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Words_Sami Abd Elbaki
I first stumbled upon the lore of Saddam Hussein watches on Pinterest while looking at photos of vintage watches for a work task. I clicked on one, and then the algorithm rewarded me with a flood of them, piquing an interest and curiosity I didn’t have only moments earlier. Although I wasn’t necessarily taken aback by the concept of merchandising the tyranny itself. Growing up in Syria, I knew Bashar Al-Assad’s face better than I knew mine. For 12 years, I would look at it, looking at me in the classroom whenever I’d drift away and zone out. He was my Mona Lisa. We had a photo of him watching over us, little six-year-olds, in every classroom and every grade. I knew his face better than I knew mine. At a point, you get used to it. You find familiarity in it, even. I vividly remember seeing t-shirts, watches, and caps with Bashar’s face on them upon “winning” his third-term referendum in 2014, which were distributed to the public in celebration.
It’s not a hot take that, throughout history, rulers have long seized image-making as an instrumental tool in the machine of propaganda and control. For China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, this was the Terracotta Army, and for Ramesses II, it was Abu Simbel; for Saddam, well, it was as many surfaces that could hold him. The Dutch researcher Florian Göttke has written about how Saddam “multiplied his body” across Iraq through his statues, extending his presence into the realm of myth. The watches follow the same logic but are much more powerful, in the sense that they can travel lighter and faster. Instead of a mural on a school wall or a face at the front of a classroom, it’s a dial on a wrist. Many Arab leaders and international ones have produced similar watches during their reign. However, in the case of the Saddam Hussein watches, it was the abundance, online engagement and even longevity that stood out.
From the mid-1970s (while Saddam was Iraq’s de facto strongman, before formally becoming president in 1979) through the 1980s, the Iraqi presidency commissioned a stream of presentation watches from the finest Swiss houses: Universal Genève, Longines, Favre-Leuba, Nivada, Eterna, Oris, Zodiac, Rolex, Patek Philippe, and Vacheron Constantin, varying in value depending on the house and who they were being gifted to. They were never sold commercially and existed purely as diplomatic gifts, handed to foreign dignitaries, ambassadors, military officers, and allies as goodwill gestures and as tools of soft political persuasion. Oftentimes, they were for other presidents, leaders and loyalists. Sometimes, for Iraqis who’d distinguished themselves internationally or domestically: athletes, delegates, high achievers, or even regular folks. When he toured the provinces and visited his people, he would hand them out as gifts too, immortalising his image everywhere he went.
Even so, there’s no documented or official number of how many watches he commissioned in his 24 years in power. It’s safe to assume it’s in the hundreds, nearing a thousand maybe. Some of these watches, like the Patek Philippe Golden Ellipse with a lapis lazuli dial, are extremely rare, as only 12 were reportedly made.
Several visual elements would go on the dial of a Saddam Hussein watch, sometimes altogether, other times not all of them: his picture, the Iraqi republican emblem, his name either in full or on a first-name basis. The images of him are the same group of ones copied onto the watches, but they vary in how he’s presented. In one, he looks quite presidential in a navy blazer; in another, he’s wearing a shemagh wrapped around his head, emoting the image of an ordinary Iraqi man, or he’s in his army attire. But in all of them he’s smiling, promoting his image as a benevolent uncle, plastering over the fact that to too many in his body politic, he was quite the opposite.
Meanwhile, some watches include an inscription: “Made from the weapons of the martyrs of Saddam’s Glorious Qadisiya,” in reference to Iraqi soldiers who died during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), which Saddam Hussein officially named “Saddam’s Qadisiyya,” commemorating the martyrs in Swiss watches.
Other watches, specifically made by Breitling, aren’t tied directly to Saddam but to the Iraqi Air Force. This tradition is not exclusive to Iraqi forces, either; Breitling has similar partnerships with air forces around the world. Norbert Schiller, a journalist who wrote a blog post called “Saddam, Breitling and Me: Collecting Watches During War Time” on Negative Colors, notes that between the early 90s and the late 90s, the price of these widely available Breitling watches jumped from $100 to hundreds of dollars to over a thousand.
“When I returned to Iraq at the beginning of May 2003 to cover yet another US assault on the country,” he writes. “Breitling Iraqi Air Force watches were very scarce, and the rare originals came with a hefty price tag. US soldiers and journalists who had heard about these watches were on the lookout, and, because of the demand, the Chinese had jumped in and dumped fake Breitlings as well as other luxury brands onto the market.”
At the time, the main interest came from international journalists and US troops who bought these watches as souvenirs when they’d leave Iraq. The recent surge, however, could be due to several factors, the opening of Iraqi souks being one of them. Several ancient markets and heritage sites in Iraq, including historic blacksmith and carpenter markets in Mosul, have been undergoing phased restoration and reopening following years of conflict and destruction by ISIS, which has allowed all of these watches to resurface despite Iraq’s strict 2005 ban on the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party, its symbols, and the promotion of its ideology remaining in place under the Iraqi Constitution. De-Ba’athification hasn’t stopped sellers in Iraq from selling these watches, because they’re seen more as antique collectables than as promotion of Ba’athist ideology. For those not willing to take the risk in person, they sell them online, either on Instagram or Facebook Marketplace and watch groups, which also have plenty of collectors. Digitising them and putting them online helps sell them, too.
You can see a version of this phenomenon in Libya, where there has been a visible revival of interest in, and nostalgia for, the era of Muammar Gaddafi. More than a decade of political fragmentation and insecurity since his overthrow led to some Libyans reminiscing over his rule.
