The most telling news about Iraq lately comes from the International Committee of the Red Cross, which reports that half the Iraqi prisoners of war still held by Iran don't want to go home.
More than 100,000 POWs were captured by both sides during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, which cost a million lives. Since then, according to ICRC figures on prisoner exchanges, Iran has released 57,712 Iraqis in return for 39,417 Iranians released by Iraq.But, 12 years after the war, 3,000 Iranian prisoners remain in Iraq and 9,000 Iraqis remain in Iran. "ICRC delegates have interviewed more than 4,600 Iraqi POWs who stated that they did not wish to be repatriated," said a Red Cross statement handed to reporters in Baghdad.
It was the first confirmation that former Iraqi soldiers, mostly Sunni Muslims, preferred to stay in Shiite Iran than return to their homeland -- not because they fear U.S. bombing or the economic privations of international sanctions but simply because they fear the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein.
Saddam's secret police are everywhere, and even a hint of disloyalty is punished by torture and death. Returning POWs are suspect simply because they have spent so long in the "enemy camp," and thus may have been subjected to brainwashing by the mullahs.
Tension between the two countries has risen considerably in recent weeks over cross-border attacks by the Iraq-based Mujahedin Khalq, the main exiled Iranian opposition group, and Iran's seizure of up to a dozen ships carrying smuggled Iraqi oil in the Persian Gulf.
Middle East analysts say this is an Iranian show of anger against Iraq rather than a desire to please the United States. But Iraq fears a warming of ties between Washington and Tehran -- even though hard-liners in Iran continue to reject overtures from the "Great Satan" -- and Baghdad was alarmed when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright made another gesture of friendship toward Iran's moderate President Mohammad Khatami.
Although she did not end the U.S. embargo on Iran, Albright lifted a ban on U.S. imports of Iranian carpets and other luxury goods, noting that both the United States and Iran had fought conflicts begun by Iraq's "lawless regime" and should work together to reduce tension in the region.
Her statement conveniently overlooked the fact that the United States supported Baghdad in the Iran-Iraq war because the Islamic regime in Tehran then was considered a greater threat than Saddam.
Iraq's most influential newspaper, Babel, published by Saddam's eldest son, Uday, accused Albright of "encouraging Iran to expand its aggression on Iraq." Given that kind of paranoia, Iraqi POWs returning from Iran are bound to be regarded as potential Fifth Columnists.
Saddam is as merciless with members of his own family if they cross him. In 1996 he personally ordered the deaths of his two sons-in-law, both cousins of Saddam, because they defected to Jordan and sought political asylum in the West.
Hussein Kamel and his brother, Saddam Kamel, husbands of Saddam's daughters Raghad and Rana, provided Western intelligence with valuable information on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction but were deemed to have too much blood on their hands to be offered sanctuary in the United States or Britain.
They were lured back to Baghdad with a promise of forgiveness, separated from their wives, then killed by a hit squad led by Saddam's son, Uday. Their father was murdered along with the two brothers, but their mother, Safiyah Hassan, survived. Saddam made up for that oversight by having her killed in February. Saffiyah's stabbed and badly mutilated body prompted a cursory police investigation that was quickly closed as "unsolved."
Iraqi exiles say this is the normal procedure when authorities are aware that a killing has taken place on direct orders of the president.
A power struggle between Saddam's younger son, Qusay, and his brother Uday, could add another bloody chapter to the family annals.
Uday was sidelined by an assassination attempt that left him seriously injured, allowing Qusay to gain control of key security organs and much of the family's business empire. But Uday has made a comeback of sorts by "winning" a seat in Iraq's rubber-stamp parliament.
He is by far the more ruthless of the two.
Contact Holger Jensen of the Denver Rocky Mountain News at www.denver-rmn.com.