Five months after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime a letter from the education ministry arrived at Abdul Karim Ma’ashan’s school ordering him home. Ma’ashan (48) the headteacher and Arabic history teacher at a secondary school in western Baghdad, and four other teachers were told they had lost their jobs because of their high-level Ba’ath party affiliations.
Since last September, Ma’ashan and dozens of other Ba’athist teachers have been meeting several times each week at one of the education ministry’s offices close to the Tigris river, waiting for news. All have put in appeals against their sacking, none has been successful and none has been paid since they lost their jobs.
Now the US administration in Baghdad has announced a rethink of its criticised de-Ba’athification policy, and in a first step 10 000 teachers are to be allowed back to work. Ma’ashan and his colleagues are likely to be among them. ”This was a cruel law that took away our living,” said Ma’ashan, who is still equally proud of his master’s degree and his branch-level membership of the Ba’ath party, its fourth highest rank.
”Iraq lost a lot of expertise not only in education but also in medicine. None of them did any crimes that the law can accuse them of. Why were we Ba’athists? Because this is how the ministry worked.”
Being a senior member of the party dramatically improved employees’ chances of promotion and gave them significant influence in their communities. In some cases this power was cruelly exercised to eliminate critics.
There has been a furious debate within Iraq about how to confront the legacy of the dictatorial and brutal one-party state. Paul Bremer, the US civil administrator, encouraged by Iraqi exiles, took a stern line, ordering the abolition of the Ba’ath party. When the administration announced last May that 30 000 Ba’athists would lose their jobs, one of his aides said their aim was to ”put a stake in the heart” of the party and to ”extirpate Ba’athism”.
Unpalatable
A year later, as the US occupation authorities face an ever-worsening insurgency from the Sunni community that made up the larger part of the Ba’ath party, there has been a radical change of heart. Officials now recognise that the only way to strike at the heart of the resistance is to allow many of these Ba’athists back to their jobs, however unpalatable that may be for millions of other Iraqis, and to give more political representation to the Sunnis.
All the teachers have had to sign documents disavowing the party, but they speak freely of their admiration for Saddam. ”He was an Arab leader who worked for Iraq and the Arab nation. He was a courageous leader and he was only finished by the force of occupation,” said Turki Ibrahim, the former headteacher of the al-Warkady primary school in western Baghdad. ”Now the Americans should allow the Ba’ath party to be a political party just like all the other parties if this is to be a real democracy.”
His primary school has a new, broad minded head and a new, if flaking, coat of paint provided by reconstruction dollars. Emad Hadi Najib says that Ba’athist teachers should be allowed back, though not as headteachers.
”Ok, so the occupation says the ideas of the Ba’ath are wrong but they should not change the citizens themselves. So I think the teachers should keep their jobs. I don’t think they should have a leadership position in the schools, though. They should just be normal teachers, because many of them became headmasters only because they were Ba’athists.”
Not all Iraqis are so forgiving. In the grounds of Saddam’s Republican Palace is the office for the Supreme National Commission on De-Ba’athification. Here the corridors are lined with harrowing photographs of Iraq’s many mass graves, and of the scene at Halabja just after Saddam killed 5 000 people in the Kurdish village with a chemical weapons attack.
In these offices there is no room left for doubt about the party’s legacy. A poster on one wall states simply: ”Nazis = Ba’ath.” In another corner is a sculpture of a yellow and green three-headed serpent about the height of a man.
On one head is stamped a swastika, on the second is Saddam Hussein with blood dripping from his fang-like teeth and on the third is the face of Michel Aflaq, the Syrian Christian schoolteacher who founded the Ba’ath (literally ”renaissance” or ”resurrection”) as an Arab nationalist party in the 1940s.
The commission, which has been overseeing the policy of sacking Ba’athists, is run by Mithal al-Alusi (54) who was in the party but fled in 1976 just before he was sentenced to death for working against it. Since then he has lived in Germany, where he was sentenced to more than three years’ jail for leading a group which occupied the Iraqi embassy in Berlin in August 2002. He served 13 months and skipped the country last year when he was released on bail. He has been warned he will be arrested if he returns to Europe.
Fascist
Alusi is blunt. He refers again and again to the ”fascist Ba’athist Nazi experiment”. He said: ”We want to prevent this happening again. We want to build a new Iraq, a transparent Iraq where there will be no place for one party and one leader. The Ba’ath ideology is the Nazi ideology and the Ba’ath method is the Nazi method.”
He is deeply uncomfortable with the policy change. ”If we try to bring any of them before any criminal court anywhere in the world none of them would ever be allowed out again. All criminal law all over the world says that anyone who knows about a crime, pushes for that crime, or is quiet about that crime is complicit.”
The decision to re-employ so many Ba’athists, he argues, may be seen as an appeasement of the insurgency, and he suggests there are more than 71 000 teachers looking for work who have no Ba’ath background and would make better teachers. ”The Ba’athists were here for 35 years, they are many in number, they have many weapons,” he said. ”One night they left and now they want to return.” – Guardian Unlimited Â