Former Iraq president carries billion-dollar secrets to his grave

Investigators are still scouring the globe for billions of dollars Saddam transferred to foreign accounts before his fall in 2003. Human rights agencies continue to search for mass graves of thousands of unaccounted-for victims of his reign.

Historians are still trying to understand why Saddam risked economic ruin in invading Iran in 1980 and international condemnation in attacking Kuwait in 1990, putting him on a collision course with the US that eventually led to the gallows.

Researchers still wonder how much support Saddam might have received from Western governments and corporations for his weapons programmes and gas attacks on Iraqi civilians.

And many Iraqis harbour more tragic questions about the fate of tens of thousands of loved ones taken away by Saddam’s security forces.

Saddam’s execution came sooner than many here expected. Hussein was convicted on November 5 for his involvement in the execution of 148 Shi’ite from the town of Dujail. Even US officials who were closely monitoring the legal proceedings were surprised that Saddam’s appeal was rejected so quickly by Iraq’s Justice Ministry and that his execution was so swiftly carried out.

Judge Rahdi Hamza Rahdi still wants to know what happened to all the money. Immediately after the US invasion, troops discovered sealed cottages containing washing machine-sized stacks of $100 bills. Nearly $500 million was found in Lebanon, according to US officials, who feared the money was being used to fund future insurgent efforts.

Billions of dollars from Saddam’s regime remain missing, said Rahdi, who heads the Commission on Public Integrity, Iraq’s national anti-corruption agency. After three years, he said, he has found only a fraction of the funds. “He used to work out agreements with foreign companies through the United Nations Oil for Food programme to sell oil for higher prices and take a percentage of oil profits,” he said.

Rahdi said that if he could, he would have also asked Saddam about another more personal matter. “I would ask him: ‘What sin did I commit that caused your men to break my skull at the jail of Baath intelligence service?’ ” he said. “I would also ask him about two of my cousins who were taken from their university. Nothing more was heard of them. I don’t even know where their bodies are buried.”

Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish legislator, said he had hoped Saddam would be questioned about the Anfal campaign, a brutal military operation that killed tens of thousands of Kurds by gunfire and poison gas. Saddam was the chief defendant in the ongoing Anfal genocide trial, and Othman said he was worried that Saddam’s execution would undermine those proceedings and other cases.

Othman said Saddam should have been forced to testify about his involvement in poison gas attacks at Halabja, his brutal crackdown on southern Iraqi towns after a 1991 Shi’ite uprising, his destruction of the southern marshlands and homes of Marsh Arab tribes and his alleged assassination orders against political opponents.

Another unanswered question is why Saddam misled the world to believe he had weapons of mass destruction. Former UN weapons inspector David Kay told Congress that Saddam’s own generals did not know he had abandoned his nuclear weapons programme until the US military began massing on Iraq’s borders.

–Solomon Moore