This is very interesting: <quote>
One can not understand the nature of Iraqi civil society prior to the Ba`thist seizure of power without considering the phenomenal role played by the Iraqi Communist Party. Unlike any other political force under the monarchy and under Qasim - by virtue of its energetic leadership in defense of the excluded Shi'a, of the repressed Kurds, of the meagerly salaried industrial workers, of teachers earning fixed incomes that could not keep pace with inflation, of peasants still vulnerable to their shaikhly landlords (in spite of Qasim’s land reform), and of the masses of slum-dwellers of Iraq’s inner cities - the ICP appealed across the board to a vast majority of the population. Moreover, the ICP did more than just clamor. The men who led ICP after the party’s founding in 1932 could claim to have been among the prime instigators of the 1920 Intifada against the British. They did not merely confront the monarchy with petitions, but actually went out into the streets and rallied masses of discontented people, organizing them into marches for social and labor reform. During the Wathba upheaval of 1948, it was the Communists - not the liberals or the nationalists - who led Iraqi oil workers on their long march to demand higher wages from the K-3 oil station. During the 1952 Intifada, it was the ICP that stood shoulder to shoulder beside student demonstrators against the volley of bullets from the regime’s forces. But more importantly, it was the ICP that built many of the clubs, unions, societies and associations at the grass-roots level of Iraqi civil society such as the Party of National Liberation, the Friends of Peasants societies, the Permanent Bureau of Labor Unions, and the General Union of Iraqi Students, to name but a few. They used these organizations to stage collective protests, public meetings, labor strikes, and trade conferences. In the countryside, the ICP established cells in many salafs (groups of rural dwellings) each led and guided by a masul (comrade-in-charge). The party created Friends of Peasants societies in all the villages that it penetrated which were responsible for "encouraging them to form cooperative organizations, offering them social, legal, and hygienic advice." (Batatu, 611).
In contrast, the other major contender for power emerging in the late 1950s - the Iraqi Ba`th Party - could scarcely have competed with the ICP in a free and fair struggle for the hearts and minds of all segments of Iraqi society. The holy trinity of Ba`thist pan-Arabism, which stressed the unity of the Arab nation, the freedom of the Arab people from imperialist domination, and the socialist (but not to be confused with Marxist-Leninist) road to prosperity, may have "appealed to the heart" but "had little to offer the mind" as it consisted of "sentiments, memories, and an excess of rhetoric being strongly oriented towards a romanticized past and only feebly conscious of the actual conditions and wants of the mass of Iraqis" (Batatu, 480). In other words, the Ba`th of the 1950s was simply incapable of garnering the level of broad popular support enjoyed by the ICP.
In terms of continuity of appeal and of the capacity to integrate masses of people into civil organizations, the ICP overshadowed all other parties - especially the narrowly based and conspiratorially-oriented Iraqi Ba`th Party. The ICP was only too aware of that tendency on the part of this small and radical right-wing party whose only ties of political influence extended to the minority entrenched Sunni elite in government and the military. Qasim was also wary of the Ba`th and their Nasserist allies. But he would not listen to the Communists who begged him not to disarm the People’s Resistance Force. They controlled this militia to a considerable extent. It also happened to be the one effective and loyal armed force Qasim would have been able to count on in the event of a coup. But he disarmed the force out of fear that it too might one day challenge his power.
As General Qasim cracked down on the Communists and dismantled the many civil associations that they had built and sponsored, he was in fact hacking away at the very essence of Iraq’s emerging civil society. This only increased the likelihood that a well-organized and swift violent seizure of power by his enemies would encounter little effective resistance. This is exactly what happened.
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PART II - THE BA`THIST EXTERMINATION OF IRAQI CIVIL SOCIETY
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4. CHAOS AND TERROR - THE 1963 BA'THIST INTERLUDE
If one were to read about the calamitous events of 1963 from the Ba`thist perspective as illustrated in Christine Helms’s book Iraq: Eastern Flank of the Arab World, one would be made to understand that the political violence of that year was merely long over-due retribution for the 1959 Mosul massacre of the Ba`thists at the hands of the Communists. The abortive nationalist uprising by the Ba`th in Mosul had caused Qasim to unleash the armed Communist militia against the outnumbered Ba`th. A wave of murders, lootings, summary trials, and hangings ensued which the Iraqi Ba`th Party would never forget. But the Ba`thists were to pay their rivals back in spades. For their nine month tenure in power amounted not to some haphazard and sudden explosion of violence as occurred in Mosul. It was instead a carefully prepared, highly well-organized and systematic campaign of political and physical extermination against the Communists and anyone intimately connected to their civil organizations.
