Idled Iraqis Cry Foul Over Firings
Ex-Hussein Party Members Say Purge Unfairly Punishes Those Pressured to Join
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 27, 2003; Page A16
BAGHDAD -- Jamil Abid, 48, a technical manager with 25 years of service at the Dora oil refinery, just sold half of his living room furniture to make ends meet. Hassan Garbawri, 58, a political science professor at Baghdad University for 30 years, has spent the past two months puttering in his garden.
The two men are among the thousands of Iraqi professionals who lost their jobs in May, under a decree from L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. occupation administrator, because they were mid-level members of the Iraqi Baath Socialist Party, one of the chief instruments of former president Saddam Hussein's dictatorial grip on society.
They are not desperate, but they are bitter and confused. Like other dismissed workers interviewed this week, they insist they were not torturers or informers, only part of a state system that demanded complete political conformity -- scrutinized and rewarded in precise, incremental steps -- from anyone who sought a job, a degree or a promotion controlled by the government.
"For 35 years, you had to be a Baathist to earn a living," said Abid, whose family lives in a modest concrete house on the refinery grounds. "That's how our children got extra points to get into college. That's how we avoided being bothered by the authorities. But we were not criminals. We did not get big houses and fancy cars. Maybe we were wrong, but why should they punish our children for it now?"
The problem for U.S. officials was the difficulty of quickly differentiating between "good" and "bad" Baathists in a party with 1.5 million members -- between those who simply went along with the system and those who abused their authority. Bremer decided to purge every Baathist who had risen above ordinary membership to any of four higher ranks in the rigidly vertical party structure.
It is not clear how many people were affected, but at least 20,000 teachers, engineers, technicians, managers and other professionals lost their jobs and pensions; some affected Baathists say the number is much higher. The majority were division-level Baathists, one rung above simple membership, who had relatively little power and were often promoted merely for attending rallies or performing well at work.
"We had no authority. We were just tools in the hands of those above us," said Sana Ali Furwachi, a division-level member who was dismissed after 21 years as a school principal in the southern city of Karbala.
The Baath Party, founded in Syria in 1947, espoused broad popular notions of freedom, socialism and Arab unity. But after Hussein took power in 1979, the Iraqi branch of the party became a Stalinist political apparatus with a paranoid mind-set, a rigid chain of command and a mandate to "organize" the entire society.
Furwachi, part of a delegation representing 400 fired education workers from Karbala who traveled to Baghdad this week to seek help, said she was required to join the party to become a principal. She also said that many members sought promotion within the party for the bonuses that helped them survive the hardships of U.N. sanctions after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Many of these idled professionals are clinging to the faint hope that they may still be exempted from the May 16 decree, which stated that all affected Baathists would be "banned from future employment in the public sector" but that Bremer "or his designees" could grant exceptions on a case-by-case basis.
In the past month, several official-looking forms have been circulating in the capital that promise job reinstatement to Baathists who renounce the party and are found "fit" to return to work. Some have been handed out in batches by U.S. soldiers outside American bases; others have been given to departing employees by their bosses; still others appear to be forgeries.
One evening last week, for example, more than 300 fired teachers, policemen and engineers lined up outside a U.S. compound, where soldiers passed out forms in English titled "Agreement to Disavow Party Affiliation." They required the petitioner to renounce all ties to Baathism and to pledge to help U.S. authorities "build a new government." They bore the signature of one Lester M. McFarland.
But many of those in line frowned in disappointment when they read the papers, saying they had been told at their former workplaces that such documents meant nothing without Bremer's signature. In an interview later in the week, an adviser to Bremer confirmed that requirement and said he had never heard of McFarland.
"There are many fictitious documents floating around," said the aide, Drew Erdmann. "This has been extremely difficult for people, and it's terrible to see others preying on them, but I see documents every day with names like L. Buell Brimmer." A handful of exemptions have been granted, he said, but the decree is "very clear. They must be authorized by L. Paul Bremer."
U.S. officials had originally planned to purge only senior-level Baathists from the government, but in May they expanded the list to all four party ranks above regular membership. At the time, a senior U.S. official here said the process might not be "very tidy," but that this was "a price we are willing to pay to be sure that we extirpate Baathism from Iraq's society."
Some fired Baathists protested this week that the decree had been implemented unevenly, with U.S.-appointed Iraqi authorities in certain regions protecting their friends from dismissal, and senior-level Baathists in key ministries allowed to keep their jobs.
And while some Baathists said they were relieved that the party's pervasive, Big Brother-like grip was gone, others said U.S. authorities had merely replaced one form of humiliation with another. For years, they said, they had to swear allegiance to the party to feed their families; now the opposite is true.
American officials are hoping to deflect some criticism by establishing a new, Iraqi-led "de-Baathification committee" that will establish a systematic method of vetting dismissals and reinstatements. But concerns have been raised that this step could further politicize a process already fraught with emotion.
Garbawri, who speaks rusty French from his days as an undergraduate at the Sorbonne, said the experience reminded him of 1963, when Baathists briefly overthrew the government of Abdel-Karim Qassem after a period of pro-communist agitation, and all public employees were forced to denounce the Iraqi Communist Party.
"When I was young I sympathized with Baathist ideas, but Saddam had nothing to do with them. He represented only power," said the professor, who joined the party in 1976 and remained a member until April. "There were good and bad Baathists, and they should punish the bad ones, but it's unfair to do it randomly. Signing a paper doesn't change your mind."
Some fired workers said they had no regrets about remaining faithful to the party's original ideas and that Baathism had become a way of life that was difficult for them to abandon after Hussein began to manipulate the party system for his own ends, such as repressing the majority Shiite Muslims and concentrating power among Sunni Muslim loyalists.
"I became a Baathist because I wanted to change things that were wrong, to serve my country," said one fired oil worker, a wiry machinist with an old car and a tiny cinder-block house provided by the government. "Then things changed, people were forced to clap and march for Saddam. The party never fulfilled our dreams, and all our work was a waste of time. So I guess I can sign that paper."
In some highly politicized areas of government, such as the interior and foreign affairs ministries, there were large numbers of Baath members and constant interference by Hussein and his top aides. But in others, such as technical and service agencies, the numbers were lower and party influence was more benign.
Perhaps for this reason, officials in several ministries this week expressed concern for the futures of some fired employees, especially those they had known and worked with, and suggested that Bremer's purge had been too sweeping.
"I think everyone should have rights, that people should be judged for deeds and not thoughts," said Riyadh Aziz Hadi, a progressive academic who was recently elected dean of the political science department at Baghdad University, where seven of 41 faculty members, including Garbawri, were dismissed. "Some of them had long careers, and families. But we were told there would be no exceptions."
At the Oil Ministry, where Abid and a number of other technical and managerial employees lost their jobs, one official said many of them had felt obligated to join the party. He said he thought the dismissed workers should have been designated as retirees, so they could keep their pensions.
"If an engineer wanted to become the manager of an oil facility, it would be extremely difficult if he were not a party member," said the official, on condition of anonymity. "I have some friends who lost their jobs, and they come to visit me, but it is very hard for me to look at them and ask how they're doing."
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