Amid shock and shame, warnings on occupation
AMMAN -- As a docile Saddam Hussein appeared on television screens above barbers' chairs and checkout lines, Arabs reacted with a mixture of sadness, joy, humiliation, and anger that reflected his dual image as a brutal dictator and an emblem of resistance against Israel and the West.
Of a dozen people interviewed as the news spread through downtown Amman yesterday afternoon, a majority said their first reaction was sadness and shame at the ignominious fate of a man many saw as a symbol of Arab pride, even as they acknowledged that he was a tyrant whose defense of Arab causes was often more posture than substance.
Karim Khoury, a 1993 Boston University graduate, summed it up as he rang up frozen turkeys at his family's supermarket.
"He was fighting for Palestine," said Khoury, 35, who has Palestinian roots. "Maybe he wasn't, but he said he was."
"We are angrier than the Iraqis," added another store employee, a Jordanian who identified himself only by his first and middle name, Suhail Hamid.
Many Jordanians said they did not believe that Hussein's arrest would deflate those fighting against US authorities in Iraq, with some predicting that resistance would spread once Iraqis no longer fear Hussein's return. "Up to this morning Iraqis had two enemies, Saddam Hussein and the occupation forces. Now they have only one," said Labib Kamhawi, a former professor of political science at Jordan University and president of Cessco, a petrochemical engineering firm. "We will witness a very short honeymoon, and then all hell will break loose."
Kamhawi said he believed it would grow harder for pro-US Arab governments like Jordan's to support the United States in Iraq if the focus there becomes "the fight against occupation," a phrase that resonates in Jordan, whose Palestinian majority is intimately affected by Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories.
"No Arab can say no to resisting occupation," he said. "It will be suicidal."
The government of Jordan's King Abdullah issued a statement that cautiously welcomed Hussein's arrest and called for the "acceleration" of the creation of an Iraqi government.
"What concerns the Jordanian government is the security and safety of the Iraqi people and their stability," said Asma Khader, a spokeswoman.
Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, issued a statement calling Hussein "a menace to the Arab world" and his capture "another step in Iraq's path toward peace and unity for all of its people."
In Turkey, the capture was hailed as a development that could only be good for that country as well as Iraq. "There is great relief," said Yalim Eralp, a former Turkish ambassador to the United Nations. "There is hope that Iraq will return to greater stability."
Other Turks' reaction was more tempered.
"It is good news, but it is not a solution and it doesn't finish anything," Hasan Koc, 65, a farmer, said in Konya, in central Turkey. "The solution is giving control of Iraq to Iraqi Muslims."
Many Jordanians saw Hussein's capture as a mixed message for other undemocratic Arab governments, such as the Saudi and Jordanian monarchies. Khoury, the BU graduate, called the capture "a good example for others to learn. . . . He deserved it."
Ilnur Cevik, publisher of the Turkish Daily News and a member of the ruling party, said the capture "will have a devastating effect on Saddam's people in the resistance, but not on Al Qaeda or the others."
Iraqis in Jordan were torn. Mustafa Yacoub, 63, a member of Iraqi's long-oppressed Shi'ite majority, said he was imprisoned during Hussein's regime for two years for giving a pair of eyeglasses to a French official on a business trip. Yet even he pitied Hussein when he saw his tiny hiding place, "a place for dead people, not someone like a president."
And while Yacoub said he hoped the capture would bring democracy and peace among Iraq's religious sects, he said he was embarrassed that it was foreigners who pulled it off. "It should have been Iraqis," he said.
Charles A. Radin of the Globe staff contributed to this report from Konya, Turkey. Barnard can be reached at abarnard@globe.com.
