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A Channel Four Farce?

The Iraq Solidarity Campaign, Iraq Solidarity News (Al-Thawra) | 09.05.2007 17:01 | Anti-racism | Iraq | Repression

In what appears to be a throw back to the black-and-white minstrel shows, where playing the "natives", people would blacken their faces and dance around on stage to "entertain" their audience, it appears that the British station Channel Four may be following suite.




On Thursday 10th May, "Saddams Tribe", a new televised "docudrama" is going to be aired with a one-off production, which according to TV Choice magazine is aiming to "recreate life within his palaces".

Based on "extensive research", with alleged early "consultation" with Saddams daughter Raghad Hussein, according to the magazine Saddams Tribe will also include the story of the "vicious power struggle" between Hassan Kamel and Saddams son Uday.

The show is apparently going to look at the last ten years of Saddam’s rule, with the audience being treated to "documentary footage, helping to remind viewers of the dictators actions and how they affected the world, as well as those around him."

The cast of Saddam’s Tribe, is an interesting bunch of British actors, with Saddam Hussain being played by Stanley Townsend, a star in the BBC's horse racing drama Rough Diamond, with Raghad Hussein being played by an actress called Michelle Bonnard.

Hassan Kamel is being played by a former "Judas", Zubin Varla who appeared in a 1996 London revival of Jesus Christ Superstar with Daniel Mays playing the role of Uday. According to the website of the Royal Acadamy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) Daniel Mays has special skills in "golf, football and tennis", along with "Electric guitar" and "Robotic dancing."

According to the soon-to-be Saddam, Stanley Townsend, playing the former Iraqi president "felt like an opportunity of a life time" with his dressing room having "video footage constantly playing of Saddam."

Townsend also had "a whole series of pictures", plastered on the dressing room walls and opted to describe walking into his dressing room "like going into the Saddam zone." He also admitted that "it was extraordinary being dressed and made-up to look like him".

Stanley "Saddam" Townsend thinks that "viewers will be compelled" by British actors in fancy dress and thinks that people will "want to see how it all plays out." He also says that playing Saddam being captured and paraded around by the illegal immigrant US forces, "was so powerful to re-enact."

As this "docudrama" is apparently going to examine the past ten years of Saddams rule, only curiosity can ask if Channel Four will include the systematic genocide of the 1.5 million who died, within those "ten years", as a direct result of UN imposed Sanctions, which were put in place on Hiroshima Day 1990.

Andy Kershaw of the Independent asked the US and UK in 2001, how they expected Saddam Hussain, "to wage war with beef broth?" Did the Sanctions Committee "661 expect him to turn on the Kurds again by spraying them with malt extract? Or send his presidential guard back into Kuwait armed to the teeth with pencils?"

The US based International Action Centre also reported in the mid 1990’s, that other items refused entry into Iraq, as a result of Sanctions included; "batteries, X-ray machines, ambulances because they could be used in battles, computers and even enriched powdered milk, which supposedly could be used in germ warfare."

Even UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy, reported that sanctions contributed to the deaths of half a million children between 1991 and 1998, with the World Food Programme and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation estimating in the year 2000 that "..at least 800,000 children under the age of five were "Chronically malnourished" inside of Iraq.

It must also be queried if the production team of Saddam’s Tribe, are going to be brave enough and acknowledge that the WMD claim, was brought to both the British and Americans attention by Ahmed Chalabi, a convicted embezzler in the central criminal court in Amman, Jordan and sentenced to 24 years hard labour in abstentia.

Few could be accused of sceptism, that in the UK where a government actually lied to invade a country and Channel Four, a media station which has also recently been in a race relation uproar, where an Indian contestant on the tacky "Big Brother" show, was referred to as a "popadom", that it wouldn’t come as a shock if Saddam’s Tribe didn’t include the fact that, "it was possible as early as 1997 to determine that, from a qualitative standpoint, Iraq had been disarmed." Said Scott Ritter, the former Chief United Nations weapons Inspector to Iraq.



The Iraq Solidarity Campaign, Iraq Solidarity News (Al-Thawra)
- e-mail: iraq_campaign@yahoo.co.uk
- Homepage: http://www.iraqsolidaritycampaign.blogspot.com

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