N. Africa’s ‘Saddamania’: More Show Than Substance? : Arab states: Pro-Hussein movements in the Maghreb region may not have been as heartfelt as they appeared.

ALGIERS —  Just before the ground war, when Persian Gulf tensions were greatest, a senior official with the French government in Paris noted a peculiar phenomenon of geography and Arab politics.

“The popularity of Saddam Hussein,” he said, “seems to be inversely proportional to the distance between Iraq and other Arab countries.”

With the exception of Jordan, where politics were dictated by a dominant Palestinian population, the Arab countries closest to the Iraqi president all vehemently opposed him. Saudi Arabia, Syria and Egypt all had military forces in the international coalition.

But along the Arab belt of North Africa, stretching from Libya to Morocco, including Tunisia, Algeria and the desert land of Mauritania, Hussein became more popular as the crisis over his invasion of Kuwait grew, sparking massive anti-American street demonstrations and causing governments to take increasingly pro-Iraqi positions in the conflict.

This “Saddamania” put a scare into the West, particularly in France and other countries with large North African Arab populations. North African Arab governments, particularly here in Algeria, fed the fears by warning Western diplomats of the dire consequences--alienation of the Arab world and increased international terrorism--that a war with Iraq would create.

But a postwar tour of three countries in the Maghreb region--Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco--showed that the political damage may not be as serious as feared. Interviews with senior government officials, diplomats and opposition leaders in each country indicated that the pro-Iraq movements may not have been as broadly based or as heartfelt as they appeared on television screens at the height of the crisis. In each case, there were internal political explanations for pro-Iraqi tendencies exhibited by the governments.

“It is hard to judge just how deeply the public was really affected,” an experienced Western diplomat in Algeria commented. “There were big demonstrations and a rabidly pro-Iraqi press. But it is difficult (to) gauge how wrought-up the people actually were. The television images looked awful, but my gut feeling is that it was never really that serious.”

In Tunisia, the French magazine Le Point reported, photographs of Hussein, mounted on a white platter, sold during the crisis for more than $1 each. Now they can be bought three for the price of one. In the newspapers of Algeria, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of the U.S. forces in the Gulf, is no longer a “pig” or a “fat mercenary” but simply the “American general.” In the Moroccan press, Saudi Arabia’s monarch is no longer the “betrayer of the holy sites” but simply King Fahd.

Like one of the seasonal desert sandstorms that rage across the Maghreb, the pro-Hussein movement was full of sound and fury but short-lived. A crude mural of an Iraqi Scud missile fades in the afternoon sunlight on the wall of a boys’ sports club in the Casablanca medina. A pro-Iraq charity art display languishes in the lobby of the huge hillside Aurassi Hotel in Algiers--the impressionistic oil paintings of American “war crimes” unviewed and unsold. Family pictures replace those of Hussein on the dashboards of Tunisian taxis.

The factors behind the Hussein craze that for a few months had mothers naming newborns after the Iraqi leader are varied; among them are the end of the Cold War and newspaper sales.

Particularly in Algeria, the decline of the Soviet Union as a global power has spawned fears of “Arab marginalization.” The Algerians thrived in the Cold War atmosphere by playing their Soviet allies against the West. They feared that an overwhelming U.S. victory in the Gulf would boost the United States as the sole world power. Thus, their Cold War leverage would be lost.

“Is it good for the future of the world--for its stability and security--to have only one side?” one obviously worried Algerian official asked. “Is it good to have a single country that leads?”

For newspapers, it was often a matter of circulation and street sales. The showdown between Hussein and the U.S.-led coalition was a bonanza for the region’s struggling papers. The Moroccan newsprint cooperative that supplies all the country’s newspapers reported that sales of Al Ittihad al Ichtiraki, a Casablanca-based newspaper that took a particularly anti-U.S., pro-Hussein line during the crisis, tripled, from 50,000 to 150,000, during the Gulf crisis.

Although some diplomats are skeptical, the governments of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia say the press was out of their control. Each country is experimenting with new press freedoms.

“Our government was very severe with Iraq,” said a top-ranking Tunisian official. “We honored the boycott, and we insisted Iraq leave Kuwait. But I admit that things got out of hand here, not the people but the Tunisian press. Then the foreign media exploited the situation. Things became hysterical.”

Another factor is what one diplomat called the “Nasser effect”--named for the late Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, who fostered dreams of a powerful, unified Arab world. Said the Algiers-based diplomat: “The people forgot about Saddam’s brutalities and egoism. They thought ‘By God, here is a man! Saddam is standing up to the world.’ It was a throwback to the days of Nasser.”

There are also deep-seated resentments in North Africa against the rich Gulf oil states. Reports of rich Kuwaitis spending the war months gambling on the French Riviera fanned these hostilities between the Arab have-nots of the Maghreb and their rich cousins from the Persian Gulf.

This attitude was particularly strong in Morocco, which has replaced Beirut as a sin capital for Gulf Arabs. Moroccans resent the sheiks and sons of sheiks cavorting licentiously on their turf. Several members of the Saudi royal family have ostentatious private castles in Morocco. Practically every Moroccan has a story to tell about a drunken Gulf Arab standing on the corner waving a fistful of dollars at passing women.

More important, however, a closer look reveals that in each country there were compelling internal political reasons for the pro-Hussein stances.

In Algeria and in Tunisia, for example, the governments used the issue to fight off growing Islamic fundamentalist movements. By pointing out the fundamentalists’ financial connections to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, the governments forced them on the defensive. Thus it evolved into a game of one-upmanship, with the governments and the fundamentalists competing with each other to show the purity of their pro-Hussein sentiments.

In Morocco, the wily King Hassan II was one of the first Arab leaders to send forces to Saudi Arabia, a contingent of 1,300 troops with experience in his Western Sahara military campaign.

But opposition parties used the Gulf War to force the 61-year-old monarch into taking an ambiguous public stance on Iraq--at one point calling Hussein his “dear Arab brother” and permitting one of the largest anti-U.S., anti-coalition demonstrations of the war--a Feb. 3 rally of more than 200,000 people in Rabat, the Moroccan capital. The king was vulnerable because of his own extensive links with the Saudi Royal Family.

The war’s rapid conclusion, of course, has brought an era of political revisionism. Leaders of each of the three countries now say that they were the “first in the Arab world” to condemn the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

Tunisian leaders say they feel misunderstood and unfairly punished by the United States, which drastically cut its foreign aid (from $80 million to $20 million annually) because of the position Tunisia took during the war.

“We don’t accept the idea of penalizing a friendly government on the basis of a perception of a position,” one Tunisian official complained. “Are we being punished because of Tunisian public opinion during the war?”

Morocco wants credit--and foreign debt forgiveness--for sending troops to the Gulf. “We did not sink to the level of the street mentality like the governments of Algeria and Tunisia,” a Moroccan official said. “Our government had to play a very delicate balancing act of condemning the invasion, keeping our Arab friendships and maintaining an equilibrium with respect to public opinion. Now we feel the United States could use some of its enormous influence to encourage investments in Morocco.”

The National Liberation Front government of Algerian President Chadli Bendjedid is too preoccupied with national elections, set for June, to do much fence mending. During the war, the Liberation Front newspaper talked of the “eternal victory” of Hussein. Now, party leaders say the Iraqi leader never had a chance, that he was the victim of a United States bent upon destroying Iraq. “The real goal of this whole operation was the destruction of Iraq,” one senior member of government said.

Privately, Maghreb leaders who once praised Hussein’s courage now say they never could stand the brute. “The invasion of Kuwait was the worst blow to the Arab countries that has ever been made by an Arab leader,” a senior Algerian official said.