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From Dictatorship To Democracy
Hamid al-Bayati
An Insider's Account of the Iraqi Opposition to Saddam
University of Pennsylvania Press
January 2011
On Sale: December 29, 2010
304 pages
ISBN: 0812242882
EAN: 9780812242881
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
Today, Hamid al-Bayati serves as Iraqi ambassador to the
United Nations. But for many years he lived in exile in
London, where he worked with other opponents of Saddam
Hussein's regime to make a democratic and pluralistic Iraq a
reality. As former Western spokesman for the Supreme Council
for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and as a member
of the executive council of the Iraqi National Congress, two
of the main groups opposing Saddam's regime, he led
campaigns to alert the world to human rights violations in
Iraq and win support from the international community for
the removal of Saddam. An important Iraqi diplomat and member of Iraq's majority
Shia community, he offers firsthand accounts of the meetings
and discussions he and other Iraqi opponents to Saddam held
with American and British diplomats from 1991 to 2004. Drawn
from al-Bayati's personal archives of meeting minutes and
correspondence, From Dictatorship to Democracy takes readers
through the history of the opposition. We learn the views and actions of principal figures, such as
SCIRI head Sayyid Mohammed Baqir Al-Hakeem and the other
leaders of the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmed Chalabi and
his Kurdish counterparts, Masound Barzani and Jalal
Talabani. Al-Bayati vividly captures their struggle to unify
in the face of not only Saddam's harsh and bloody repression
but also an unresponsive and unmotivated international
community. Al-Bayati's efforts in the months before and
after the U.S. invasion also put him in direct contact with
key U.S. figures such as Zalmay Khalilzad and L. Paul Bremer
and at the center of the debates over returning Iraq to
self-government quickly and creating the foundation for a
secure and stable state. Al-Bayati was both eyewitness to and actor in the dramatic
struggle to remove Saddam from power. In this unique
historical document, he provides detailed recollections of
his work on behalf of a democratic Iraq that reflect the
hopes and frustrations of the Iraqi people.
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