Iraqi Teachers Learn Hard Political Lesson

They flood the halls of the Ministry of Education, men and women hoping to land a lucrative job by presenting evidence that a family member was killed or jailed by Saddam Hussein’s regime.

A teaching post in Iraq used to pay about $5 a month and was largely reserved for Iraqis who joined Hussein’s Baath Party. But after the fall of the regime, more than 10,000 Baath Party members were expelled from the classroom. Those with teaching experience who can prove they were kept out of schools by Hussein’s repression get preference for jobs that now bring in as much as $300 a month.

“This is righteousness,” said Qahstan Hassan Jawad, who was at the ministry to collect work papers for his wife, a former schoolteacher who lost her job 12 years ago during one of Hussein’s purges of political opponents. “If righteousness is followed, we will have the priority.”

But priorities are shifting and leading to new tensions.

Last month, L. Paul Bremer III, head of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority that is running Iraq, reversed his much-criticized de-Baathification policy and said that many laid-off Baathist teachers would be eligible to regain their jobs through an appeals process. Bremer’s order means that only Baathists who took part in the crimes or violence of the old regime would be kept out of the classroom.

But with about 300,000 teaching jobs nationwide, there are not enough to go around. The massive across-the-board pay increases for government positions -- paid for out of Iraqi oil revenue -- mean that the Ministry of Education has limited funds to pay for new teaching posts. And ministry officials say they have received tens of thousands of applications but fear they will be able to fund only 5,000 additional jobs.

Even before Bremer’s about-face, the ministry was picketed by angry marchers demanding jobs as payback for Hussein’s oppression.

Education officials worry about the implications.

“If they killed my father and my brother and gave a job to me and the Baathist, it would be OK,” said Hasanein F. Muallah, a senior official in the ministry. “But don’t give the job to the Baathist and tell me to go home.”

The dilemma illustrates the difficulties in reconciling Iraq’s past while doling out jobs.

Hussein’s dictatorship used public jobs and contracts to reward loyalists. When the U.S. toppled the regime, it began to steer official posts and work toward groups that had been left out of Hussein’s government. Hussein’s opponents, many of whom had long been in exile, were appointed to the Iraqi Governing Council. The body named people, including family members, to key positions in the new government. Jobs also began to go to members of influential political parties represented on the 25-member Governing Council.

The result is that Iraq’s new rulers are walking a fine line between compensating for past wrongs and engaging in political patronage. Meanwhile, those who have been left out of the coalition -- former Hussein loyalists -- have helped fuel the terrorism rattling the country.

Now the United States is moving to reintroduce the former loyalists: letting teachers back into classrooms and, in a high-profile case, briefly naming a former general in the Republican Guard to head security efforts in the volatile Sunni Muslim city of Fallouja. The steps have brought protests from groups that Hussein repressed, such as the Kurds and Shiite Muslims, and led the U.S. to remove the ex-general from his post.

Many say that unless the country can move past a spoils system, violence will continue.

“Most people have a zero-sum approach to this, which is deadly,” said Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor who has written books on Iraq, “because zero-sum means someone doesn’t get what they want, and then they fight.”

Cole and others say that if Iraq is stabilized, government revenue should grow, increasing the number of teaching posts and avoiding the difficult choice between giving jobs to Baathists or those who were repressed.

“In the immediate situation, which is not good, there are some serious questions,” Cole said. “It’s a temporary tightrope [the interim government] must walk.”

Education officials say they have given 4,700 jobs to former teachers removed under Hussein. At least 1,100 more in Baghdad are among the thousands of applicants, and additional job-seekers flood the ministry every day.

The teachers’ predicament dates from last May, when Bremer, in one of his first acts as head of the occupation authority running Iraq, unveiled the de-Baathification policy.

The rule barred any Baathist who was more than an entry-level member from holding a government job. Although an appeals process was instituted in January, it was sluggish and criticism mounted. Opponents said the policy was too sweeping and unfair to party members who had not engaged in violence under Hussein, such as the 52-year-old teacher who goes by the Arabic nickname of Abu Jassim.

Jassim, who did not want to give his full name out of fear of violence against former Baathists, joined the party three decades ago so he could become a teacher. But he said he forbade his eight children from joining and remained a member simply to support his family.

A job was not the only benefit of party membership. Jassim received a stipend to move to the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk, where he was awarded a plot of land as part of the regime’s effort to push Kurds and Turkmens from the city. Over the years, he rose to headmaster.

After the fall of Hussein last year, Jassim was dismissed from his job. He received two more paychecks, then had to scrounge for work in the local market to support his family.

“We are being treated unjustly,” he said at the Ministry of Education, where he was hoping to get his job back. “We were all required to join this party.... If they were in our shoes, what would they have done?”

In contrast, Abdul Hussein Naqi, a 54-year-old Turkmen from Kirkuk, is looking to benefit from Jassim’s circumstances.

At the ministry, he told of how he had lost his teaching job 20 years ago because a cousin was a member of a banned opposition party. After spending five years in jail because of his cousin’s politics, Naqi was moved from Kirkuk to the Sunni Triangle city of Ramadi and made to work in menial jobs.

Naqi applied for a teaching job in November, when the ministry first announced it would give priority to those oppressed by Hussein. In a sign of the widespread unpopularity of the de-Baathification policy, Naqi said that people such as Jassim did not deserve to lose their jobs, because they committed no crimes and were only trying to feed their families.

At the same time, Naqi said he deserved to have top priority for one of the precious teaching jobs.

“I love teaching. Even my father was a teacher,” Naqi said. “Our homeland is in terrible need of people like me.... But instead of taking me, they are taking other people.”

To proponents of de-Baathification, the choice is clear: Baathists won promotions, higher pay and food vouchers because of their party membership.

“Those people took their chances, and they shouldn’t, at least in this transitional period, be involved in key positions,” said Mudar Shawkat, an aide to Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi, who has headed the council’s de-Baathification committee.

Critics of de-Baathification say such an approach could worsen Iraq’s problems. “That’s a very tribal and feuding approach,” Cole, the University of Michigan professor, said of Shawkat’s stance.

Frustrated former teachers are not as blunt as Shawkat, but as they throng the halls of the Ministry of Education it is clear that they think they are owed.

Among them is Muhyee Muhaisen Jassim, 45, whose brother and cousins were executed in the early 1990s after participating in an abortive uprising against Hussein. The dictator’s secret police barred Jassim from his job as an electronics teacher. He worked as a carpenter.

“It was a catastrophe,” he said.

Jassim stood outside the ministry’s hiring office recently, brandishing a certificate that showed his relatives had been put to death by Hussein and a card that demonstrated he once belonged to the teachers union. The documents were not working.

“I have so many family members who were executed,” Jassim said, “and still I cannot find a job.”

Suheil Ahmed and Said Rifai of The Times’ Baghdad Bureau contributed to this report.