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Kurdish tailor has Saddam taped 30.11.2005
By Roger Boyes
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ONE MAN has the measure
of Saddam Hussein: 44in chest, 42in waist and
continental shoe size 45. The Kurdish tailor Recep
Cesur, who has no love for the former Iraqi
dictator, has been enjoying a huge boom in business
ever since his client went on trial in Baghdad.
Every time Saddam reaches for a pen in the inside
pocket of his pinstriped suit, the camera zooms in
on the label: Cesur.
“I calculate that we have had about $6 million of
free advertising time since the trial began,” the
35-year-old Istanbul tailor said. He has other
clients in court — Tariq Aziz, Iraq’s former foreign
minister, and Taha Jassin Ramadan, former Iraqi
vice-president. They were even better for business,
having failed to remove Cesur labels from the arms
of their suits. |
Former dictator Saddam Hussein
Photo : AFP
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Orders have flooded in from across the Middle East.
“Since the trial started, nobody has asked about the
price — people are happy to buy anything,” the
tailor said. “We could ask for double the price.” So
he did.
A handmade suit for Arab clients (mainly al-Jazeera
watchers) has risen from $200 to $400. Before the
trial began Mr Cesur was selling 12,000 suits a
year. He sells three times as many now. A Turkish
newspaper said that he has become the style guru to
the Middle East. Recep Cesur moved to Istanbul from
southeast Anatolia when he was 13 and after years of
shoe polishing and lavatory cleaning took over an
ailing clothes shop dealing with Iran. By 1996 he
was able to expand and opened his first shop in
Iraq.
One day a courtier ordered 52 suits at the Baghdad
shop. The measurements were wrong and the rich
anonymous client had plainly put on weight. So the
tailor was told to measure Saddam in person. The
order was 50 new suits every second month. The whole
Iraqi Cabinet switched to Cesur suits, as did the
Iraqi football squad.
Mr Cesur assumed that his Baghdad business was over
when the Iraq war began. But last June, 25 days
before the first hearing against Saddam, he was
summoned to Saddam’s cell and new measurements were
taken; the dictator had lost weight. Mr Cesur made
four new suits, eight shirts and two new pairs of
shoes.
Mr Cesur said that he hoped Saddam’s trial would
last, as some believe, five years. “His evil deeds
are his business, that’s why he’s in the dock,” he
said. “But the advertising, that’s what we have to
look after.”
www.timesonline.co.uk
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