Frustrated Iraqis are beginning to force United States officers to remove senior Ba’ath Party figures who have tried to return to power.
The US army has sacked the police chief it was working with because he was accused of having a senior Ba’ath position and running his own mafia in the force.
Major General Hamid Uthman, who headed the police under Saddam Hussein, is the second to have tried to lead the force since the war ended.
Major General Zuhair al-Noami, who had been a deputy chief of police, resigned last week under similar criticism.
On May 11 protests by dozens of doctors forced the resignation of Ali Shnan al-Janabi, newly appointed as health minister, who had also been a senior party member.
Their removal is offering the Iraqis their first taste of the power of public protest.
The Pentagon-backed Iraqi National Congress has tried to capitalise on it by insisting on a ”deba’athification”, and the exclusion of 30 000 senior party members.
Entifadh Qaribar, one of congress leader Ahmad Chalabi’s deputies, said: ”I am worried to see some Ba’athists coming back to power. We are encouraging Iraqis to refuse.”
The dismissals are a serious setback to the coalition’s Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (Orha), which took the decision to work with senior members of Saddam’s regime. But it says it was impossible to weed out unwanted Ba’ath officials before asking Iraqi civil servants to return to work.
”Now we are slowly going through them and it is basically the Iraqis who are telling us which of them are good and which of them are bad,” a spokesperson said.
Orha and the US forces are still struggling to complete even the most basic restoration of order in the capital.
Ministries are still ablaze, looters freely steal from buildings under the gaze of US soldiers and there is shooting in the streets every night.
The police academy is a shambles. Once a day, just before dark, a handful of Iraqi police officers armed only with pistols go on joint patrol with US military police.
They admit that it has little effect. ”The trouble starts after dark, what’s the point of going out at 6pm?” an Iraqi police colonel asked.
”I’ve told the Americans that if they want to regulate everything here they could do it in just 24 hours. Maybe they are doing their best, but they don’t know the area and they don’t know we must have more checkpoints and collect all the weapons.”
Many of the 50 000 members of the pre-war force have not returned to work and some speak openly of their fear of being attacked by people who associate them with Saddam’s regime. More and more Iraqis are buying guns.
Orha said: ”We have got to retrain the Iraqi police force from scratch to police this place in a civil manner. This is an enormous job.” — Â