DUBAI, Nov 12: Uday Saddam Hussein, elder son of the West’s favourite bogeyman, returned to centre stage on Tuesday with the first serious suggestion that Iraq will finally agree to tough new disaramement terms.

The measured call came in a working document distributed in the National Assembly to which he was elected in 2000, completing a transformation from feared wild child to elected politician.

The tall, bearded 37-year-old has assumed a lower profile and sought to add gravitas to his image since his election to office in a Baghdad constituency on a ruling Baath party ticket.

The metamorphosis appears to have started after he was left for dead on a Baghdad street when unknown attackers riddled his body with bullets in Dec 1996.

It took months of operations before Uday finally recovered the use of his legs. Three years after the assassination bid, Iraqi television provided proof of his rehabilitation showing Uday swimming in the cold Tigris river.

One of his aides said that the new Uday, who still limps, was more “reflective and mature”.

Today Iraqi television puts out repeated footage of Uday receiving foreign dignitaries in his luxurius office, and awarding medals to volunteers of Saddam’s Fedayeen, a paramilitary force which he both set up and heads.

When he voted in last month’s referendum which returned Saddam to office, he alighted from a red Rolls Royce sporting a white suit and had a six-year-old boy vote for him before rewarding him lavishly.

His 300-page political science doctorate, published as a supplement by his Babel newspaper in 1998, argued that the United States would lose world dominance in the 21st century, sharing superpowerdom with Japan, the European Union and China.

Uday has effectively translated the natural, even brute power he inherited from his father into an unrivalled trading and media empire.—AFP