Sports, of course, were not Uday's only interest. Though he had effectively been by passed in the line of succession by his brother, and though he had inflamed his father's passions against him with the slaying of Jajo, Saddam's food taster and procurer, Uday had found ways to both worm his way back into Saddam's good graces and to keep himself occupied. One of his chief responsibilities, it turned out, was to bend the Iraqi media to his will.
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| Uday Hussein |
He owned and operated Babel, the nation's largest daily newspaper, and amassed a media empire that ultimately included a dozen more weekly newspapers, the youth-audience station Shabbab TV and the FM radio station Sawt al-Shabbab. As if that didn't give him enough control over the Iraqi media, in 1992, Uday Hussein was "unanimously" elected head of the Iraqi Journalists Union, a position that allowed him to mandate that all Iraqi journalists join the Ba'ath Party and blindly follow orders. According to Iraq-2003, a report compiled by Reporters Without Borders, in the decade after Uday obtained his virtual monopoly over the media in Iraq, "About 300 journalists, including the country's best writers...(f)led abroad...to escape Uday Hussein's silencing of all dissent and reducing the media to echoing his father's propaganda, using legal harassment, humiliation, blackmail, arrests and executions."
"Some people reportedly had their tongues cut out for critici(z)ing the president and journalists were said to have been dealt with in a special torture chamber at the offices of the national Olympic committee," the report continued.
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| Torture mask used by Uday |
Ironically, in 2002, Uday Hussein's own paper, Babel was in many respects more controversial than its competitors. While most Iraqi news outlets contented themselves with reprints of official handouts, Babel often printed foreign news reports. As Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post reported in the International Herald Tribune on Nov. 25, 2002, Babel "even published editorials critical of cabinet ministers and others close to the president. In 1996, as Iraq was hammering out an arrangement with the United Nations that would allow the country to sell its oil for food and other humanitarian supplies, Babel accused the government in an editorial of being needlessly secretive, writing caustically that "everybody knew the details of the talks except the Iraqis."
In fact, In Nov. 2002, the paper was shuttered for a month after it published a report that speculated about what might happen to Saddam's family in the event of a war with the United States. In the report, Babel denied allegations published in a British newspaper that Saddam had offered Libyan leader billions of dollars to provide sanctuary for Saddam's family in the event of war. Though the report was decidedly sympathetic to the interests of the ruler and his clan, the official policy of the Iraqi media had been to downplay or ignore completely the gathering war clouds in the months before the US-led invasion.
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