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being posted.Son of Saddam
As Iraq's top
Olympic official, Uday Hussein is accused of the torture and murder
of athletes who fail to win
As he stood at the double-door entrance to the office of Iraqi
National Olympic Committee president Uday Hussein, the boxer knew
what awaited on the other side. He had just returned from a Gulf
States competition, where he had been knocked out in the first
round. Now it was time to pay the price.
A former double for Uday says Iraq's Olympic programs have been
destroyed since Saddam gave his son control in 1984 and the brutal
punishment of athletes began.
Inside the yellow-and-blue office, Uday, the older of Iraqi
president Saddam Hussein's two sons, paced the floor, waving his
expensive Cuban cigar and glaring out the floor-to-ceiling windows
overlooking Baghdad. "He was yelling about how Iraq should not be
embarrassed by its athletes," recalls Latif Yahia, employed for
nearly five years as Uday's body double -- he would stand in for
Uday on occasions that were deemed a security threat -- and one of
his closest associates to have escaped to the West. "He kept
saying, 'This is my Iraq. Embarrassing Iraq embarrasses me.'"
With a wave of Uday's arm the manacled boxer was led into the room
by Iraqi secret service. Sitting behind a dark wood desk beneath an
oversized portrait of himself, Uday began his tirade. "In sport you
can win or you can lose. I told you not to come home if you didn't
win." His voice rising, he walked around the desk and gave the
boxer a lesson. "This is how you box," he screamed as he threw a
left and a right straight to the fighter's face. Blood dribbled
from the athlete's nose as Uday launched another round of punches.
Then, using the electric prod he was famous for carrying, Uday
jolted the boxer in the chest.
Blood was streaming from a cut above the boxer's eye when Uday
ordered his guards to fetch a straight razor. The boxer cried out
as Uday held the razor to his throat, and as he moved the blade to
the fighter's forehead, Uday laughed. He then shaved the man's
eyebrows, an insult to Muslim males. "Take him downstairs and
finish the job," Uday screamed.
Says Yahia, "They took him to the basement of the Olympic building.
It has a 30-cell prison where athletes -- and anyone else who is
out of favor with Uday -- are beaten and tortured. That was the
last I ever heard of that boxer."
THE BUTCHER'S BOY , as he is sometimes called, is
reputed to be the most brutal member of Iraq's notorious ruling
family. As an infant he reportedly played with disarmed grenades.
By 10 he was accompanying his father to the torture chamber at
Qasr-al-Nihayyah (the Palace of the End, where many political
enemies, including deposed King Faisal II, were killed) to watch
Saddam deal with dissidents. By 16 he bragged of committing his
first murder, telling classmates he had killed a teacher who had
upbraided him in front of a girlfriend.
For nearly 20 years Uday Hussein has been the most powerful force
in Iraq's athletic hierarchy. In 1984, when Uday was 20, Saddam
handed his son the reins of both the country's Olympic committee
and its soccer federation, hoping Uday could help rebuild the
spirit of the nation's youth while also proving himself a worthy
successor to his father. The Iran-Iraq war, which would drag on for
eight years and lead to the death of hundreds of thousands of young
Iraqis, was demoralizing Iraqi youth. Success in sports, Saddam
thought, could lift their spirits and restore national pride.
"Saddam's plan didn't work," says Issam Thamer al-Diwan, a former
Iraqi volleyball player who now lives in the United States and
carries a list of 52 athletes he claims have been murdered by the
Hussein family. "Iraqi sports are worse today than ever. Our teams
used to win. There was much pride in playing for your country. But
Uday never understood pride, only fear. He was never an athlete. He
thought he could use his father's sadistic approach to improve
performance. He has failed."
In fact Iraq, once an Asian sports force that sent 46 athletes to
the 1980 Summer Olympics, now rivals Liechtenstein in terms of
athletic insignificance. Iraq sent just four athletes to the 2000
Games in Sydney. "People don't want to play because they [are
afraid] to lose," says Sabah Mohammed, Iraq's former national
basketball coach, who fled to London in 1999 and claims that nine
members of his wife's family have been executed by the Hussein
regime. "Can you blame them? No one wants to speak out against
Uday." (SI's attempts to reach Uday for comment through the Iraqi
permanent mission to the United Nations were unsuccessful.)
Uday's penchant for violence has long been an open secret among
international athletic officials. Amnesty International reported in
2001 that Uday had ordered the hand of a security officer at his
Olympic headquarters to be chopped off five years earlier, after
the man was accused of stealing sports equipment that was missing
(but later turned up). In 1997 FIFA, the governing body of world
soccer, sent two investigators to Baghdad to question members of
the Iraqi national team who'd allegedly had their feet caned by
Uday's henchmen after losing a World Cup qualifying match to
Kazakhstan. The investigators spoke only to people whom Uday had
selected. The result: a report exonerating Uday.
"Did the torture of those players happen?" asks Sharar Haydar, a
longtime Iraqi soccer star who participated in 40 international
matches for the national team and was a teammate of many of the
victims. "Absolutely. But when you interview athletes who are under
Uday's control, what else do you expect them to say?
"I know what they went through," adds Haydar, who escaped from Iraq
in 1998 and now lives in London. "I was tortured four times after
matches. One time, after a friendly [match] against Jordan in Amman
that we lost 2-0, Uday had me and three teammates taken to the
prison. When we arrived, they took off our shirts, tied our feet
together and pulled our knees over a bar as we lay on our backs.
