By Susan Sachs
New York Times
22 November 2003.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 21 — Purging Iraq of the Baath Party, the backbone of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, has proved more difficult than many Iraqis had imagined.
In some provinces where the party's roots were deep, high-ranking party members kept their government jobs because local officials said they were afraid to make changes. In other cases, American Army commanders have intervened to keep senior Baathists on the official payroll, reasoning that firing people only feeds public resentment.
Even when there is the will to dismiss top Baathists, it has sometimes been difficult to find the way. In the chaotic weeks following the old government's collapse, computer records in many ministries were stealthily altered to effectively demote thousands of once privileged party bosses, said officials of Iraq's interim government.
"A lot of Baath Party members changed their ranks in the files during April and May, when the institutions of the state were empty," said the new minister of finance, Kamel al-Keilani, who is the paymaster of the huge public sector. "You'd think the only active Baathist was Saddam Hussein and all the rest were low-ranking nobodies."
The Baath Party's tentacles stretched to every university, school, ministry, hospital and city hall. Members benefited from preferential treatment in work and education, salary bonuses and a license to humiliate others, according to Iraqis who lived under its rule.
But membership was also a social passport, they say, a requirement for some positions as well as a means to demonstrate allegiance to a rule that severely punished disloyalty. When L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the American occupation authority, outlawed the party in May, some 2.5 million people, out of a total population of 25 million, were believed to be Baath Party members.
No one proposed firing all of them, but Mr. Bremer and the Iraqi Governing Council did decree that Baathists in the top three ranks of the party, an estimated 120,000 people, be removed from their government jobs. The council's resolution was issued in September. Two weeks ago, Mr. Bremer set out a procedure for investigating senior party officials, noting that, "the Iraqi people have suffered large-scale human rights abuses and deprivations over many years at the hands of the Baath Party."
But even the most adamant advocates of a purge now say that time, economics and pragmatic considerations have moderated their ambitions.
"We had hoped there would be a radical shake-up but as time has gone on, prudence has taken over," said Ali Alawi, the new trade minister and a former political exile who spent years polishing a plan to de-Baathify Iraq once Saddam Hussein was gone. "In the context of this country and its various upheavals, one has to be careful."
A good example of those reduced expectations is Mosul, Iraq's second largest city and the base of the 82nd Airborne Division, which controls the northern swath of the country.
The capital of Nineveh Province, Mosul is home to thousands of once senior party members, including 1,100 former Iraqi Army officers with the rank of brigadier general and above, according to the American military. At its university, 120 professors and other workers held high ranks in the party. In its public school system, 937 employees had climbed to Baath's top positions.
"Do you throw 900 teachers out of work and tell them they can never work in their field again, and then not expect them to turn against you?" asked Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the division commander.
Throwing people of authority and expertise onto the street, he said, would negate the mission of the occupation forces to subdue resistance and win friends. "To beat this you can't just kill the bad guys," the general added. "You've got to give people jobs."
At the crowded offices of the provincial education department, the new director general, Said Hamed, was more ambivalent but powerless to buck the American commander.
Mr. Hamed has worked for the school system for 22 years. He never joined the Baath Party, a choice that he said left him with a salary half that of subordinates who did join.
Senior party members in the system include teachers, schoolmasters and high-level bureaucrats. Mr. Hamed has no sympathy for them.
"They didn't get their jobs based on qualifications, but on their political activities," he said.
But it fell to Mr. Hamed to enforce the orders from the Governing Council and Mr. Bremer in Baghdad. Faced with firing 937 people and incurring the displeasure of the American commander, he said he had decided to demote the senior Baathists but keep them on the payroll.
"They know they made a mistake and they say that now all they want to do is provide for their families," he said. "Of course, they didn't care in the old days about other people's families. But now we are letting them work because we do care about their families — and we worry about what might happen to us. It's to avoid troubles."
The governor of Nineveh Province, a former Iraqi Army general who fell out of favor with Saddam Hussein 10 years ago, expressed similar misgivings.
"This just shouldn't hang in the air," said the governor, Ghanem al-Basso. "If they aren't taken care of, they could join the ranks of the enemies."
General Petraeus, who set up his base in a huge stone palace built by Mr. Hussein on a hill north of Mosul, has tried to take care of the problem in his own way. He created job programs for many of the people who were fired by Mr. Bremer and the council in their efforts to rid Iraq of its old security apparatus, centered on the army, the secret police and the Information Ministry. He strongly encouraged the University of Mosul to sort through the cases of professors who were high-level Baathists and was pleased when the school gave 65 percent of them a reprieve.
"I'm not saying that all these people by any means should be kept, but if you are going to tell people that they're never going to work again, you might as well throw them in jail," General Petreaus told Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Governing Council's de-Baathification committee, last week.
Mr. Chalabi was less than sympathetic. "At least they can eat there," he said.
"You've made an enemy of their whole family, though," said the general. "If you could only see the record of the Baath Party," Mr. Chalabi replied. "People need to see justice done."
"Keep them on the job and you watch them, then," the general told him. "If they are anti-new Iraq, then you throw them in jail."
Most officials, whether they are eager to fire top Baathists or reluctant, said the ideal process would examine each individual, case by case, to sort out those members of the party elite who did harm and those who did not.
It would be a Herculean effort, said Mr. Alawi, the trade minister.
"Obviously those people who are in the top ranks must go," he said. "But the Baath has percolated so far into the structure of society that it's difficult to isolate. It's like pouring coffee into a sponge. It becomes intermingled."
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Citation: Susan Sachs, "Baathists, Once Reviled, Prove Difficult to Remove," New York Times, 22 November 2003.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/22/international/middleeast/22BAAT.html?ei=1&en=e6d0b3ad5f16231f&ex=1070516892&pagewanted=print&position=
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