'Hope of something better'

The item here comes from this morning's edition of From Our Own Correspondent (11.30 am, BBC Radio 4 - at the time of posting, the audio at the site is still that for last week). It is the BBC's Stephen Sackur talking about the reaction in his household to the news of Saddam Hussein's capture:

Then my phone starts beeping. A text message from a friend. Four words which turn my world upside down. Reports say Saddam captured, says the screen on the phone. I call out to my wife, rush to the TV and stick on the rolling news. US sources claim they've caught Saddam Hussein. But how to believe it? This is a moment my wife Zina has dreamed about for more than twenty years. How cruel it would be to give way to joy now, only to find hope crushed as it has been so many times before.

But then Paul Bremer comes on to a platform in Baghdad. 'We got him,' he cries, and in Brussels we shout, and laugh and hug. Our three children have now gathered around the screen. They're young but they have a sense of what this means to their mother. Her father was killed by Saddam in one of his first murderous purges after he established his dictatorship in 1979. She was a teenager at the time, and she's never been home since.

Suddenly Saddam's haggard face is before us. This man has been a constant presence in my wife's imagination, to a lesser extent in mine too. He is our personification of evil and yet, perversely, without him we would never have met. A US medic is examining the tyrant's wild hair for lice and ticks; his mouth is open for a cursory inspection. He's like a horse being prodded by a vet - the whole scene so improbable that we simply stare, gobsmacked. In the Baghdad auditorium, local journalists are on their feet screaming Arabic curses at the big screen, others are clapping, laughing, crying. One, my wife tells me, repeatedly hollers 'Play it again! Play the tape again!' Our phone starts ringing. Zina's mother is beside herself, giddy with joy. Saddam ruined her life, but at least she lived long enough to see him humiliated.

I take a call from another friend. We start to talk about the news. But I find it impossible. I put the phone down and for a few minutes I surprise myself. I simply sit and sob. Why? Because this moment has taken me back seven months, to images and memories I find it hard to control, to the most harrowing experience of my career; no, never mind career - life.

Last May I was in Iraq working on a story about Iraq's disappeared. I met families who were travelling up and down the country responding to whispers and rumours of mass graves. They were searching for relatives missing for a dozen years, in some cases much longer. I followed them down a dirt track to a patchwork of fields beyond the town of Hilla, ninety miles south of Baghdad. In the middle of this desiccated landscape I came upon a mechanical digger clawing at the earth. Scores of people were gathered around it, pawing each new pile of soil. In my mind's eye now - and, to be honest, every day - I still see the hundreds and hundreds of corpses, eaten away by time. I see the tattered soldiers' uniforms, women's shawls, children's shoes, covered in dirt. I see the frantic searchers, pushing, shoving, treading heedless on human bones, detaching rotten identity cards from the bodies to which they belonged, holding up hanks of human hair, trying to remember the precise colour and feel of the hair of their brother, son or mother. This is the Iraq that Saddam Hussein built, a land of murder, nightmares and tears, so many tears.

And now he's locked up in a cage while politicians, lawyers and the world's wise men discuss his fate. And that surely is a cause for celebration at the end of this sour, violent, divisive year. But then again, maybe not. After all, only hours after I first reported from Hilla all those months ago, I received a furious email from one viewer convinced that I was exaggerating and manufacturing Saddam’s crimes in order to justify the Bush-Blair war. Even this week one acquaintance here in Brussels expressed his disgust at the sickening behaviour of what he called 'Iraqi Uncle Toms' who expressed delight at Saddam's capture simply to please their American masters. He means my wife, I suppose, or the millions of other Iraqis both in and out of their Saddam-free homeland who are coming to terms with a novel emotion this new year: hope of something better.

(Hat tip: WotN and Jenny Geras for, respectively, making and transcribing the recording.)