Reversal of ‘De-Baathification’ Proves Divisive

Smart, stylish and secular, graphic designer Eman Haisi might have been a natural ally in the U.S.-led coalition’s plan to transform Iraq from dictatorship to democracy.

But Haisi had one major blotch on her resume: a decision 28 years ago -- at the age of 15 -- to join Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, then considered the smoothest path to higher education and a successful career.

During the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, American officials seemed bent on eviscerating Hussein’s political network, firing tens of thousands of Baathists. Haisi lost her job at Baghdad University’s College of Fine Arts and was suspended from a graduate program in graphic arts.

With the June 28 transfer of power to an interim government, people such as Haisi have new hope that their careers and shattered lives will be restored.

Since taking office last month, interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, himself a former Baathist who split with Hussein decades ago and went into exile, has moved to undo what he and others say was the United States’ overly harsh action in firing party members. They have formed review committees within ministries and begun rehiring people fired by U.S. officials. The new government says it needs some former Baathists to help rebuild the country.

The reversal of the U.S.-sponsored program known as de-Baathification has so far been painful, divisive and inconsistent. Shiite Muslims and Kurds who suffered at the hands of Hussein’s Sunni Muslim-dominated leadership still blame the party for discriminating against them. Unemployed Iraqis resent that the government makes monthly payments to former Baathists -- demobilized Iraqi army officers, many of them sympathetic to the insurgency.

But Baathists such as Haisi, who is still without a job, say they should not be punished. They say they were mere subordinates in a party dominated by Hussein’s inner circle.

Saif Rahman, chief of staff to the minister for industry and mining, agrees.

“There were 6 million Iraqis somehow associated with the Baath Party. They weren’t all criminals,” Rahman said.

His boss, Hachim Hassani, said the number of Hussein cronies repressing the rest of the country was no more than a few hundred.

Education Minister Sami Mudhaffar, who has already reinstated 4,000 of 11,000 sacked teachers, said: “Most people in the party were forced to become Baathists. They joined against their will in order to get the benefits of membership.”

De-Baathification was a task assigned by U.S. civilian administrator L. Paul Bremer III to the now-disbanded Iraqi Governing Council, whose 25 members included Allawi and other ardent Hussein opponents who broke with the Baathist regime years ago and went into exile.

Former council member Ahmad Chalabi -- who had close ties to the Pentagon until allegations arose in May that his political faction had provided flawed intelligence to U.S. agents and leaked American secrets to Iran -- remains one of the most steadfast defenders of de-Baathification.

“What about the people who are victims of the Baath? Nothing has been done for them,” Chalabi said angrily in an interview. “What about the relatives of the mass-grave victims? How about the ones who have been dismissed from their jobs by Saddam?”

Chalabi argued that Baathists were fired for their own protection after the fall of Baghdad. “The main thing that came out of de-Baathification is that it preserved the lives of the Baathists,” he said. “People would have taken action themselves. People would have killed them.”

Mithal Alusi, chief of the de-Baathification commission, defended the dismissals as modest, possibly even insufficient. Despite the new efforts to rehire Baathists, the commission remains active, handling grievances against the party.

“There were many terrorists and killers in the system. It’s not a matter of giving them another chance. The law in this country says you have to bring killers to court,” Alusi said. “We can’t just close our eyes and start over again.”

He said the prime minister was courting trouble by giving Baathists jobs to lure them away from the insurgency.

“Mr. Allawi will make a big mistake if he allows this,” warned Alusi, who alleged that more than half the top-level managers in the interim government were former Hussein technocrats. “We have to give a clear signal that there is no place for the Baathist Nazi party. Never. Otherwise we will never have a new Iraq.”

Former party members such as Haisi, meanwhile, say the rehiring process is too slow.

“I’m angry because this wasn’t something done for a month or two, to find out who were the real problems. I’ve been out of my job for a year. They wouldn’t even let me attend classes to finish my degree,” she said, mulling over her predicament with former colleagues who had been rehired.

Idled professionals such as Haisi say party members of discredited regimes elsewhere seldom face such harsh treatment. Communist Party members kept their jobs throughout Eastern Europe after the end of communism, and ousted parties survived in most countries to run in democratic elections.

The challenge for Allawi’s government, analysts say, is to find constructive roles for those who worked in positions of authority under Hussein but haven’t yet drifted into the ranks of extremists. Even U.S. officials now acknowledge that cutting Baathists out of postwar Iraq was counterproductive.

But there is another challenge.

“We won’t work for the occupiers and we won’t work for the current ministers because they are collaborators with the Americans,” said Mohammed Salah Azawi, a former major in the Iraqi army who worked at a rocket engineering plant and served as a Baath Party division leader. He now earns about one-fifth his prewar salary under the pension program designed to discourage demobilized soldiers from joining the insurgency.

“If the Americans don’t leave and the new government doesn’t do as promised, all Iraqis will fight against them,” Azawi said.

Former Baathists insist that they joined the party to serve the country or further their careers, not for Hussein.

Mahmoud Azuedi, a journalism professor rehired last month, joined the party when he was 16 because, he said, that was what anyone with academic aspirations did in the late 1960s.

“There is nothing wrong with the [party’s] ideology. It was the way it was corrupted that was wrong,” said the 51-year-old, who said he had exhausted his savings and borrowed from relatives to keep his wife and three daughters clothed and fed during his 15 months of unemployment.

Azuedi said he understood the feelings of helplessness and rejection motivating some former Baathists to sympathize with the insurgents.

Officials agree that they must do more to win over former Baathists.

“If we can’t solve this problem, we won’t be able to do anything in Iraq. This is an important part of national reconciliation,” Hassani, the industry minister, said of the push to rehire Baathists “whose hands have not been dirtied with the blood of Iraqi people.”