By John F. Burns and Ian Fisher
New York Times
03 May 2004
To American officers who chose him, Gen. Amer Bakr al-Hashimi had one overriding qualification for his recent appointment as commander of Iraq's new army: Among 11,000 generals under Saddam Hussein, he was one of a handful who had refused to join Mr. Hussein's Baath party.
But during a meeting with other former Iraqi generals this past week, when General Hashimi was asked by a reporter what he thought of having served under Mr. Hussein, he responded: "I feel proud."
The fact that the man named by the Americans to head the new army would not distance himself from Mr. Hussein indicates how far things have moved in the past month. Confronted by uprisings in Falluja and Najaf, and a surge of anti-American violence elsewhere, the American occupation authority has cast about urgently for new ways of stabilizing the country before matters spin out of control, the nightmare of many senior American officials here.
Along the way, L. Paul Bremer III, the chief of the occupation authority, has revised policies that had seemed all but immutable as long as Iraq was bumping along, unsteadily but still surely, toward the transfer of sovereignty on June 30.
Like a storm-tossed ship's master calling all hands, he has reached out to members of the old government, holding out the prospect of return to thousands of former officials and Baath Party members.
On Friday, the change in tone was on dramatic public display when another former general in Mr. Hussein's army, Jasim Muhammad Saleh, strode through the streets of Falluja in his old Iraqi uniform as the head of a new force of 1,000 former Iraqi soldiers assigned to quell the anti-American insurgency there.
While troublesome questions have since been raised about General Saleh's past links with Mr. Hussein's fearsome Iraqi Republican Guard that could lead to his removal, the force he is leading will still take over for the marines, who would prefer Iraqis to confront Iraqis and thus avoid stirring deeper anger against the occupation.
The purpose of this change, American officials say, is twofold. First, it is meant to help restabilize the country by inviting some of its most educated and qualified professionals to reclaim their old jobs, and ultimately help rebuild Iraq. It is also intended to reverse the precipitous erosion of American popularity here, by gaining the backing of a constituency — stalwarts of Mr. Hussein's old bureaucracy — who have been embittered by their outcast status since the American-led invasion last year.
But the shift risks alienating Iraq's majority population of Shiite Muslims, oppressed by Mr. Hussein's Sunni-dominated government and now widely more supportive than Sunnis of American efforts here. Some moderate Shiites have tentatively endorsed the changes in the name of stability and reconciliation. But in a Friday sermon in the Shiite southern city of Basra, one cleric freighted his criticism with a threat — not easily ignored in a country that has seen scores of revenge killings of former Baathists.
"This is a warning to all Baathists not to be tricked by the decision of Bremer and his support for you to return to the streets or to your jobs," said the cleric, Abdulsattar al-Bahadli, a follower of the rebel Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
Mr. Sadr, now America's most wanted man in Iraq, watchful for any issue on which to build popular passions against the Americans, delivered his own sermon on Friday saying that Mr. Bremer's changes were aimed at "humiliating the Iraqis."
Mr. Bremer and his aides deny any policy reversal, saying the strict "de-Baathification" rules for weeding out the guiltiest of Mr. Hussein's subordinates remain firmly in place.
They cite the choice of General Hashimi as army commander — whatever he may say of Mr. Hussein now — as a prime example. When he first met American officers, as a candidate for appointment to Baghdad's City Council last year, the officers told him they did not believe that a major-general in the old army could have escaped becoming a Baath Party member.
He promptly fetched the scroll given him on his retirement as a specialist on infantry tactics at a Baghdad war college. In the space giving his political affiliation, it stated "Independent." That, and his effectiveness on the City Council, "getting things done," American officers said, made him an obvious choice to head the new army.
Mr. Bremer and his officials insist that the changes they have made are procedural, primarily to accelerate backlogged appeals by former Baathists disqualified for jobs.
Still, the changes have been viewed among ordinary Iraqis as a major rollback. Already, the changes have cleared the way for more than 10,000 former teachers and professors who had belonged to the Baath Party to return to work. Now, the Americans are recruiting between 1,000 and 2,000 military officers to stiffen a new Iraqi Army that failed at its first test, when a battalion of several hundred men refused American orders to fight at Falluja.
The issue behind de-Baathification, and now, its modification, is complicated, addressed in similar moments in history in different ways. Essentially, it is finding a fine balance between punishing the guilty and moving a defeated country forward. Nazis were prevented from returning to their jobs in postwar Germany, but some helped rebuild the country years later after their cases had been reviewed. Communist Party members still hold high posts in Russia, Poland and Hungary, among other former Eastern Bloc countries, and South Africa offered broad forgiveness to former apartheid regime officials.
Still, many Iraqis, Shiites mainly, see no ground for forgiveness toward members of Mr. Hussein's regime so soon after the fall of a system that sent hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to miserable deaths.
One of the most bitter reactions came from Ahmad Chalabi, a secular Shiite and the most prominent of the Iraqi exiles who returned after Mr. Hussein's fall, who was appointed by Mr. Bremer in December to oversee de-Baathification.
Mr. Chalabi drew an analogy with postwar Germany. "This is like allowing Nazis into the German government immediately after World War II," Mr. Chalabi said in a Reuters report last week after Mr. Bremer made a national address in which he told Iraqis about the changes regarding the teachers and army officers.
