- BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A new
novel just published in Iraq, combining romance and Iraqi politics after
the Gulf War, is widely believed to be the second book written by President
Saddam Hussein.
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- Al-Qala'ah al-Hasinah ("The Fortified Castle")
appeared this week in bookshops and all public libraries in Baghdad and
was hailed on state-run television and by the newspaper al-Jumhouriya as
a "great artistic work".
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- The cover gives no clue to the writer's identity, saying
cryptically that it is a "novel by its author", while a note
inside explains that the writer "did not wish to put his name on it
out of humility and modesty".
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- But the official press has been heavily promoting the
713-page paperback, which sells at 4,000 Iraqi dinars ($2), and rave
reviews
in the Iraqi media, which called it an "innovation which nobody has
managed to achieve during the past century", leave little doubt as
to its authorship.
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- An opening paragraph that reads: "The novel is a
trip in the world of struggle and virtue and a fight against
injustice,"
makes it reasonably certain that the style is Saddam's.
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- In the story, the hero is a militant who took part in
the 1980-88 Iraq-Iran war and the Gulf War. He was wounded in the war with
Iran and was captured by the Iranian forces but he managed to escape from
his jail and return to Baghdad.
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- He rejoins his university studies in Baghdad, where he
falls in love with a Kurdish girl from northern Iraq, which her family
fled after the Gulf War because of unrest.
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- His marriage cannot be completed for lack of some legal
papers that she cannot obtain from her northern hometown of Sulaimaniya,
where she cannot go because of death threats as her family opposes the
political system there.
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- Northern Iraq has been outside the control of Saddam's
government since soon after the Gulf War.
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- Saddam last month urged opposition Kurdish parties to
open dialogue with his government.
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- The novel also describes the "extraordinary"
situation in northern Iraq and how the U.S. and British warplanes bomb
targets and Iraq's military concentrations in nearby places such as
Mosul.
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- U.S. and British jets patrol no-fly zones set up after
the expulsion of Iraqi troops from Kuwait in 1991 to protect a Kurdish
enclave in northern Iraq and Shi'ite Muslims in the south from possible
attacks by Iraqi forces.
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- THE STORY OF KUWAIT'S INVASION
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- The novel also has a sub-plot about a servant who betrays
his master by trying to kill him and escapes with his sister whom he loves,
and his animals.
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- The master recovers from his wounds and searches Iraq's
desert until he finds the servant and his sister in a place near the Gulf
and takes his revenge by killing them both.
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- This is seen as an allegory of Iraq's claim to have been
betrayed by Kuwait, which it regards as its 19th province and accused of
stealing its oil, and Baghdad's invasion of it in 1990.
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- The occupation lasted until a U.S.-led multinational
alliance based in Saudi Arabia drove Iraqi forces out in February
1991.
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- If the novel is Saddam's it is his second after
"Zabibah
wal Malik" (Zabibah and the King) which was published late last year
to equally rapturous reviews.
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