Hosin Jasem Mohamed al-Jbouri, a paunchy, middle-aged man with an ink-black mustache, had a good life and highly respectable job when Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq.
He still does.
A general with 32 years of military service at the time of Hussein’s fall, today he is governor of the former dictator’s home, Tikrit, a job handed to him by the U.S.-led occupation authority.
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He believes there is a danger in banning former soldiers who were high-ranking Baath Party members from government positions, which is exactly what is taking place in a wide-sweeping process known as de-Baathification.
“Think about it. How many of the 395,000 soldiers in the Iraqi army were Baathists? Isn’t that a large number of fighters to be out there?” he asked. “You can’t eliminate a whole people and expect they will do nothing.”
Nine months after the regime’s fall, some Iraqis are beginning to publicly urge a tempering of the de-Baathification program. They say there are Baathists with skills needed to rebuild Iraq, that some were unwilling party members and that families should not suffer because of relatives’ party ties.
Appeal process begins
In response to the outcry from a number of employees purged from the government’s payrolls because of their party ties, the U.S.-appointed Iraqi government recently set up an appeal process. Though it limited the process to the lowest level of Baath Party leaders, tens of thousands of appeals have flooded in, according to Ahmed al-Barak, an Iraqi Governing Council member, lawyer and founder of a human-rights organization.
But while Iraqis such as al-Barak see the need for a just process and help for Baath members’ families, they do not give much credence to the idea that the wounded nation will heal faster by reconciling with the Baathists.
“We are not going to accept all of them, because they created problems and because of the hundreds of thousands of victims,” al-Barak said. “The best satisfaction for these victims is to make the de-Baathification work. Talking about the families, what about the families of the victims?”
Part of Iraq’s challenge is sorting out the legacy of the Baath Party and determining how deep a stain it has left on society.
Under Hussein, the Baath Party for decades imposed a fearful order similar to that in Germany under Adolf Hitler and the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin.
With party membership, government workers skipped over others to more lucrative jobs. They got bonuses and perks others did not receive. They were urged to spy on their countrymen. Children were told to report on their parents.
Baath Party members controlled the various intelligence agencies and filled them with fellow Baathists. The names of Iraqis who quit the party were placed on a black list that not only banned them from government jobs but also made them pariahs in their communities.
“The party was the government, and the government was the party,” said Sermid al-Sarraf, an Iraqi-American attorney and member of the DePaul University Law School team working with Iraqi lawyers and law schools under a U.S.-funded effort.
However, becoming a Baath Party member did not immediately open the doors to its inner sanctum, Iraqis familiar with the party’s operations say.
The party had seven levels that members had to climb by putting in time and showing devotion.
Tribal and other connections also helped. Once past the first three levels party members were considered leaders, and those members were banned in May from holding government jobs by Paul Bremer, the head of the U.S. occupation authority.
Ban could affect 60,000
At the time, U.S. officials said the order could affect as many as 30,000 former members of the party, whose ranks had climbed to an estimated 1.5 million. But Iraqi officials now say the number of banned party members could reach 60,000 by time the de-Baathification process is over in the next few years.
One high-ranking supporter of the process is Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a council member and a leader of the Dawa Party, who suffered heavily under Baathist rule.
Five relatives were killed, including his brother, and he fled Iraq in 1980 to escape the regime’s oppression of Shiite activists. But while saying the government needs to clean its ranks of top-level Baathists, he adds that the process is complicated.
“There are many low-level members who may have been worse criminals than those who were high-ranking members,” he said recently between meetings at his Governing Council offices.
Talk of scaling back the de-Baathification program does not go down well, however, with Iraqis such as Mudhar Shawkat, a political activist and spokesman for council member Ahmad Chalabi.
A Shiite political leader, Chalabi was named by the Iraqi Governing Council to oversee de-Baathification.
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The critics, according to Shawkat, are really “trying to distance themselves from a controversial process.” And he said he has little sympathy for Baathists, whose only punishment is being barred from public jobs.
“If the Baathists were in power, they would hang me from the pole right out there,” he said, pointing out the window of his heavily guarded office. “We are not doing that.”