BAGHDAD, Iraq — Abbas Fadhil Kamal has no trouble deciding who bombed his DVD and video store Monday in Baghdad’s oldest shopping district. Kamal was copying and selling DVDs that showed scenes of atrocities by Saddam Hussein’s regime.
"It’s positive that this was done by Baathists who want to keep the crimes of Saddam a secret from the people," Kamal said Wednesday as he swept up shards of glass, plaster and trash left by the bombing.
Not long after U.S. troops toppled Hussein and his ruling Baath Party in April, video images from inside his regime began surfacing in Baghdad’s markets. It turned out that Hussein’s secret police agencies had sometimes videotaped their torture or executions of suspected dissidents, perhaps to demonstrate their loyalty to the regime, or as aids for training their officers.
Such videotapes, plus others recording Hussein’s family at play at ostentatious parties, apparently were found in palaces and offices of the former leaders during the spasm of looting that followed their fall.
On Rashid Street, the narrow, bustling main road through Baghdad’s old market district, merchants such as Kamal have for years made bootleg copies of Arnold Schwarzenegger movies and Britney Spears videos. This year, they eagerly began selling Iraqis the heretofore hidden evidence of their recent oppression. Copied onto the cheapest blank DVDs available, it is truth priced to sell, as little as $1.50 or so.
"My CDs showed Saddam’s intelligence officers torturing people," Kamal said. "It showed the mass graves (where executed dissidents were buried), it showed Halabja," the village on the border with Iran where Iraqi forces allegedly used chemical weapons to kill thousands in 1988. On the wall of his shop, tattered advertisements showed stills from his DVD: notably Hussein’s late son Odai leering at a woman in a party dress.
"I put the CD on a television and showed it out the window" of the shop, Kamal said. "People crowded around to watch it. They would stand here and cry."
Even though "people knew in a way that this was going on under Saddam, it is a new thing to see it with our eyes," said Mustafa Othman, a university student who said he had watched parts of such videos and plans ultimately to buy one. "These things were a dark part of our lives that we now must see and learn from," he said.
Kamal sold great numbers of the DVDs, "maybe a million," he said, smiling. But he said he also had warnings from loyalists of Hussein.
"Three weeks ago, four big guys drove up in a nice new car. They came up and tore down the posters" advertising the DVDs, he said. A week later, a bomb wrecked the office where Kamal had computers and DVD burners working long hours to copy his video indictment of the Hussein regime.
Before dawn Monday on Al-Rasheed Street, a bomb left in front of Kamal’s tiny store wrecked it and blew out windows in adjacent stores. No one was hurt, but the message was clear.
"I am going to have to be more careful" about offering the DVD for sale, Kamal said. Baghdad residents said some other shops selling the videodiscs have closed up or have removed them from view.
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