Mr. Chalabi could not be reached for comment for this article, although some of his aides suggested that his approach to Mr. Bremer's changes might not be as stark as his initial comments had suggested.
In some ways, the issue has turned around a struggle between Mr. Bremer and Mr. Chalabi, who has gone from being the Pentagon's favorite to lead the first post-Hussein government of Iraq to a harsh critic of the Americans as his own political fortunes have faltered. As one of his first acts after arriving in Baghdad last May, Mr. Bremer barred any formerly high-ranking Baathist from employment in any government job. He said recently that his intention was to disqualify no more than 20,000 of the 2 million party members, men and women of high enough rank to be held responsible, at least in a moral sense, for the worst abuses under Mr. Hussein.
But by midwinter, after Mr. Chalabi had taken over responsibility for the process, a behind-the-scenes struggle broke out. Under Mr. Bremer's rules, teachers and others suspended from their jobs could appeal; but at least 10,000 teachers found their appeals blocked, or endlessly deferred. It was not until late March that Mr. Bremer intervened, ordering Mr. Chalabi to curb what senior American officials called "overzealousness" in the post-Saddam purge.
The teachers quickly became the focal point of the dispute, amid reports reaching Baghdad of schools rebuilt with American money that could not operate or suffered overcrowding because of a teacher shortage. But even as the occupation authority began moving to speed the teachers' appeals, the entire program came under review again, this time because of the chaos that had threatened the country after the insurgent uprisings in Falluja, Najaf and elsewhere.
This time, in effect, a new standard was introduced: Where the de-Baathification procedures had been previously applied stringently, centering on an individual's party rank and ability to prove innocence of rights abuses, the new approach has given priority to an individual's skills. Although Mr. Bremer's aides have insisted that the changes are merely "technical," the results, in the past two weeks, have suggested that something much more fundamental is under way.
A senior American officer who led the search for the new army commander suggested something of the new approach at the meeting last Thursday when General Hashimi met with other former officers of Mr. Hussein's army. The meeting quickly became a clamor of demands from the officers to get their jobs back, with one officer after another protesting the injustice done to them. Several said they were destitute.
With 300,000 officers and noncommissioned officers in the old army, few officers at the meeting are likely to be rehired. But in making those choices, the American officer suggested, the priority would be military proficiency, not pro-American or anti-Hussein feelings. When asked if the new army would recruit officers who fought Americans in Kuwait in 1991 — or in the invasion last year — the American officer, a 1991 war veteran, was blunt. "I don't care if they fought against us, as long as they didn't rape any villages," he said. "Our philosophy is simple: We need the best men; if we don't get the right people, everything else is irrelevant."
Shiites, disunited on this issue as on many others, have reacted to Mr. Bremer's course change in complex ways that reflect the underlying battle over Iraq's past — and over who will lead the country going forward. While the militant Mr. Sadr and his followers have reacted virulently, more moderate groups have presented more layered messages. Moderate Shiites, generally, seem ready to accept at least some degree of "re-Baathification" as the price for moving away from the current instability and back towards the political path mapped out by the Americans.
That path — sovereignty in 60 days, elections for a transitional government by the end of year, a permanent, elected government by January 2006 — is seen by many Shiites as the most likely solution for ensuring their future pre-eminence in Iraq, where they account for 60 percent of the 25 million population. A descent into chaos, many fear, would risk splitting Shiites and opening the way for the more cohesive Sunni minority to once more claim power, as they have in Iraq for generations.
Adnan al-Asadi, a leader of the Dawa Islamic Party, among the groups repressed by Mr. Hussein, said his group endorsed Mr. Bremer's changes — again with the caution that the most guilty not return to power. "We want to make the country one and united, not divided," he said. "That should include Baathists who did not hurt people."
But the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the most powerful Shiite group, has sent mixed signals. An influential council cleric denounced the changes in a widely broadcast Friday sermon from Najaf. But the cleric, Sheik Jalal al-Den al-Sagir, said that reversing those changes could wait for another day, "when Iraqis take over the country." In the meantime, he said, "We said to Bremer, `This is wrong. This is a mistake,' " he said. "But now he is doing what he thinks is suitable for the country."
For many highly qualified Sunnis hurt by de-Baathification, the new approach offers hope. Dr. Abdul Haleem al-Hajaj, who was the former secretary general of the nation's Academy of Sciences, and his wife, Dr. Nawa Ibrahim al-Gaban, a pediatrician and medical school lecturer, lost their jobs last year because they were Baath party members and have been contemplating emigration to the United Arab Emirates to start new lives.
"What relation do I have to mass graves?" Dr. Gaban asked. "Did I kill anyone? I am a pediatrician." She added, "I did everything that was good for this country — and they kicked me out on the street after 27 years of teaching."
But Dr. Gaban said Mr. Bremer's new rules on teachers and university professors mean she may regain her job. Her husband, who held several high positions, is less confident about himself but says a loosening of de-Baathification rules is necessary if Iraq's reconstruction is to succeed. "There is a big intellectual potential in Iraq," he said. "It is not just an opportunity to take this potential and use it. It is the duty of any reasonable men that will rule this country."
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Citation: John F. Burns and Ian Fisher, "U.S., Seeking to Stabilize Iraq, Casts Baathists in Lead Roles," New York Times, 3 May 2004.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/03/international/middleeast/03BAAT.html?pagewanted=print&position=
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