‘Baghdad International Exhibition for Military Production’.
Part 2.
You know how it is. You see something but you don’t really take it in. Something is happening, you look, you see, but perhaps its only for a fleeting moment. Thats how it was with me.
The stands were built, most of the exhibits were in place. The airfreight had been collected from the airport. Tomorrow the exhibition would be declared open. I was standing outside the British Pavillion with the commercial secretary from the embassy. Although he and the military attache were keeping things low key I still saw a lot of them. We were just chatting about nothing in particular when we heard muffled explosions in the distance. Not to loud but it was something out of the ordinary. We looked in the direction of the explosions and saw white puffs of smoke in the sky. It went on for three or four minutes, maybe longer. Then it stopped. We looked at one another, kinda shrugged our shoulders and carried on as before.
It wasn’t until next day that I heard what had happened. I have in my last post mentioned that the old airport situated in the north west suburbs of Baghdad was hosting the aircraft and other large military items that couldn’t be accommodated in the fairground. But it wasn’t all about displaying military equipment. Some other friendly arab states had been invited to attend with some of there own hardware. One of the friendly states was Egypt who sent some of their fighter aircraft to the show. However, the airfield being used was in the suburbs and the flight paths came very close to some of the Iraqi ministries. A couple of days before an aircraft coming in to land didn’t follow the very precise flight path and flew over one of the ministry buildings. Now there were ack ack guns protecting these building but none of them took any action so some Iraqi bigwig officer decided they needed to be taught a lesson. Most of the poor Iraqi’s manning the guns were arrested and thrown in Abu Greib prison whilst some of the officers, so the story goes, were executed. It seems what the commercial secretary and I saw was an attack on another aircraft which, like the one a day or so before, was not following the flight plan and had strayed near the ministry buildings. Of course the poor Iraqis manning the guns didn’t want to end up in prison or face execution so all the guns started blazing away. Unfortunately, the aircraft belonged to the Egyptian Air Force and Egypt was a staunch supporter of Iraq but by pure luck the ack ack boys managed to hit it. The pilot was injured but managed to eject from his stricken aircraft which then proceeded to spiral down to earth where it crashed on top of a minibus transporting Yugoslav workers killing a number of them. It didn’t take long for the Iraqi’s to realise they had a major diplomatic incident on their hands and the first thing they did was scoop up the pilot and rush him off to the Irish ‘Park Group’ hospital where he was patched up by the lovely Irish nurses. I don’t think the nurses could do much for the Yugo workers though as they were too far gone to be resuscitated.
The exhibition was dubbed a success by the Iraqis and the British Group seemed pleased to have participated but as most business negotiations happened behind closed doors nobody made any startling disclosures. Everything was hush hush. BAE or as it was then British Aerospace had high hopes of selling its Hawk jet trainers and it looked like a done deal but politics came into it and later Maggie stepped in and vetoed the deal.
Matrix Churchill, who of course were largely Iraqi owned, continued as before selling their machine tools into the Iraqi market but they were used only for peaceful purposes. What a load of balls that was. They had a large contingent of UK workers in Baghdad looking after the machines. All these men were sworn to secrecy and told not to discuss company business but that didn’t stop them informing us that the machines were turning out round casings that fitted into tubes or hinted that they made loud noises if you hit a cap on the end. Of course we all knew they were turning out artillery shells by the thousand every day. I had to laugh when a few years later the ‘Scott Enquirey’ was set up in 93 to look at the arms to Iraq story. A statement was made by, I think Maggie, that ‘our intelligence failed to pick up warnings that Matrix Churchill machine tools were going to Iraq munitions factories’. They didn’t know!!! Every ex pat and visitor to Iraq knew. Paul Henderson, Matrix Churchill’s managing director knew and he worked for MI6 for eleven years!!! But our intelligence services didn’t know. Hmmm. Worrying aint it. Lets hope they’ve improved.
For Promotor it was also a successful exhibition. Another one to add to the list. Time passed and the Iraq/Iran war ended. Hussein Kamel al-Majid the Iraqi tasked with setting up the exhibition and his brother Saddam Kamel, both married to Saddam Hussein’s daughters fled Iraq seeking sanctuary in Jordan. Later they were talked into returning home where they were forced to divorce their wives and three days after their return were murdered by, allegedly, their relatives in the Majid clan for dishonouring the family name.
Promotor moved on and the ‘Baghdad International Exhibition for Military Production’ was forgotten about until the ‘Scott Enquiry’ raised its ugly head. Newspapers started to make enquiries and soon found out we were the organisers of the British Group. We had many calls from both the newspapers and also the BBC Panorama team. What they were after of course was proof that the British Government was backing the participants and that the Embassy in Baghdad were involved. Rest assured they got nothing from us.
