Iraq's Nizar Hamdoon

People who go into politics are likely to be friendly, hard driving, self-confident and adventuresome. Iraqi Ambassador Nizar Hamdoon is all of those things at age 41, but as he was growing up, the emphasis was on adventure. When he joined the Arab Renaissance (Ba'ath) Party at the age of 15, it was a clandestine, Pan-Arab movement whose members were being hunted down by the agents of Iraq's left-leaning strongman, Abdul Karim Qassim.

The young student at an American Jesuit-founded high school nevertheless spent his spare time distributing leaflets for his party, which was growing rapidly among Iraqi intellectuals, students and the middle class, and carrying messages from one secret cell to another.

"It was very dangerous," he says, sitting in his spacious office in one of the most beautiful old embassy buildings in Washington. "Many of my friends were caught and beaten. But I was lucky."

The Ba'ath Party overthrew the Qassim government in 1963, and Hamdoon concentrated on his studies at Baghdad University. But not for long. The Ba'ath itself was overthrown less than a year later and once again the young student mixed political activity with his university classes.

When the Ba'ath returned to power in 1968 Nizar Hamdoon was qualified, both in terms of a university degree in architecture and extensive experience in party activities, for a rise up the ladder of government jobs which took him eventually to the Ba'ath Party Central Command. He put his architectural knowledge to work when, as the Ministry of Information's Director of Cultural Affairs, he supervised the restoration and preservation of historical sites in Iraq.

Ancient Culture and Modern Diplomacy

The first cities in the world were built in Southern Iraq by the mysterious Sumerians, who also developed cuneiform, mankind's first writing system. Abraham set out from Ur in Iraq to become the Patriarch-Prophet of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Alexander the Great made Iraq the base from which he tried to create the first world empire, linking Europe and the Orient. When the Arabs succeeded where Alexander had failed by building an empire which extended from Morocco to India, it was ruled during the Abbasid era from Iraq. Preservation of more than 8,000 historic sites remaining from Iraq's more than 10,000 years of continuous recorded human occupation since the end of the ice age was part of Nizar Hamdoon's government responsibilities.

When he came to Washington two years ago, however, it was to restore an entirely different historic entity. The U.S. and Iraq once had close ties, but they began to unravel after the creation of Israel and the Qassim revolution. During the Arab-Israeli war of June, 1967, Iraq broke diplomatic relations entirely. By the time Nizar Hamdoon arrived in the U.S. in 1983, however, the political climate was warming. He had the ticklish mission of negotiating a formal renewal of diplomatic ties, which meant clearing away a thicket of financial claims each country had against the other. The task was completed in a year and Nizar Hamdoon became Iraq's Ambassador in Washington. "Before and after relations were renewed, the work has remained the same," he says wryly. "I spend my days talking and listening to people, and my nights and weekends doing the same." Office work occupies whatever spare time he finds for it, seven days a week and far into the night.

Until the birth of their first child a year ago, his wife, Sahar, frequently accompanied him on speaking trips around the U.S. Now Ula, their American-born daughter, keeps Mrs. Hamdoon close to Washington where she oversees a heavy schedule of entertaining.

Guest lists show just how political an Ambassador's work can be. Iraq, always a prominent supporter of the Palestinians, has been strongly criticized by U.S. partisans of Israel over the years. Ambassador Hamdoon has set out to cultivate those critics, particularly Jewish members of the U.S. foreign affairs and media establishments. He knows that whether or not he changes minds, Iraq's viewpoint has seldom been presented clearly to Americans in the many years of glacial U.S.-Iraqi relations. At the moment, of course, he is most concerned with the Iraq-Iran war, and with stability in the Gulf area.

"The U.S. now realizes that if Iraq were not there, the other Arab oil producers could not withstand the pressures," Ambassador Hamdoon says. "As a result, except for the Arab-Israeli problem, we get a very positive response in the U.S. Americans realize it is Iraq which is calling for peace in the Gulf, and that the U.S. interest is for stability and security there."

He has been personally successful in alerting the U.S. to illegal sales of American weapons to Iran, both by Israel and other U.S. allies and by American citizens falsifying export documents. The U.S. is cracking down on both categories.

That, as well as increasing U.S. exports to and oil imports from Iraq, and the presence at U.S. universities of 1,600 Iraqi students, indicate that people are listening to Ambassador Hamdoon, and beginning to hope, with him, that the ice age in U.S. Iraqi relations has ended, and the warming trend is here to stay.

—Richard Curtiss