Heroes and villains | Books | The Guardian
Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung, Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, the studies explore the complicated relationship between poetry and political. The world would be a better place if dictators such as Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi were still in power, the Republican US. Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Saparmurat Niyazov and Radovan Karadzic, the authors explore the complicated relationship between poetry.
But these crimes served only as a pretext for foreign interventions. Repressive policy towards ethnic minorities and political opposition characterise multiple political regimes all over the word.
Ignorance of human rights in most of the cases does not lead to military intervention and killing of the respective leaders. In only a very few cases the Western military alliance takes repression as a pretext for intervention. So what are the reasons behind? The Western allies did not hunt Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and Muammar al-Gaddafi because of their bad politics, but because of their good ones.
Trump: World was better off with Gaddafi and Saddam
This includes social politics for the masses and national economic modernization. Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya for some decades used a huge amount of public money to modernise society. Instead of administering the state in favour of foreign investors, they used the means of the nationalization of industries for social, and regional development.
Western firms had only restricted access to the markets. But also their geopolitical position made them suspicious to the Western allies. Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi were leaders of societies on the periphery of the Western sphere of influence, historically as well as actually. Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya — all three of them were key states between the two blocks in the period of the Cold War. And they were not willing to give-up political and economic independence completely, as they were asked for after the breakdown of the Soviet Union.
Their closeness to Moscow had allowed them to keep relative distance to Western economic and political interests. Was it, because their potential to take part in a different integration than the dictated one from the Western block threatened the imperial advance? Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya: From partners of the Comecon to pariahs of the West All three states have a long history of partnership with Eastern Europe.
This partnership geopolitically as well as ideologically was rooted in the cases of Libya and Iraq in a common interest to counterbalance Western economic and political advances since at least the s.
This was true also for Yugoslavia a decade later. And all three of them were willing to trade on barter or bilateral clearing as well as on hard currency basis. This mixture could be seen best in the Soviet-Iraqi system of trade. Iraqi oil was imported by the Soviet Union in exchange for Soviet weapons, and then Moscow sold this oil to India on hard currency basis in a triangular arrangement.
Libya was one of the main importers of Soviet military equipment outside Comecon afterwhen Tripoli opposed the Camp David accords as a betrayal of long-term Arab aspirations. Also this trade could have been a triangular one, although it was never published to what extent the Soviet weapons were re-exported by Libya to other African states. Many of these projects survived the breakdown of the Soviet Union and were to be continued in the s.
But it should come differently. In the early s the United States and the European Community used the weakness of the post-Soviet Russian leadership to impose economic and cultural embargo on all of the three peripheral states. Officially it was transformed in to an new regime of trade regulations called Wassenaar agreement. But the embargo-policy continued. So IBM was sentenced to a fine of 9 millions of US-Dollars because of selling high-tech-computers to Russia — and in this case we speak of the year It was not only the Western capitals putting economic pressure on odious states, the United States and its allies succeeded in convincing the whole UN Security Council to sanction Iraq, Yugoslavia and Libya.
In August Iraq was put under a total trade and financial embargo under the pretext of its invasion of Kuwait some days before. The sanctions were lifted after Saddam Hussein had been captured in In the case of Yugoslavia the argument for these sanctions was that the Yugoslav army actively took part in the civil war. In the case of Libya the bomb explosion of the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie served as a pretext to sanction the country.
An interesting remark has to be noted: Libyan oil was too important for European states to cut themselves from the flow, so the oil-business was excluded from the UN-embargo.
The sanctions against Yugoslavia were lifted after Milosevic lost its power, the lifting of the sanctions against Libya occurred when Gaddafi compensated the families of the victims of the Pan Am flight in All three sanctions were voted in full accordance with the Russian Federation under the leadership of Boris Yeltsin.
Before the breakdown of the Soviet Union, an internationalisation of such sanction-regimes under the UN-flag would not have been possible. He has no idea if the novel he is working on, an epic allegorical tale of passion and revenge, will ever be published.
Provisionally entitled The Great Awakening, his fifth novel will emerge into a very different critical climate from that which greeted the others. In his home country, his works were acclaimed, with sales said to run into millions. One was made into a part TV series. It had been announced that his books were to become part of the national curriculum. And then the regime changed. For eight years, Saddam Hussein has been carving out an alternative career as a writer of romantic and fantasy fiction, full of thinly veiled political allegory, grandiose rhetoric and autobiography.
He has published four novels in less than five years - prolific for someone whose day job was, presumably, fairly demanding. Many statesmen and revolutionaries have been consummate writers of prose and poetry.
Saddam, however, is part of a less honourable tradition of despots who have turned their attentions to the arts. From Nero to Napoleon, Hitler to Mao, there is sufficient output to suggest that we acknowledge this as a genre in its own right: As with any genre, the range of dic-lit talent runs from the literary to the populist.
Fellow Middle Eastern autocrat and dic-lit star Colonel Muammar Gadafy has built a literary reputation based on a collection of short-story fiction entitled The Village, the Village, the Earth, the Earth and the Suicide of the Astronaut. An international edition, retitled Escape to Hell and Other Stories, included a foreword from Pierre Salinger, one of JFK's press spokesmen, who said the writings provided an insight into a unique mind.Emotional Palestinian Poem to Saddam English Translation
Saddam's writing is at the other end of the dic-lit spectrum, following a populist family tradition. His uncle, a former mayor of Baghdad and an influential local tyrant himself, contributed to the genre with a book entitled He Created Them By Mistake: The Persians, Jews and Flies, published in His masterstroke was to make 20, Iraqi schools purchase 50 copies each.
What motivates dic-lit authors? They know critical reaction to their work is unlikely to be genuine. It may be that the act of creating "art" is an extension of the urge to control. Fiction in particular offers the author a malleable world. But just because he was a brutal dictator, should Saddam be excluded from a place in literary history?
Many great writers were not great human beings - perhaps Saddam merely had more scope to realise his vision. Published init is a torrid, romantic tale with an obvious political analogy.
Zabibah, the heroine, represents Iraq; her cruel husband is America; and the strong but vengeful king is Saddam.
Tyrants Writing Poetry | CEUPress
His influence was widespread He was surrounded by respect, peace, love, and trust as well as awe and fear This king was obeyed by his people, either willingly or by force. The king always has the last word as their discussions range over themes of power, cruelty, justice, nature and tradition. Then, one night, Zabibah is attacked and raped by a hooded stranger. The stranger turns out to be her husband the Americans! A great battle follows, coinciding with the Desert Storm assault of the Kuwait war.
But in this case, US forces are symbolically defeated, as the vicious husband is killed. Order is restored, though, tragically, neither Zabibah nor the king lives to see it.
What do the killings of Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi have in common? [Silvia Cattori]
On the back of this tour de force came The Fortified Castle which, like Zabibah, also veils a political agenda with romance. Set after the war, it tells the story of an ex-soldier who falls for a girl from northern Iraq balm to Saddam's actual policies against the Kurds.
The subplot - a servant running off with the master's sister - is a clear reference to Saddam's feelings of betrayal by the Kuwaitis.