger daughters. He said that the universities were not safe places, especially for girls, that male students would try to befriend them or lure them—they were the daughters of a man in his position—and he could not allow it.

Amani was tall and pale and wan and she limped slightly when she walked. I saw her several times at the Sachet house, she would smile shyly in greeting, but she never spoke to me directly except to nod
Salam aleikum
and she never came down to sit and chat as the other members of the family did. Something had happened that could not be talked about. Whatever it was—or wasn't: I have no desire to repeat rumor and falsehoods here—it should have been a private family matter. But Kamel Sachet had made too many enemies in the regime who
wished to exploit his discomfort, undermine his position, provoke his temper with conspiracies and cast suspicion on his loyalty. In that ratting atmosphere, a scandal splintered into stabbing mirror shards that reflected the shadows and searchlights, some real, some spectral: Mukhabarat agents, Iranian Shia spies, Saddam himself.

“What happened with Amani was the major thing that destroyed Kamel Sachet,” Dr. Hassan told me, sitting in his Abu Dhabi office. “For something to happen with a daughter is a very big thing according to Arab mentality. Even if his son Omar had died it would have been easier for him. The thing with Amani was a catastrophe.”

Kamel Sachet was in torment over it. When it first happened, Dr. Hassan found his friend sitting in the dark alone, unshaven. The atmosphere was bitter and funereal. He saw that the general was close to tears, white with anger; his shock seemed to be beyond bereavement. He saw his strong brave friend crack.

“It would have been better if she had died,” said Kamel Sachet simply.

Dr. Hassan saw the danger of his retribution and reasoned with him, “Think of your duties as a father before Allah, believe in your own mercy and trust in the will of Allah.”

Sheikh Adnan, like Dr. Hassan, tried to calm him, to rationalize and soothe.

“The wisest thing to do, Kamel,” he told him, “is not to blow up the issue. As a believer, you know sometimes things happen to test the moral mettle of people. Allah would not ask you to shoulder something that you could not manage.”

Kamel Sachet found little solace in his words. The kingdom of God was a far dream, in the meantime he had to navigate the social fall out, weft and warp, tribe and party.

“I need not only to pray to God, I need the understanding of my people,” he said.

Adnan offered him the advice of wise men, he exhorted his friend to “handle the situation humanely.” He reminded him that death was not sanctioned by the Koran, it was an older Bedu salve, it was an anachronism…

 

A
FTER SEVERAL MONTHS
of public and private anguish Amani fell out of a second-story window and into a coma. Her legs had absorbed the brunt of the fall, her feet were broken up, a femur was cracked, she had internal bleeding, a ruptured spleen and a fractured skull. Suddenly, all of Kamel Sachet's bitterness was washed away with the crisis. He went from hospital to hospital summoning doctors and specialists for second opinions and he became again just a father who wanted to help and protect his daughter. He asked Dr. Hassan to talk to doctors to help him understand the complications of her medical condition. For a long time it was not clear that she would wake up and if she woke up whether she would be brain damaged and if she had her mind intact whether she would walk. Kamel Sachet prayed hard for her survival. He did everything he could to get her the medical care and attention she needed. Dr. Hassan was surprised. “He was not angry. I saw him as a kind father. He was anxious. He did not betray any guilt; guilt would have been an alien emotion to him, but this was the other side of the coin, the worried parent.”

He stayed by her side for many days and after two weeks, when she finally came out of the coma, he made sure her mother could visit her often. Dr. Hassan tried to explain to me the trauma he observed in his friend, but he said he was not a
social psychiatrist and his English could not master the technical terms.

“Honor is very important for any Arab man. For a good man. And for Kamel Sachet, a famous general, a hero, it was something even more. Honor included his whole family. These are the kind of men who would not even tolerate talk about their daughters…it is the structure of the Arab personality, it depends on honor and on the honor of their women.”

Kamel Sachet never really recovered his old self: even after Amani had returned home and learned to walk again in convalescence, the episode seared him like a brand that was stamped onto the pages of reports that found their way to the desk of the director of Qusay's Special Amn. He withdrew from people and kept away even from those he had been close to. When his friends asked him why he no longer encouraged visitors, he told them, “to avoid the problems.” Dr. Hassan saw less and less of him. When he went to his house one of his sons would tell him Kamel was away even though he could see his car parked outside. He thought perhaps Kamel wished to protect him, that association would bring him also under suspicion. Dr. Hassan had a cousin who was a neighbor of the Sachets and he told him that there was always a Mukhabarat car parked on the corner.

“One time,” remembered Shadwan of that difficult period, “he was going to the farm near Hilla with his driver. He had fallen asleep and when he woke up, out of the blue he said, ‘Qusay is going to kill me.' Maybe it was the end of a dream.”