Reuters, 06 August 2006
BAGHDAD - Almost 10,000 Iraqis purged from their jobs in the de-Baathification programme after the U.S.-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein have been reinstated, the Iraqi government said on Sunday.
"About 8,000 members of the ministries of interior and defence have got their jobs back, along with 1,800 people from the Ministry of Information," said Rashid Najeb Saleh.
He heads the Agency for Dissolved Entities, an agency set up by the government in 2005 to assist workers displaced by the controversial programme to purge the civil service of former Saddam loyalists.
It was set up last year to aid national reconciliation between the country's rival sects and Saleh was addressing a news briefing to report on progress to date.
"There are 700,000 who were deprived of their rights, 350,000 to 400,000 who are from the army ... Next week we will return 650 members to government establishments," he said.
Critics say de-Baathification, together with the disbanding of the Iraqi army, fed the ranks of the insurgency by denying thousands of people the means to make a living or to have a sense of a stake in the new Iraq.
Overall, about 2.5 million people belonged to Saddam's Baath party. For many, membership was a way of securing work rather than a hardline commitment to Baathism and Saddam's regime.
Under de-Baathification, U.S. administrators decreed that the top three tiers of party membership could not be employed by the new government.
Just how many people lost their jobs is unclear, but Robert Looney, a professor at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in California, estimated it was at least 120,000 in a 2004 study.
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Citation: "Iraqi government reinstates workers purged after war," Reuters, 06 August 2006.
Original URL: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L06743859.htm
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