Uday al-Ta’ai is not a man touched by regret. Even now, seven weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein, he clings with chilling loyalty to a regime he spent his life defending.
In the years before the government was overthrown, the bureaucrat controlled the state’s vast but crude propaganda machine. As director general of the Ministry of Information he was an ultra-loyal Ba’athist, the man responsible for masterminding the censorship, harassment and persecution of foreign journalists.
Today he is out of work and resigned to a future that will see him permanently excluded from any role in the government of Iraq. Saddam, his family, his top military commanders and the most senior in the Ba’ath leadership are either on the run or detained in American military camps in Iraq.
But Ta’ai, like many of the regime’s high-ranking civilian officials, is not a hunted man. Instead he spends his days quietly in his apartment, fuming at the war that destroyed his career, counting what is left of the wealth he accrued from his position.
The ministry that was once his fiefdom is now a burnt-out shell, hit first by the United States’s bombs, then stripped and torched by waves of angry looters.
”I am an Iraqi and I love my country,” Ta’ai told The Guardian in a rare encounter. ”I believe that what I have done in my domain was good for serving my country.”
His domain offered a rare window into the nature of Saddam’s state apparatus. The ministry employed 6 800 staff. Their job was to translate articles about Iraq from the foreign press, to censor tightly the news that appeared in state media and to monitor the work of Iraqi writers and poets to ensure they did not dare stray from the Ba’athist message.
Most importantly, Ta’ai closely scrutinised the work of every foreign journalist in the country. All reporters were assigned a minder and a driver and both were required to report in detail where each journalist had been and who they had met. Any Iraqi speaking out of turn faced arrest, torture or death.
Ta’ai (55) towered over it all, impeccably dressed in expensive suits and carrying himself with a haughty, unctuous grandeur.
At 22 he joined the ministry of planning and later the information ministry. From 1988 he spent two years in Paris as press attaché with the Iraqi embassy. He hoped to return to France last year and was bitterly disappointed to be passed over.
Instead he stayed at the ministry in the months before the war. A couple of evenings each week he would go to the ground floor to lecture foreign reporters for hours on the double standards of Western foreign policy and the integrity of Saddam’s regime.
Today his suits are in the wardrobe at home, but he remains as unrepentant as he ever was in those late-night sermons. The Ba’ath regime had its positive side, he insists.
”In 1989, for example, we had the best health-care system inside the region. This was a wonderful country before 1990,” he said.
He admitted there were some failings but, improbably, denied knowing the depth of brutality to which his government sank.
At least 200 000 Iraqis went missing during Saddam’s 23 years as president. No Iraqi could have failed to notice the terrible power of the security agencies. ”Every system has its own negative aspects,” he said. ”Nobody can deny that, even in Britain. Nobody is perfect. I feel sorry to see all those graveyards.”
After all, none of that was really his fault, he added. ”Don’t think that every official in the government knew all the details of what happened. We heard many rumours, but who could prove it?”
He admitted he was a Ba’ath Party member, but insisted he had held a low party rank. He had been excused from compulsory military duties, he said, because of his senior position.
Ta’ai worked under Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the information minister who became notorious for his ever-optimistic attitude as US tanks closed in on Baghdad.
He last saw the minister, he said, on April 9, the day the statue of Saddam toppled. Since then he claims to have had no contact with his ex-boss, though he believes he is hiding in the city.
Ta’ai talked about the illegitimacy of the war, the power shortages, the long queues at petrol stations, the still appalling state of the hospitals, and the US policy to refuse jobs to all senior Ba’athists.
”How can you dismiss all these people?” he asked. ”Is that going to work? Who are to be the people who run this country?”
Whoever is chosen to run post-war Iraq, Ta’ai will certainly not be among them. Some expected he would have fled abroad. He balks at the idea of a life in exile. ”Why would I leave my country? I could sell cigarettes here and live in a very decent and humble way.
”Why should I go? I had a 33-year career in the ministries. This is my reputation. I am proud of myself.” — Â