'I hadn't even suffered and yet I was sobbing'
Daily Telegraph, 6 March 2003


MP Ann Clwyd cares more for causes than her career, but her passionate support for war in Iraq has made her an unlikely heroine. Alice Thomson meets her


"It's the woman professor who haunts me most. A prisoner under Saddam, she gave birth to a girl, but couldn't feed her because the thin soup wasn't enough to provide breast milk," Ann Clwyd tells me.

"When she begged the guards for milk, they beat her. She held that dead baby for three days, refusing to give it up. The temperature in the cell was stifling, the smell was horrendous, but none of the other prisoners complained. In the end, they took her away and killed her."

When Mrs Clwyd stood up in the House of Commons last week to talk about the plight of the Iraqis and Kurds, MPs fell silent. The Prime Minister was thrilled that a Labour backbencher was finally coming to his aid, exhorting MPs to listen to her. Here was a staunch Left-winger, who had held sit-ins down coal pits and marched with Greenham Common women, backing his call for a war against Saddam Hussein.

The MP for Cynon Valley has become his heroine. He mentions her at every opportunity: three times in one interview this week. After the embarrassment of Carole Caplin, here is a woman who doesn't have a clue about chakras and crystals, but has gone to northern Iraq many times, at great personal risk, to uncover the facts about Saddam Hussein's regime.

Mrs Clwyd laughs. "He's forgotten that I was the first person he sacked from the front bench when he became leader of the Labour Party," she says.

The former rebel is sitting in the Pugin tearooms, overlooking the Thames. Every few minutes, another Tory or Labour MP comes across to pat her on the back. It must be strange to be feted after eight years in the wilderness. She still can't quite believe the fuss, and sits quietly, sipping lemonade.

"Eight years ago, I was a front bench spokesman on foreign affairs and, in six months, I'd never left the country. Then I got an invitation to go into northern Iraq. I was the first MP to cover the plight of the Kurdish refugees fleeing bombardment in 1991 - it's one of my great passions, I had to go.

"I was up near the border when I got a phone call saying: 'Come back immediately or you'll be sacked.' But I had to listen to these Kurds' stories, Arabs as well: Assyrians, Turkomans and Shi'as. It was right, what I did, although I do have regrets. It ruined any conventional career path."

Last week, she returned once more. "I hardly recognise the place since it became self-governing. There's now a university, a library, new schools and three women judges. It's amazing what democracy has done. The markets are full - I bought this watch for $40."

Mrs Clwyd had been invited by the Kurds to open the new genocide museum.

"I'd seen museums in Rwanda, Cambodia and on the Holocaust, but nothing prepared me for this," she says.

"The museum has been set up in the old torture centre, where thousands died. They've kept the cells with the bullet holes, and pictures drawn by children imprisoned there - images of birds and aeroplanes scratched into the walls with blood. The guards said they didn't imprison anyone younger than 11 but they forged their birth certificates."

Former prisoners showed her around. On the walls were hundreds of photographs of piles of clothing, mass graves and skulls. "Saddam's regime is like the Khmer Rouge and the Nazis; they are obsessed by documenting everything they've done. There are lots of photographs of prisoners just before they were executed, grinning at the cameras. The guards tickled them before they died to make them laugh."

The day she opened the museum it was snowing, grey and icy. "Hundreds of relatives of the dead and the victims queued up to watch and to tell me their stories. An old Kurdish woman shoved a piece of plastic at me; inside were two photographs of her husband and two missing sons. She wanted to know how they died. One old man showed me a photograph of 15 of his family. He was the only survivor. 'Why was I meant to survive?' he said."

Mrs Clwyd was asked to cut the ribbon. "I could feel my voice breaking. I've given thousands of speeches but I couldn't speak. I started walking round the room, trying to compose myself, but when a Kurdish TV cameraman asked me how I felt, I burst into tears. As I stood in that museum, I just thought: 'Why didn't we carry on to Baghdad? Why did we let this keep happening for another 12 years?' "

The next day, Mrs Clwyd says, she felt embarrassed. "The Kurds were so composed. I hadn't even suffered and I was sobbing. I went to the market with a Kurdish friend. Suddenly, all the shopkeepers were coming to offer me gifts. One explained: 'We saw you crying on TV last night. Thank you. My mother cried for the first time in 10 years when she saw you. She finally felt she could grieve for her lost husband and brother. Soon, my whole street was crying'."

She also went to the new UN refugee camp. "It's like every wretched camp in the world, only even muddier and colder than Kosovo, and as haunting as Rwanda. They have no fuel, and no possessions. Many once lived quite affluent lives in the towns. Most had less than 24 hours to flee their homes after one of Saddam's ethnic purges."

