The year is 1971. The place is Baghdad. The Baa’th Socialist party took over in a coup d’état three years earlier. One family lives through fear and suffering under a brutal regime. This is the memoir The First Evidence: A Memoir of Life in Iraq Under Saddam Hussein. This is the memoir of life at the beginning and through the development of Baa’th control in Iraq in the 1970’s. The memoir chronicles the life of a young girl and her family, who did not support the Baa’th, and the struggles and tragedies that occurred in Baghdad from about 1971 until 1979 when she was taken out of the country and to Europe by her parents. The effects of the fear of the Baa’th regime’s tactics and the effects of the application of the regime’s tactics are well documented in the memoir. This is something that I have never read about in the course of this class or any other that I have taken in the past.

When I say that I have never heard about the atrocities that are found in this memoir, I mean that these are not the more commonly known crimes that the regime committed, the gassing of the Kurds in the 1980’s or the massacre of the Shiites in the 1990’s. The atrocities against the Iraqi people described in this memoir are those that took place in the 1970’s. These crimes were ignored by the rest of the world when they happened and are just now being brought to light because of those Iraqis willing to step forward now and tell their stories, like Juman Kubba. In all of my studies I’ve never come across some, if not all of the events described in this memoir.

The memoir opens in the year 1971. The focus is on one family of the former elite class. Both of the parents are well educated, the mother, Lydia, a teacher and the father, Makki, deputy minister of the ministry of communication, reaching this post pre-Baa’th regime. The family had always been well respected in the community and was known as lawful, sincere citizens of the city and of Iraq. Both parents were idealists and passed that on to their children, believing that the law would be upheld and bring about what is right. This ill prepared them for the trials that they were about to put through.

According to Kubba’s retelling of the period, during the early 1970’s there was a string of murders in Baghdad, the first of their kind, all attributed to a serial killer that was named Abu Tubar. The people of Iraq lived in fear of this serial killer, and were always on their guard with this monster roaming the streets. A special line to the police was set up for the purpose of receiving calls about this killer. It was around this time that odd occurrences started happening around and in Kubba’s home. The way that houses are built and the culture surrounding the home in Arab culture is not the same as that of Western culture. Guests would often come by unannounced. There were several gates in a wall that surrounded one’s home, and each gate was for use by different people. Kubba’s family started seeing strange people coming to their gates, and once even had someone in their home after the police inspected it, to see if anyone was in it. The suspicious activity continued and involved all manner of people.

One night, because of Makki’s position in the government, was called by a member of his staff after several Baa’th guards had come in and ransacked the office and beaten several of the other staff members on duty. The significance of this is that this office was monitoring calls made about Abu Tubar. A call was placed by Abu Tubar, and that call was placed from the presidential palace. This was the discovery that truly placed Makki and the rest of his family in danger, in addition to their refusal to join the party or support it. Makki attempted to order an investigation, but was strong-handed into closing it before it had begun. This however was not the only consequence of his discovery of a government conspiracy.

The serial killer Abu Tubar had turned out to be the government and the conspiracy was far stretching. The killings and disappearances of citizens who either opposed the regime, or refused to do the bidding of the regime, anyone who posed a threat as a political enemy, was the work of the government. Calls to the police were intercepted and Baa’th agents were sent in costume of the Baghdad police (the police in Baghdad had yet to be taken over by the Baa’th regime at this time). All of this was to foster a sense that the citizens were still being protected, but in reality they were being watched and manipulated. In all my studies I had heard of the “purges” of officials from the old regimes, but I had never read of the widespread fear and panic that the Baa’th used to bring the Iraqi people under foot.

As a result of Makki’s knowledge of the conspiracy, he was detained by the government and taken to one of the headquarters of the secret police to face questioning and torture. The way it appeared to his family was that he just never came home from work one evening until a member of the family was able to use his remaining connections in the government (as was stated previously, this was a family from the elite) to find out what had happened to Makki. The detainment culminated in a “trial” where Makki was simply sentenced to a year in the Abu Graib Prison. This wasn’t the end of this family’s trials. The nightmare only deepened from that point on, until the children one by one were able to escape the country and finally years after they were able to take their daughters, the last of their children, to safety, Lydia and Makki were also able to escape the once beloved city and country that they called home.

In its entirety, this memoir gave the history of this period in Iraq a human face. It brought forth a humanity to the experience of this history, one that for the longest time has gone untold. The world did not see these atrocities going on, because they didn’t want to see them. The world has ignored the pain and suffering of these people that occurred long before Saddam Hussein was not only the brains (however demented in some opinions) behind the operation, but also the figurehead that embodied that power and commanded the fear of a captive people. The one quote that struck me most and describes the brutality of the regime totally is found in the preface of the memoir. “Anyone who attempts to take this government from our hands, shall receive Iraq as a land without people.” – Saddam Hussein.