"I suppose I can just about bear to watch the “inspections” pantomime a second time. But what I cannot bear is the sight of French and Russian diplomats posing and smirking with Naji Sabry, Iraq’s foreign minister, or with Tariq Aziz. I used to know Naji and I know that two of his brothers, Mohammed and Shukri, were imprisoned and tortured by Saddam Hussein–in Mohammed’s case, tortured to death. The son of Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz was sentenced to twenty-two years of imprisonment last year; he has since been released and rearrested and released again, partly no doubt to show who is in charge. Another former friend of mine, Mazen Zahawi, was Saddam Hussein’s interpreter until shortly after the Gulf War, when he was foully murdered and then denounced as a homosexual. I have known many regimes where stories of murder and disappearance are the common talk among the opposition; the Iraqi despotism is salient in that such horrors are also routine among its functionaries. Saddam Hussein likes to use as envoys the men he has morally destroyed; men who are sick with fear and humiliation, and whose families are hostages."
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Christopher Hitchens, "Taking Sides," 26 September 2002, The Nation
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tariq_Aziz
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Tariq Aziz
1979 – 2003
Tariq Aziz (April 28, 1936 - June 5, 2015) was Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister (1979–2003) and Minister of Foreign Affairs (Iraq) (1983–1991) and a close advisor of President Saddam Hussein. Their association began in the 1950s when both were activists for the then-banned Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party. An ethnic Assyrian, he was both an Arab nationalist and a member of the Chaldean Catholic Church. He was sentenced to death by the Iraqi High Tribunal on October 26, 2010 for persecuting Islamic Parties
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