Tyranny of mind
What is the psychological toll of living under a brutal totalitarian regime for a quarter century?
When Iraqi-American psychotherapist Ilham Al-Sarraf visited Iraq two years ago, she stayed in her 7-year-old nephew's room. In a place of honor at the head of his bed was a clock with a prominent picture of Saddam on its face. Unable to sleep with the dictator's image looming above her, Al-Sarraf turned the clock to the wall.
The next morning, when her nephew came in to gather his clothes, he asked her why "Baba Saddam"--Father Saddam--was facing the wall. Her brother and sister-in-law frantically tried to explain it away as a clumsy accident. What if the little boy told his teacher that his American aunt had acted disrespectfully toward Saddam Hussein? The landscape of Baghdad was haunted by the earless, the handless, the tongueless, the widowed and orphaned, who had endured capricious justice for lesser crimes. Seeing her brother "sweating bullets," Al-Sarraf quickly concocted an acceptable explanation. "It was no accident," she said. "I am a spiritual and religious woman, and I did not feel it was right to have a man looking at me while I slept in such skimpy clothes. That is why I turned the picture."
Brutal force. A minor incident, perhaps, but one that reveals many of the psychologically most debilitating forces at work in a brutal totalitarian state: the intrusive cult of personality; the ruthless indoctrination of children; the pervasive atmosphere of paranoia; the frightening potential for one inconsequential event, remark, or gesture to become grounds for severe reprisal. Today, as the people of Iraq are suspended between the death of the old system and the uncertainty of the new, the emotional consequences of living in this regime are most likely to be experienced by the victims, the torturers, and the millions of silently complicit citizens who simply tried to survive the 24 years of Saddam's tyranny. As the experiences of Cambodia, Chile, Germany, South Africa, Rwanda, and the former Soviet Union have shown, repairing the hearts and minds of the citizenry may prove far more difficult--and more important--than restoring the electrical grids or the water supply.
Saddam Hussein meticulously replicated the totalitarian techniques of terror first practiced on a massive scale by his idol Joseph Stalin. An intricate web of informants--from children to party officials--created the impression of constant surveillance, the overwhelming sense that the eyes of Saddam quite literally were watching--and not just from the face of a child's clock. "Tyrannical regimes do many things, but they always intimidate," says Robert Okin, a psychiatrist from the University of California-San Francisco who has worked with victims in Peru, Kosovo, and South Africa. "Whether they physically traumatize people or not, by definition they intimidate and control, and in so doing create a chronic type of trauma."
Documents left at the chief Baath Party headquarters in Basra outline the mechanics of maintaining a stranglehold on the people. The party doled out meager financial and professional incentives to reward citizens--both the complicit and the desperate--for informing on family members, colleagues, and neighbors. More powerful than incentives was the constant threat of physical injury. Even conscientious party workers were arrested, tortured, and then put back on the job. Former prisoners describe electric shocks to the genitals and lift their shirts to show maimed bodies. They describe months of isolation or hanging for hours in contorted positions while being beaten. And then there are those who were forced to watch a beloved family member endure such agonies.
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