Yehia, the founder of House of Vintage Libya, a shop that sells vintage clothing as well as watches bearing the faces of Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi, sees the objects less as political statements than as pieces of a history that is in danger of being forgotten.
“They’re part of our history that a lot of people try to erase. I want that history to live on,” he said. He remembers Libya under Gaddafi as a time when, in his words, the country was at peace, people were wealthier, the cost of living was lower, there were no power cuts, and gas was readily available.
“We can’t go back in time and change things, but we can still remember and preserve our history,” he said. “And I think the coolest things you can do that through are things you can wear, like vintage watches and T-shirts.”
All the way in Jordan, Golden Age, a 50-year-old family business specialising in royal timepieces, is the biggest in this space. With a following of over 100,000, they sell special-edition watches once owned or made for Arab leaders, presidents, and sheikhs, selling to clients especially across the GCC and internationally. The biggest demand and engagement, however, is on the Saddam Hussein watches. According to their website, their collection “holds one of the most complete private collections of authenticated Saddam Hussein–era watches, each accompanied by verified provenance.” The site’s dedicated subcategory runs to nearly 50 items, mostly watches, but also a rare presidential document written and signed by Saddam, a shoulder badge, a pen he used, and coins and banknotes.
Ahmad, grandson of Mr Mahmoud Al Asaad, who started the business, tells me, “Not every watch bearing a logo or an image is automatically a special watch, especially the more recent editions. At Golden Age, we focus on the rare pieces, which is what sets us apart in this field across the entire region. Some people receive these watches as gifts, then part with them and sell them after a while, and they end up circulating in the markets.”
One look at the comments under any Saddam Hussein watch on their account, past the hundreds asking for its price, and you can sense the nostalgia for his era, the deep appreciation and longing for him. Some ask Allah to have mercy on him. Others call him “Falcons of the Arabs,” or Sayyidi (Sir). “I’ll give you everything,” one comment reads. “And you give me this honour in return.” Another: “I swear by the Kaaba, this very watch is worth a nation.” In a painful metaphor, these watches did cost a nation.
Saddam isn’t the only Arab president of his era receiving this kind of retroactive devotion and nostalgia online. Hafez Al-Assad, Muammar Gaddafi, men who ruled their people through fear, get clipped into looping reels of anti-imperialist speeches. Under the accumulating wreckage of the present, in a region hollowed out by imperialism’s slower, more diffuse machinery, with no state or figure left standing that plausibly says no to it, that kind of selective memory starts to read like a coping mechanism. It isn’t really about Saddam, and it certainly isn’t an argument that he was good. It’s about disappointment, fear and desensitisation.
Such comments, and perhaps some buyers, represent a nostalgia for a past that never really existed and a future that never really arrived – a fantasy in which an Arab leader could once threaten American power.
So much so that they didn’t skip any chance to ridicule him. Americans, in response, built their own Saddam iconography, running in the opposite direction. During the first Gulf War, it was novelty items like “Saddam Insane” and “Wipe Out Hussein” loo rolls; by the 2003 invasion, the US Defense Intelligence Agency had gone as far as producing a deck of playing cards to help troops identify the most-wanted members of his government, with Saddam himself as the Ace of Spades. These decks are now sold on eBay.
Inevitably, the watch became a miniature battlefield. Saddam Hussein Watches, a 2004 photobook by British photographer and collector Martin Parr, spends nearly 40 pages displaying images of watches he collected in Iraq of the president. The final stretch of the book, however, features photos of U.S.-manufactured anti-Saddam watches. A bearded, captured Saddam on one dial; his head grafted onto a rat’s body in another with the words “Captured like a rat by the US Army,” an earlier piece made before his capture reading “Let’s go get the Butcher of Baghdad!” and finally, one pocket watch bearing his face, sitting inexplicably beside another one of Osama bin Laden.
Like a pendulum, the watch swings between one side inflating Saddam into myth, signalling power and luxury, and another celebrating his capture, weakness, and failure, finding yet another instrument to typecast Arabs (and their leaders) as either big, ugly Goliaths, or in this case, rats. In both cases, the watch is the medium.
Needless to say, Saddam Hussein was obsessed with his own image. After the Gulf War in 1991, sanctions imposed by the international community banned all trade with Iraq except in humanitarian circumstances. Among many hardships, this made it difficult for artists and sculptors to access materials. One way to get paint, canvas, bronze and stone was to paint pictures or make sculptures of Saddam. If the art was right, the regime would provide.
“Saddam had already multiplied his body and extended his presence throughout the country through his statues,” Göttke writes. “And by the same token, by living through the multiple living bodies of his doppelgängers, he would become more than human, he would extend his presence into the realm of myth. He would even be able to survive his own assassination.”
The statues have long since his execution been toppled, either by Iraqi citizens or, akin to his own capture, by US soldiers, manufactured as media events, staged for journalists to capture and for outlets to frame as Iraqis themselves toppling and celebrating the fall of their dictator, presented as a “success” of George W. Bush’s “mission to free the Iraqi people.”
The iconoclasm of Saddam Hussein, whether in the form of memefying his supine capture in a hiding spot today, or in toppling down any depiction of him across Iraq much to the West’s rejoicing, stems from the same self-mythologising ubiquity of his image during his reign. Saddam isn’t the first, nor is he the last, leader to propagandise his image, with his face not only omnipresent but, at worst, nostalgic and, at best, profitable.
THIS FEATURE WAS PUBLISHED IN THE 11TH EDITION OF ICON MENA PRINT MAGAZINE. ORDER YOUR COPY HERE.
