She Must Have Been Crazy to Oppose Saddam

IRAQ: She Must Have Been Crazy to Oppose Saddam
Ferry Biedermann - IPS - 5/8/03

BAGHDAD, May 8 (IPS) - Lahib Kishmesh had seemed headed for the good life. Her wealthy parents sent her to Paris in the seventies to train as a lawyer. Her success was to prove her undoing.

"My dear Iraq, my dear Iraq, what has become of you," she reads from the scribbling on the walls of her run-down house in Baghdad's once gracious Ghadeer district. Neighbours crowd the entrance, curious to see what "crazy Lahib" is up to this time.

"Get out of here," she shouts at them. "Where were you when I needed you? Why are you not looking after me, how can I live here without water, with you people all the time staring at me?" She looks dishevelled and much older than her 48 years. Deep lines mark her face.

Kishmesh admits she is "confused". But that, she told IPS, is to be expected "after all they did to me, the way they hurt me, and the medication they gave me."

She has written her memoirs on the walls of her partially burnt house because she was worried the regime would steal her writings. "They have taken everything else away from me," she says. The house has no water supply, and she sleeps on a foam mattress on the floor.

People have different stories to tell about Kishmesh. The local lawyers association denies she was ever a lawyer. The mental hospital where she was kept says she made up the story scribbled on the walls. But several of her fellow lawyers, and an old family friend speak of the persecution she suffered.

In the mid-eighties Kishmesh is said to have defended an Egyptian employee at Babel hotel in Baghdad who got into a fight with a girlfriend of Saddam Hussein's son Uday. The man was arrested on a trumped up charge of theft. Kishmesh represented him before a panel of judges and secured his release, says a lawyer who worked closely with her.

Kishmesh says that following that she was picked up and jailed time and again. "When I realised that it didn't matter what I said, that they would pick me up anyway, I stopped caring and I said whatever I thought."

That, more than anything else, may have earned her the reputation of being crazy. Nobody in their right mind would challenge Saddam Hussein and his family the way she did.

On one occasion she was arrested after she refused to accept new paper money that bore a portrait of Saddam Hussein. Another time she got into trouble after she wrote "Saddam is a cockroach" on a wall in her neighbourhood. That was payback, she says, because while she studied in Paris she would remove graffiti that insulted the Iraqi leader.

Everyone agrees that the height of her confrontation with the regime came in 1988.

Kamal Hanna Jajjou, a trusted aide of Saddam Hussein was said to have been arranging a divorce for Saddam Hussein from Uday's mother, and his marriage with another woman. Uday beat Jajjou to death at a party in the presence of several witnesses.

Uday was arrested on his father's orders and made to stand trial. He was sentenced to a year's imprisonment, later commuted to a brief exile in Geneva.

A lawyer who knows Kishmesh well says she was asked to represent Uday at the trial. Her victory over Uday in the trial of the Egyptian may have made her perfect for his defence in the regime's eyes because it made the defence more credible.

At the trial, though, she shocked the court by pleading guilty on behalf of Uday instead of making the agreed plea that he had acted in self-defence. "She said that yes, he did this and yes, he committed a crime but would the court please have mercy on him," says the lawyer, who still wants to remain anonymous. Then on her fate was sealed.

Saadiyeh Salman, a lawyer who knows Kishmesh says leaders of lawyers associations were the Baath party faithful, and colluded with the regime. Salman herself was suspended by a lawyers association because she won a case against friends of Saddam Hussein's family.

Kishmesh spent most of the last ten years in and out of the Al-Rashad mental hospital where patients spend their days in squalid drug-induced stupor.

Her doctor at the hospital, Saad Mehdi, insists that she really is "psychotic", and that she made up the whole story of Uday. "She fixated her psychosis on a powerful person, as is often the case."

Staff at the hospital says they frequently got 'patients' who had insulted the President or his family. A psychological evaluation was a part of the procedures for this 'crime'.

Ali Al-Khattab, a medical assistant says Kishmesh was brought in regularly. "When she came in she was usually clear-headed," he told IPS. "They would treat her with electric shocks and then release her."

She was in the hospital until the very end of the regime when it was looted after the fall of Baghdad. According to the Red Cross, some of the female patients were raped.

"Iraq has to be cleansed of all the people whose hands are dirty," Kishmesh says. "And there are many."