Chemical Ali invites you into his world of interiors
Nothing explodes a despot's mystique like an avocado bathroom suite
by Ben Macintyre
April 05, 2003


When dictators fall we rummage through their medicine cupboards, we gasp at their lavishly tasteless bathrooms and whistle at their walk-in wardrobes packed with designer clothes. For only by exposing those excesses, the bully’s luxury in the midst of want, do we understand the tawdriness of tyranny.

Uncovering a dictator’s private opulence is the most intimate of liberations: Imelda Marcos’s bulging shoe cupboard, Nicolae Ceausescu’s gilded kitsch, Hermann Goering’s looted art collection.

We have yet to penetrate Saddam’s bunker, with its mythical gold-inlaid light switches and mother-of-pearl lavatory paper holders, but already his regime is going the way of all despotisms as the greed and self-indulgence of his rule are held up for contemplation and ridicule.

On Wednesday, US Delta Force troops entered the Maqar-al-Tharthar Palace outside Baghdad, the President’s pleasure complex inevitably nicknamed “Saddamland”, with its amusement arcade and safari park with elephants and deer, Ferris wheel, casino and artificial lake.

It was empty, of course, but the very artificiality of the retreat built for Saddam and his Baath Party creatures lends the place iconic significance. Simultaneously, British forces occupied the country home of “Chemical” Ali Hassan al-Majid, a pink monstrosity on the outskirts of Basra, its flowerbeds planted with exotic species, dying for lack of water. The floor is covered with shards of smashed chandelier; the swimming pool is filling up with wind-blown sand. Thus has the most feared mass-murderer of Saddam’s regime been demystified into a murderous fugitive with an overwrought patio.

There is more to this poking through the luxuries of despotism than idle curiosity; ever since the Roman Emperor Vitellius was dragged out to watch his statues being toppled, exposing the tyrant’s vanity and gaudy ostentation has become a ritual of regime-change. To handle Napoleon’s suitcase (which is still in Chequers), to hold up Caesar’s toga full of holes, to count Imelda’s shoes, and to scorn the grisly bathroom fittings of the mighty fallen, is to know that the oppressors were human, and are gone.

Last November, exactly one year after the fall of the Taleban, I stayed in the Kabul house once occupied by Osama bin Laden. Though hardly on the scale of Saddam’s palaces, by Afghan standards it was a stately home, the residence of the Saudi-born terrorist’s third wife. It was at once a surprise and a confirmation to discover that the ascetic, anti-Western terrorist had chosen French bidets for the green-tiled en-suite bathrooms.

His luxury mansion outside Kandahar, with its door handles studded with semi-precious stones, would not have been out of place in Footballers’ Wives. A computerised replica of another bin Laden home, albeit a less comfortable one, will soon be installed at the Imperial War Museum to allow vistors to live, briefly and virtually, chez Osama. Bin Laden’s naff door handles and Chemical Ali’s broken chandelier serve the same symbolic purpose, rendering terror as commonplace as expensive bad taste.

Luxury and comfort are the trappings of dictatorship, the adjuncts of political violence, oppressing by grandeur. It is no accident that Saddam’s silk-canopied bed with duckling down pillows is said to echo that of Bonaparte himself. The Nazis, too, manipulated the iconography of luxury. The Paris interior decorator The House of Jansen, for example, was brought in to design a lavish banqueting room for the Reichsbank’s headquarters, complete with a table for 150 set with a gold dinner service — not just because it pleased Nazi vanity to eat with golden fish-forks, but because opulence meant power.

Nothing so clearly defined the Ceausescu reign in Romania as its extravagant ugliness: Elena’s shoes with diamond-encrusted heels, the interiors of supreme Balkan bad taste, the boar hunts when Nicolae would gun down scores of animals like a medieval baron. When Romania’s revolutionaries rifled the wardrobes of the vast House of the Republic, itself a symphony in discordant charcoal and pink marble, they found racks of identical fur coats and pet dogs grown obese on steak while the rest of the country starved.

Romanians did not discover the full extent of the Ceausescus’ self-indulgence until after they had gone, but tales of despotic greed are often the first signs of a regime in trouble. It may be no coincidence that in Zimbabwe the tales are now legion of Grace Mugabe’s fantastic shopping trips, her husband’s oak-panelled palaces and alleged plans to buy a Scottish castle.

The luxuries of Saddam, Ceausescu, Mugabe and their ilk have doubtless been exaggerated, but excess remains essential to the mythology of despotism, both in power, and when power is lost. Marie-Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake” remark is important precisely because it is apocryphal, a popularly accepted image of a regime fattened on frivolity and overindulgence, and cake.

Dictators, as obsessive compulsives, tend to be collectors: Kim Jong Il has 20,000 videos; Idi Amin amassed titles: King of Scotland, Field Marshal, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular.

Saddam Hussein collects palaces. Since the end of the last Gulf War he has built at least 38 new residences, and as the Iraqi regime crumbles, so the contents of those monuments to personal avarice and paranoia will be exposed: the fawning portraits, the autocrat’s toys, the expensive fixtures and fittings of the potentate.

The collapse of every modern dictator has been accompanied by exposure of his sumptuous private universe. The glimpse we are now getting into Saddam’s palatial lifestyle is the modern counterpart of Shelley’s Ozymandias, the broken, grandiose remnants of the transitory totalitarian: look on my gold-plated taps, ye mighty, and despair.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,482-634787,00.html.