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| Iraq-Jordan |
| The De-Baathification Program in Iraq |
| 2004-11-11 |
| From The New Yorker, a long feature article by Jon Lee Anderson. An excerpt: .... This summer, I visited the Supreme National Commission for De-Baathification, which occupied two floors of a concrete office block inside the Green Zone. A poster on one wall bore the simple message "Baathists=Nazis." The director of the commission, Mithal al-Alusi, is a tall, lanky man of fifty-three who speaks English with a syrupy drawl and, even in the office, wears a pistol tucked into his belt. Alusi is a protégé of Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, the exile group favored by the Pentagon before the war. Chalabi had been appointed chairman of the commission in September, 2003. Since then, he had lost much of his influence, in part because intelligence concerning Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, which he promoted, had proved useless. In June, when sovereignty was transferred to Iyad Allawi, a rival of Chalabi's with ties to the C.I.A., not a single member of the I.N.C. was given a post in the new government. But Chalabi's access to the de-Baathification commission—and to the files of thousands of Baathists—gave him continued leverage. (When I saw Chalabi in Iraq this summer, he pulled out the intelligence dossier of a senior member of Allawi's government and translated what he claimed was damaging information about him.) The commission began its work in January, and Alusi told me that it had achieved a great deal: "Thirty-five thousand Baath Party members have left their jobs." Alusi said that the commission was interested only in Baathists from the four highest levels of the Party, some sixty-five thousand people. The top level consisted of no more than fifty or sixty people. "Level 2 is a few hundred people, Level 3 is a few thousand, and at the fourth level there are tens of thousands," he said. Level 4 Baathists were allowed to appeal their bans, and, so far, the commission had approved about half of the appeals. Alusi said that the commission was not inflexible; he described one instance in which seventy doctors had been sent back to work. "We expedited their cases," he said. "We just made sure they weren't killers." Alusi told me that he had been a Baathist once himself, and had worked at the Party's top-secret academy for political cadres. He had fallen out with the regime in the seventies, however, and spent more than twenty years in exile, mostly in Germany. In August, 2002, Alusi and a few cohorts briefly seized Iraq's Embassy in Berlin, for which they were arrested and spent thirteen months in prison. When Alusi was released, in September, 2003, he returned to Iraq, violating his parole. I asked Alusi what Baathism had meant to him as a young man. "It was like magic," he said. "The Baath Party gave us the opportunity to do something important." One of the opportunities enjoyed by young Baathists was access to power. Under Saddam, the Party was melded with the secret police and the state intelligence organization. Membership was a requirement for many government jobs, and Baathists were required to inform on their neighbors, their co-workers, and one another. During one of Saddam's hallmark purges in 1979, several ministers were handed weapons and ordered to kill colleagues whom Saddam had just declared to be "traitors." One of the steps in the appeals process for former Baathists was attendance at a thirty-day de-Baathification course, and I asked Alusi what model he had used for it. "I've studied the de-Nazification of Germany," he said. "And I've e-mailed Jewish Holocaust organizations, although only one of them answered me. We've read a lot of books." A few days later, I attended a graduation ceremony in a seminar room at Baghdad University, where a hundred or so middle-aged men and women, most of them professors and doctors, sat expectantly. Alusi walked in with a half-dozen bodyguards. He took the microphone, smiled, and began to talk in a rambling fashion about how the United States had liberated Iraqis, how the Coalition was on a par with the alliance against Hitler, and how Iraq now depended upon the good will of the U.S. Men from Alusi's office began taping posters to the wall behind the stage. The posters showed decayed bodies and skeletons piled in unearthed mass graves, and they elicited muffled exclamations from the audience. A man raised his hand. "Why are you putting up those posters?" he asked. "Everyone here was forced to join the Baath Party. We didn't have anything to do with those crimes." "These are the bodies of Iraqis," Alusi replied. "Why shouldn't we look at them?" A man called out, "Mr. Alusi, I feel frightened when I see these pictures. Many people may not distinguish between the criminals who did these things and innocent people like us." "The Iraqi people are not idiots," Alusi replied. "I know there are good citizens among you, but we cannot close the files, because the files are full of crimes. The problem is for those who committed crimes. What shall I do, put away the posters, omit the truth? No, we cannot. If we omit this, we omit our history." The man smiled politely but didn't say anything. Alusi stood up, and the people in the room filed over to officials sitting at tables to obtain their de-Baathification certificates. Later, Alusi told me that he had meant to be provocative. "There is a duality in Baathists," he said. "You can find a Baathist who is a killer, but at home, with his family, he's completely normal. It's like they split their day into two twelve-hour blocks. When people say about someone I know to be a Baathist criminal, 'No, he's a good neighbor!' I believe them. The Baath Party is like the Nazi Party, or like the Mafia. If you meet them, they are simpatico. And this is why it's very difficult for us to do our work, which is to change—really change—Iraqi society." Alusi wasn't alone in drawing analogies to the de-Nazification process in Germany after the Second World War. But the comparison is less helpful than it seems. De-Nazification was marked by ambiguities, exceptions, compromises. And, to the extent that it worked, it did so because the Nazis had so catastrophically failed. Germany was utterly defeated; millions of people had died, and its cities lay in ruins. .... |
| Posted by:Mike Sylwester |