CAIRO, 21 September 2004 — Toppled Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is miserable sitting in a jail cell awaiting trial on charges of crimes against humanity and has begged for mercy, Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said in an interview published yesterday.
“He is distraught and depressed,” Allawi told the Arabic daily Al-Hayat in an interview from London where the Iraqi leader is currently on a visit. “Saddam and his cronies are not the all-powerful men that they are sometimes portrayed in the media,” said Allawi.
“Saddam transmitted a message to me begging for mercy. He said they had been working for the public interest and their goal was not to do harm.” But Allawi said his response was: “It is for the courts to decide.”
In another interview, the New York Times quoted Allawi as saying that Saddam has been “dying every day” since he was toppled by invading US and British armies last year. “He is in prison, he is alone, he has lost everything, he has no power, nothing,” Allawi said. “And to him that is worse than death.”
The same paper quoted Iraqi and US officials as saying that Saddam insists that he is still head of state and that “he has refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing, or to show remorse for the hundreds of thousands of people killed during his 24-year dictatorship.”
In his 3.5x3.9 meter cell — furnished with a fold-up bed, a small desk and a plastic chair and a prayer mat — Saddam reads poetry and “tales from 1,000 years ago when Baghdad was a center of learning and the capital of the Islamic world,” one official said.
Iraqi Human Rights Minister Bakhtiar Amin, for his part, compared the Spartan simplicity of Saddam’s life in custody with the enormity of the crimes he is alleged to have committed.
Amin told the New York Times it was bizarre that Saddam placed white-painted stones around the plants he tends in the courtyard where he is allowed to exercise for three hours a day.
“This is a man who committed some of the biggest acts of genocide in history,” the minister said.
