They came bearing gifts, but now most countries would prefer to forget

www.timesonline.co.uk www.timesonline.co.uk March 10, 2003

From Janine di Giovanni in Baghdad

THERE is an American football signed by the New York Giants, a delicate gold-leaf tea set from a former Sri Lankan President, and six large shirts in yellow, cream and cornflower blue from Fidel Castro.

Gifts to Saddam Hussein fill the seven luminous galleries of the cavernous Triumph Leader Museum in central Baghdad. They bear testimony to those long-forgotten days before weapons inspections and United Nations deadlines, when Iraq and its President were seen in an entirely different light.

They poured in at a time when Iraq was considered to be a barrier against the radical fundamentalism of the Iranian Revolution and Saddam was a man to be wooed. They were a means of courting oil-rich Iraq before it became part of the “axis of evil”.

When the presents arrived, they were unwrapped, sent to the Iraqi leader for inspection, then stowed behind glass in the museum. There are rows of gifts from Mexico, Spain, Brazil, France, Italy, Tunisia, Turkey and Egypt, among others. There are crystal, clocks, garish paintings of mothers and children. There is a calligraphy set, alongside a Russian-made fountain pen from the President Lukashenko of Ukraine.

There are lavender Llardro figurines from Spain. There is a pearl and lapis lazuli key to the city of Sanaa in Yemen. There is a sprawling mosaic model of the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem given by Yassir Arafat, the Palestinian leader; a sculpted silver eagle given by Iraqis living in Romania; an Egyptian silver tea set.

There are faded images of Saddam with Marshall Tito of Yugoslavia, Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator, Indira Ghandi, the Indian Prime Minister, President Pompidou of France, Señor Castro, the Cuban President, and a lean, young Jacques Chirac drinking a glass of milk.

The more one probes the corners of the museum, the more embarrassments one finds. The California Senate presented an embroidered medal in 1984 with the grovelling message: “To His Excellency Saddam Hussein.”

Four months before Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 the President of the International Students’ Movement of the United Nations presented another elaborate medal to Saddam with an earnest and admiring message.

That same year the Russian Parliament gave Saddam a wooden dish with a carved knight on a rearing stallion and the words: “Good Defeats Evil.” Even after the Kuwaiti invasion, gifts kept arriving. President Chávez of Venezuela sent a CD. The Indo-Iraqi Friendship Society sent a tribute in 1998 calling Saddam “Man of the Century — Statesman, Thinker, Revolutionary”. Two years later, they went even further, hailing him “Man of the Millennium”. All these items are gleefully showed off by Mazan Ahmed, a guide, but, curiously, almost every American offering has disappeared now that Saddam is no longer on that country’s A list. The New York Giants’ football is there, given by an “unidentified” donor in 1982 and signed by every member of the team, but a photograph of Saddam and Donald Rumsfeld, now the hawkish US Defence Secretary, is banished. Mr Rumsfeld was then President Reagan’s special envoy to the Middle East. He was pictured shaking hands with Saddam in December 1983 — firm allies in the new world order.

A pair of golden spurs from Mr Reagan are nowhere to be seen. Nor are the pistols or the unusual medieval spiked hammer that he gave the Iraqi President during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. Some people say they have been stored away for “safekeeping” in a secret location. Others, pointing out the soured relationship between America, Britain and Iraq, swear that they never existed. Mr Ahmed said that the gifts were “unavailable”.

He added: “I know the spurs are kept somewhere, also a letter from George Bush’s father when he became the American leader. But you cannot see them.”

The guide cannot remember anything British. “The British never gave any gifts. The Queen didn’t give anything, not a tea cup. Neither did the Government,” he said.

The only acknowledgement of Britain or America’s existence are wall clocks that show the time in Washington and London as well as Beijing and Moscow. “They have been here for a long time,” Mr Ahmed said, indicating that it is far too much bother to remove them.

Astonishingly, even in the dark days before what will certainly be a bloody war, the gifts keep arriving in the museum’s grand central hallway. Last Thursday a delicate golden plate arrived from Vietnam. “We still have friends,” Mr Ahmed said.

Iraq still has friends, but one wonders how much time it has left. Outside the museum, engraved in stone and written in Arabic and English, are words written by Saddam in February, 1986: “The clock chimes away for time to keep record of men and women, some leaving behind the mark of great and lofty souls, while others leave naught but the remains of worm eaten bones.” In a city where children are now digging trenches and people are flocking to churches and mosques to pray that they live through the bombardment, the words seem eerily prophetic.