The suffering of the Kurds and Iraqis has touched her more than any other human rights issue. "As a young journalist, 25 years ago in Cardiff, I met lots of Iraqi students. They used to talk about executions and torture. I couldn't believe them, now I can't forget. As far back as 1986, I went to see William Waldegrave and David Mellor to tell them about the genocide. They said they had no proof."

Mrs Clwyd is a strange mixture. She was ousted from the front bench by Neil Kinnock for opposing nuclear weapons yet she has supported American and British intervention in Kosovo, Afghanistan and now Iraq. She was the first politician into Cambodia after Pol Pot and campaigns vociferously against human rights abuses, yet she is just as passionate about bogus cosmetic surgeons operating in Britain. It is refreshing to meet an MP who cares so intensely about causes rather than her career. With no children - just a "long-suffering husband" - she devotes her life to her campaigns.

I suspect this is why her fellow backbenchers have praised her, even if they disagree with her. The Labour MP Alice Mahon is sitting near us, drinking coffee. "She's my closest friend here," says Mrs Clwyd. "We have neighbouring offices and sit together on the backbenches. She's very anti-war but we've agreed not to discuss it because she knows I mind so much."

Anti-war protesters aren't so understanding. "They screamed traitor at me at the Welsh Labour conference. Somehow, it sounds much worse in Welsh but I held my head up," she says. "I admire Tony Blair now, he's brave. He's out on a limb, and I can tell you, that's tough."

She has met the Archbishop of Canterbury on his home territory in Wales to reason with him, and addressed the peers this week to win them round to her cause.

"Even if Saddam does give up his weapons, he isn't suddenly going to stop being a brutal, fascist dictator. Is it moral to let him remain as long as he doesn't threaten us?" she argues.

Six years ago, she set up the pressure group INDICT.

"We've been gathering evidence on victims of torture and deaths ever since. One day, we want to be able to give very specific details that will stand up in court. We've taken evidence from prisoners who've been let out of the Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad.

"One Kurd, who had been in jail for eight years, was regularly hauled up to the ceiling on a meat hook with his hands tied behind his back so his shoulders dislocated. Then he was beaten on the soles of his feet."

INDICT has received backing from President Clinton, Lady Thatcher and Tony Blair. The US Senate gave it $2 million, and it has a team of researchers in northern Iraq.

"I've sat at the UN and listened to the awful catalogue of atrocities from their inspectors.

"The UK and the US have tried several times to access opinion for a war crimes tribunal but they always come up against a brick wall with France and Russia."

For a former socialist MEP, she is remarkably rude about the French, whom she once admired. "If President Chirac wins the peace prize, I will be devastated. The French have come up with no other options. A war crimes tribunal could have been the answer - the Arab countries might have supported it. When President Milosevic was indicted while in power, it made him lose face among his people."

Her views on America also differ from those of her fellow backbenchers. "I don't think that George Bush Jnr won the election fairly but he's not an idiot. There is far too much anti-Americanism about this war. They are not the villains, they're not even over-weening and arrogant. They've listened on human rights; I've always been treated very courteously there."

INDICT, of which she is chairman, decided to bring a human rights case against Saddam for the way he treated the British Airways hostages during the Gulf war.

"We had all the evidence of how they were raped and tortured but the Attorney General kicked it into the long grass. I was told the police were too busy. But the police have got enough time to go for a Royal butler, so why not Saddam?"

The peace protesters are worried that, if there is a war, the Kurds and Iraqis could suffer even more. Mrs Clwyd admits that the Kurds are terrified.

"They have no protection against chemical weapons," she says. A group of Kurds took the Labour MP, wearing a flak jacket, to the border.

"They showed me where the Iraqi soldiers were, high in the mountains, and pointed to a mass of rockets. They were convinced the rockets had the capability for chemical warheads. The Kurds want to know why the weapons inspectors haven't gone there.

"In the marketplace, people were buying dozens of packets of nappies to wrap around themselves against a possible attack. But none of them told me they wanted to stop this war."

Mrs Clwyd says that many of the 186,000 people who have been killed by Saddam died in chemical attacks, and she has seen the results.

"I've been to the villages. One child who hid in the fields described the planes coming towards him, watching the chemical balloons descending. He was gasping for air. Anyone not killed was rounded up the next day and taken away. He was lucky, his family wasn't."

She says that the Kurdish leaders now want what most Iraqis pray for: a federal, democratic Iraq. "But like the Welsh, they also want their own TV station."

Every week, Kurdish television shows documentaries about Saddam's atrocities. "They prefer it to soaps - they don't want to forget. And I don't want the West to, either.

"I know I've been banging on for years," she says, "I sometimes bore even myself. But it will have been worth it if this war liberates these people."