The Tyrant's Son and the Reluctant Lion

Animal stories abound in Gaza. First there was the demise of the giant TV mouse Farfour, a favorite of pro-Hamas kiddies, and now there's the happy reunion of Sabrina, the lioness, with her zoo mate. This time it was Hamas to the rescue. They freed the kidnapped lioness (let's see if they do the same for captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit) after a shoot-out.

It seems the Gaza lion-nappers didn't want to give up a nice little earner --people would pay a dollar to have their photo taken beside a snarling, chained Sabrina.

This reminds me of another lion story, in Iraq. It seems that depraved tyrants like having lions roaming around. Haile Selassie did, and so did Saddam's son Uday.

One day in Baghdad I asked an Iraqi human rights activist how he got into that particularly dangerous line of work. “Through a lion,” he replied. It turned out that in Saddam's day, my friend was the owner of a big circus with girl acrobats from Uzbekistan and a lion with a prodigious roar but a shy disposition.

Uday sent some of his thugs around to the circus one day wanting to borrow the lion. He had a lioness prowling his dad's palace gardens and he wanted cubs. But the circus lion was all roar and little else. “My lion didn't perform, and Uday got very angry,” my friend recounted. “So he demanded that I give him the Uzbek acrobats for sex. I explained that they were good Muslim girls, and their fathers had entrusted them to my protection, and this was not possible. So Uday had me thrown into a sack in a corner of the palace, and people would beat and kick me every time they passed by.”

Uday grew tired of the sport and had the circus owner sent out to a jail in the middle of the desert. Without him, his circus fell apart. The acrobats returned to Uzbekistan. The circus owner was in prison for an eternity, until the Americans liberated the cells and he staggered out into the blinding desert sun, free. He tried to get his circus going, but his lion had been sent back to Malawi. He was at the UN one day, trying to retrieve his lion, and happened to tell them his story. “They had me write it down, but I said my story was nothing compared to others I'd heard in prison. And so I became a human rights activist.” In murderous Baghdad these days, it's a lot safer handling lions than human rights.

---by Tim McGirk/Jerusalem (City of lions)