A small place where Saddam's memory is kept alive

AWJA, Iraq: The grave site has a forlorn, even jumbled air. There are filigreed inscriptions hailing him as a martyr, as a hero of the insurgency, and as "the eagle of the Arabs," his favorite sobriquet. But alongside these there is the mundane bric-à-brac of his life - a carved wooden eagle hung with his personal prayer beads and a gallery of informal photographs, one showing him with a cigar.
Saddam Hussein's burial place, in his native village on the banks of the Tigris, may be the only public space in Iraq where the former ruler, hanged in December at the age of 69, is openly extolled. Under a decree dating from early in the American occupation in 2003 and still in force under the new Iraqi government, all paintings, photographs and statues of Saddam are forbidden, as are public protests in his support. At least in terms of public hagiography, he remains, everywhere else in Iraq, a non-person.
But in Awja, Saddam's legend lives on, though only as a pale shadow of what it was. The old reception center where he lies - renamed "Martyrs' Hall" by the family members who manage it - has none of the grandeur of the palaces he built during his 24-year rule. The trickle of visitors drops on some days to twos and threes, and only rarely reaches double figures, far short of making Awja a pilgrimage site on the scale of Iraq's religious shrines.
Part of the problem is the danger - in death as in life - that envelops all that involves Saddam. Since his burial, no other Western reporter has reached the site, though it lies less than five kilometers, or three miles, from the center of Tikrit, a strategic city long garrisoned by American forces and turned over in the past 18 months to the Iraqi Army and police. Reaching here required what amounted to a guarantee of safe-conduct from the sheik of Saddam's Albu Nasar tribe, and from other people in Awja with links to the "national resistance" - Sunni insurgents who control many of the riverbank villages and towns around Tikrit.
The site itself offers mixed messages. On broken ground outside the hall, behind a line of wilting sunflowers, Saddam's family has buried six others, including his sons Uday and Qusay, whose brutishness and greed, unfiltered by the regime propaganda that made a mythic figure of Saddam, made them among the most hated people in Iraq. Three others buried near them were associates who stood trial with Saddam and were hanged in the same dank prison chamber in Baghdad within weeks of his execution at dawn Dec. 30.
The scant flow of visitors reflects, too, the chaos that has supplanted the tyranny that Iraq endured under Saddam. Awja, 160 kilometers north of Baghdad, is in the middle of a fiercely contested war zone, where American troops passing on Iraq's main north-south highway, flanking the village, are regularly ambushed and bombed by insurgents. Along with that, there is continuing fury among Saddam's loyalists at his overthrow, trial and hanging, a mood that simmers so strongly at Awja that outsiders - indeed, any but Saddam's established loyalists - have generally stayed away.
The grave site, humble as it is, reflects something more than a hometown's determination to honor a fallen son, something that seems irreducible in the politics of Iraq: the refusal of the Sunni minority, who ruled Iraq for centuries until Saddam's overthrow, to reconcile themselves to the assumption of power by the Shiite majority who won elections godfathered by the American occupation authority.
Saddam was far from the beloved figure his regime's propagandists depicted, even among the people of his home region. Not far into many conversations, people here speak of the ruthless killing that characterized his rule, killings of Sunnis as well as of his principal victims, Shiites and Kurds.
And they point to the 128-building palace complex that Saddam built on a rise above the Tigris in Tikrit. Locals cite the complex as proof of how Saddam used Iraq's oil wealth to benefit himself, his family and a coterie of loyalists, not the ordinary people of Awja or Tikrit.
"Saddam Hussein led the country into destruction, and in doing so destroyed himself and his family, and led us into the present chaos," said Abdullah Hussein Ejbarah, 50-year-old deputy governor of Salahuddin Province, with its capital at Tikrit. Like many senior officials here, Ejbarah is a former high-ranking member of Saddam's ruling Baath party and was a fast-rising officer in the Special Republican Guard, an elite military unit, until members of Ejbarah's Jabouri tribe tried to assassinate Saddam in 1993. Ejbarah was lucky to escape the purge that followed.
Now, he treads an uneasy path as an intermediary between the American military command, with a huge regional headquarters for northern Iraq at Camp Speicher, eight kilometers northwest of Tikrit, and the shadowy oligarchy that holds much of the real power in Salahuddin: the province's powerful tribal sheiks and, in silent league with them, the insurgents known by the Americans as "former regime elements" - men who were once senior Baath party officials, Saddam-era military officers and secret police agents, who now direct many of the attacks on American troops.
It was Ejbarah, along with the Tikrit governor and the head of Saddam's tribe, who flew by American helicopter to Baghdad on the day of Saddam's hanging and waged an argument deep into the night against the new Iraqi government's plans to bury Saddam in an unmarked, secret grave. When the body first arrived from Baghdad in the pre-dawn hours of Dec. 31, Saddam was buried quickly, to the accompaniment of angry protests, in the interior courtyard of a local mosque, then moved within hours to a caramel-colored, two-story reception hall built by Saddam as a gift to the village. There the body lies in a shallow grave dug beneath the building's rotunda, under a massive chandelier. Covering it are two Iraqi flags of the design used under Saddam, with the words "God is Great" in his handwriting.
Outside, down a pathway of broken concrete paving stones, lie the remains of the others chosen by Saddam's family for burial here, each body, like Saddam's, lying with the head toward Mecca.
But it is at Saddam's graveside that visitors linger. A remembrance book with perhaps 1,500 signatures shows that most visitors come from the country's Sunni heartland, predominantly from the provinces of Salahuddin, Anbar, Baghdad, Diyala and Nineveh, all insurgent strongholds.
On a back wall hangs a further reminder of the insurgency, a black banner inscribed with a message in golden thread: "Gift from the Adhamiya mujahedeen," a hard-line Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad that was the birthplace of the Baath party in Iraq.
The condolence messages are replete with references to Saddam as a martyr, with prayers that God speed him to reward in "his wide heavens."
But many, too, echo the themes Saddam pressed in his courtroom harangues in the last 15 months of his life - damnation to Iraq's American occupiers, to Iran as the backer of the Shiite religious parties that now rule here and to Israel.
"May God bless Comrade Saddam Hussein, and have mercy upon him" wrote a Baath party visitor in May who gave his name as Comrade Abu Qaysar.
He added, "By the will of God, victory will soon be ours, and we will liberate our beloved Iraq from the claws of the Zionists and their followers."