I hated Uday Hussain, says bodyguard

Weeds grow in the cracks of the cement pavement now and the summer wind off the Tigris stirs the empty liquor cartons in the trashed Boat Club, Uday Hussain's favourite party spot.

The former bodyguard picks his way through the shattered glass, twisted metal, torn magazines and bottle tops to show a reporter where he and other members of Uday's security detail used to sit in a small building just across from the club.

It was next door to the room where popular sin-gers waited to be summoned for performances that could last until dawn. "Of course I hated him," says the bodyguard, who spent four years working for Uday and asked that his name not be used because he fears retribution from former colleagues or regime opponents. "But you could not leave."

Uday Hussain, Saddam's eldest son, was known for his obsession with sex, fast cars, heavy drinking, expensive clothes, torture and murder.

Although many people thought it was unlikely that Saddam would make him his successor because of his unstable character, Uday was a potent and useful symbol of the regime's terrifying power. Uday was shot to death with his brother Qusay when about 200 American soldiers stormed the house where they were hiding in Mosul last month.

The bodyguard says he was disgusted by Uday's activities - he points to a floor-to-ceiling cage in the corner of the club's kitchen where he says monkeys were kept for Uday who liked to have the animals watch him when he was deflowering virgins.

But there is a lingering boastfulness. Not so long ago, it was a symbol of power to be able to say he knew where Uday sat; what he drank; when he was about to get angry.

Conversations with four people who were close to Uday, including a personal photographer and a car mechanic, give a glimpse of the psychology of those who chose, or felt compelled, to work for the Hussain family.

These were the people behind the scenes who did the regime's day-to-day work; some intimidated less-fortunate Iraqis and all helped shape its image of omnipotence. They were people whom others dared not cross.

Some were cruel themselves, some were voyeurs; some were criminals, but all were seduced by the cl-oseness to money and power in a society bankrupted both financially and pe-rsonally by Saddam's rule.

The bodyguard knows every inch of the club and has almost an owner's pride. As he walks through the looted rooms, where even the light switches have been stolen, he points out the acoustic tiles, the wood paneling of an intimate bar area where the singers used to perform and the marble on the floor of the 'diwan' - the Arab-style sitting room - the only non-Western room in the place.

He points to a corner near the bar: "He used to sit there," said the bodyguard, who like many of Uday's former employees, rarely refers to the son of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussain by name.

"Most of the people wanted to work with him," said one of Uday's three professional photograph-ers, who recorded his every move.

"He was a VIP; his companies opened horizons for you. People who worked for his companies were travelling here and there, they were getting benefits, they were staying in his resorts."

The photographer says that he did it for the money and, like the bodyguard, asked that his real name not be used for fear of retaliation.

A pale, large man with a protruding stomach, thick arms and crew cut, his wire-rimmed glasses and pudgy cheeks make him appear almost childlike.

But occasionally he is moved to re-enact his job. And at those moments, it appears that he enjoyed his power as an intimidator and that there was a symbiotic relationship between those who did Uday's bidding and Uday himself.

By his own description, he was almost always near Uday, often working for 48 hours at a stretch. His job was to make the singers who entertained Uday at the Boat Club gulp down a litre and a half of a "cocktail," a combination of 90-proof alcohol often spiked with drugs.

When it comes to Uday, it is often hard to know what is true and what is embellished, but the story of the forced consumption of lar-ge quantities of straight alcohol is corroborated by several people who went to the clubs. It was not possible to verify whether drugs were added.

"I would line up all the entertainment against that wall," the bodyguard said, pointing to the side of the garage. "And I would take a stick," he said, picking up a long, stray twig that made a menacing, whistling sound as he whipped it through the air. "And I would say, 'Drink, drink, you have 10 minutes.'"

"If any of them didn't drink, I hit them with a stick," he said, whipping the stick through the air as he spoke. Then, if the singers still refused, they were given a "street beating," meaning that their faces were untouched but they were pummelled until they could hardly stand up.

The worst beatings occurred when Uday was present, the bodyguard said. Did he ever beat people in front of Uday? "Yes, yes, I did the beatings in front of him, I did a lot," he said. "Sometimes their feet would be broken."

What did he think when he was beating them? His eyes glazed over as they often did when he was asked about his own feelings. "Time stopped. I thought of nothing," he said recently and added, "I try to forget." But when the same question was asked a few weeks earlier, his answer was more complicated.

"I always felt like I was the one who took the beatings because each shout of pain from the beaten person, I used to pray to God and ask God to punish me for what I was doing. But the person who took the beating did not know that if I didn't carry out the orders, I would take the same beating that he was getting." He estimated that he administered maybe 100 beatings a year.

Even so, Uday punished him on a number of occasions - humiliating him for being late by having his head shaved and once throwing him in prison for daring to hand in his resignation. The relationship seems rooted in the interplay of inspiring fear in others and being fearful of being punished oneself.

Uday's photographer expressed similar sentiments. He said he always told Uday the truth because he was afraid that if he didn't, someone else would, and then he would be punished. "I was upset by what happened to those singers, but what could I do? If he asked me if a singer had drunk or not. I would not lie because he would punish me," he said.

Every night when he went home after one of the parties, he thought about quitting, he said. Especially after he saw one of Uday's friends die from the amount of alcohol he was forced to consume.

"Whenever I put my head down on my pillow, I thought about going to work for someone else. But the thing was that I couldn't, because he was paying me very well - 50,000 denars a day ($25) - and I could not get that anywhere else because there was not much work," the photographer said.

He differs with the bodyguard and others on whether it was possible to resign from a job with Uday. Their accounts suggest that Uday was both offended and wary of anyone who wanted to quit. Their resignations flatly were rejected and sometimes they were punished for having attempted to leave.

Still, the photographer's view raises the que