Then they dragged us over pavement and concrete, pulling the skin
off our backs. Then they pulled us through a sandpit to get sand in
our backs. Finally, they made us climb a ladder and jump into a vat
of raw sewage. They wanted to get our wounds infected.
The next day, and for every day we were there, they beat our feet.
My punishment, because I was a star player, was 20 [lashings] per
day. I asked the guard how he could ever forgive himself. He
laughed and told me if he didn't do this, Uday would do it to him.
Uday made us athletes an example. He believed that if people saw he
was not afraid to beat a hero, that they would live in greater
fear."
Ahmed Kadoim, a FIFA-recognized referee who fled Iraq in December,
tells a similar tale of torture at Uday's hands after he refused to
fix a soccer game last May. "I was the referee of a match between
Al-Shorta and the club of the air force," Kadoim says. "I was told
that Shorta should win, but I refused to fix the match. It ended at
2-2. I was taken by Uday's men to Al-Radwaniya prison, where they
used hoses and a cane to beat me three times a day.
My punishment was 10 beatings each time. When I was bleeding, they
forced me into a pool of sewage. The guards laughed and said, 'You
should have let them win.' I still am in pain nearly a year
later."
"Saddam is brutal and occasionally predictable," a senior U.S.
State Department official told SI. "Uday is brutal and
unpredictable." It may be revisionist history, but the official
says Uday's bloodthirsty nature worked to his father's advantage
during the Gulf War. "You should not discount the fact that when we
invaded Iraq in 1991 that Uday's presence, and the possibility at
that time that he might be the next ruler of Iraq, played a role in
our decision to leave Saddam in place. There was a lot of unease,
and there was no plan for what would come after Saddam. The
possibility that it could have been one of his sons was
unacceptable." Indeed, Uday, along with his brother, Qusay, top a
list of Iraqi officials who the Bush Administration has said will
be tried for war crimes or crimes against humanity after an
American-led attack on Iraq, according to published reports.
"Two stories about Uday leap to mind," the State Department
official told SI. "The first is the caning of the feet -- called
falaka -- of the soccer team. That form of torture is well known to
be used by Saddam's forces as well. They beat the soles of the
feet, which breaks a lot of the smaller bones, causes massive
swelling and leaves victims unable to walk for a while. There were
also reports that after a loss Uday forced the volleyball team,
which was made up of taller athletes, to remain in a room he had
constructed with a five-foot-high ceiling. He built the room so
small that not all of them could sit at the same time. The only way
they could fit was by having half of them standing and leaning over
while the other half were sitting with their knees in their chests.
He considered this a motivational technique. There was always a
psychological element to the kind of torture Uday employed. You are
supposed to play like tall players, so feel what it is like to be
small. For the soccer players, you are supposed to be fast and
quick, so I am going to beat your feet and ruin your livelihood.
That was his thinking."
After years of Uday's abuse, it came as little surprise to the
international community when he was the target of an assassination
attempt in December 1996. Uday was driving to a party in a two-car
caravan with bodyguards when gunmen peppered his car with
submachine gun fire. Uday was hit by eight bullets and was rushed
to a hospital. No one was arrested for the crime, leading experts
on Iraq to believe that a member of Uday's family -- possibly his
brother -- had masterminded the attack. The 6'1", athletically
built Uday survived, but he was partially paralyzed. Today he uses
a wheelchair in private and limps with a cane in public. In the
years since the assassination attempt Saddam has tended to favor
Qusay as his successor.
AS U.S. AND British forces sit on the borders of Iraq poised for
invasion, Uday Hussein's name is near the top of the Pentagon's
list of the Filthy 40 -- the close associates of Saddam targeted
for war-crime trials. Yet Uday remains in place, unchallenged, as
his country's Olympic leader.
"This man has no business using the Olympic rings to give him
credibility," says Charles Forrest, CEO of INDICT, a
U.S.-government-funded human rights group based in London. "That
the Olympic community, which has known about the atrocities of Uday
for years, has taken no action is a black eye for the organization.
The IOC is in a morally indefensible position here."
In December, INDICT filed a complaint with the IOC asking that Iraq
be expelled from the Olympic community. Attached to the complaint
were sworn statements from several Iraqi athletes detailing torture
and imprisonment on orders from Uday. In February the IOC agreed to
investigate Uday's behavior. As of last week, however, none of the
athletes who had given sworn statements for the INDICT complaint
had been contacted by the IOC.
"[IOC leaders] have tried to call the timing of our complaint
suspicious and suggest it is part of an anti-Saddam agenda," says
Forrest. "The real question should be, Why didn't you do something
about this years ago? It is not as if we've uncovered something no
one has ever heard of, and they know it. It almost seems [that
they're thinking] that if they wait long enough, the U.S. will
invade and they won't have to deal with this issue."
IOC president Jacques Rogge acknowledged last week that his
organization received the complaint and says it is in the hands of
the ethics committee. But IOC member Richard Pound says that it is
"important to remember these are just allegations, and you have to
make sure this is not all tied to the Iraq-U.S. dispute, that we
are not being used for propaganda. You just never know."
"That disgusts me that someone would say that," says Haydar, the
former soccer star. "I wish they would run their hands over our
scars, see the pain in our eyes and float in raw sewage. Then there
would be no questions."
"The problem for the IOC is going to be when Saddam is overthrown
and people walk into the Olympic headquarters and see the torture
chamber and the blood on the floor," Forrest says. "What will they
say then?"
Issue date: March 24, 2003