During that brief period of February-November 1963, between 3,000 and 5,000 Iraqis - the majority of them ICP leaders, members, or suspected sympathizers - are believed to have been either tortured to death, arrested and executed without due process, or simply dragged out of their homes and shot out of hand in the streets by the Ba`thist militia known as the National Guard. As U. Zaher relates, in Baghdad alone as many 1,000 perished while tens of thousands were rounded up in sports grounds, military camps, and schools "turned into concentration camps and interrogation centers." (Zaher 1986, 31). In 1964, the full horror of the nine month Iraqi Ba`thist experience finally came to light:
"A pamphlet entitled al-Munharifun (The Perverts), a semi-official publication circulated in 1964, after the fall of the Ba`th, provided horrific photographic evidence and documents exposing the crimes committed under the direct orders of the notorious [Ba`th] ‘Special Bureau of Investigation’. It included lists of names of the murdered and ‘disappeared’ victims, and a description of the instruments of torture. Hands and fingers were chopped off, women were raped and victims were killed by poison then dissolved in acid tanks leaving no trace behind. Mass graves were later unearthed where victims had been buried alive." (Zaher, 31).
After having been fatally weakened by Qasim’s crackdown on the ICP-influenced civil organizations, Iraq’s young and enfeebled civil society was strangled to death by the Ba`th. During the political thaw that accompanied the five intervening years of the Aref brothers (1963-68) prior to the second Ba`thist seizure of power, civil society could not be revived. Parliament had been dissolved immediately after the 1958 Revolution "without a whisper of protest." (Makiya, 162); and by November 1963, all representative institutions had long since been throttled. This left a system in place that had "no other source of legitimacy except that conferred by military force." (Sluglett 1994, 93).
Nevertheless, the name of Prime Minister Abd al-Rahman al-Bazzaz deserves to be mentioned, for he made vigorous efforts during his fleeting tenure (April-August 1966) to revive civil society. Bazzaz embarked on an ambitious campaign to liberalize the economy and political system by releasing all political prisoners whom the Ba`th had incarcerated without due process, and by pledging to reinstate parliament and the rule of law. But his ambitions all came to naught with the sudden death of President Abd-us-Salam Aref, whose helicopter crashed under mysterious circumstances in August 1966. His elder brother, Abd-ur-Rahman Aref, became president but was too weak a personality to pacify the army officers who surrounded him and who had no wish to see parliament or any other representative institution revived.
Like Qasim, "neither of the Arefs [who were also career army officers] succeeded in creating an institutional base for their rule outside the armed forces." (Sluglett 1994, 219). Furthermore, they were unable to deliver any of the economic and social promises of the revolution. Their overriding concern became not the reluctance of the Iraqi business community to invest in the risky economy, but the obsession of surviving in power by building a loyal army officer corps. But since military loyalty was never a sure prospect, the Arefs were just as vulnerable to becoming the victims of intrigue as Qasim.
The extremely violent nature of the 1963 Ba`thist experience dealt a fatal blow to Iraqi civil society as did it to the Iraqi Communist Party which never again enjoyed the same level of influence it had had in the 1940s and fifties. This is perhaps the only concrete achievement of the first Ba`thist regime. For in those nine months, the collective Ba`th leadership, who had no prior experience in the business of government and the art of compromise, spent the rest of their time intriguing against one another. According to Majid Khadduri, this chaotic and violent state of affairs was very much a result of their age and background. The vast majority of the Ba`thist leadership as well as the rank and file were men in their twenties and thirties. Many came from the lower classes, some of whom had barely finished high school, most of whom "could scarcely contribute to the improvement of a bureaucracy that had been drained of experienced administrators" (Khadduri 1969, 197). Having "spent most of their time in theoretical discussions" or carrying out street attacks on the ICP, they were prone to "quick decisions made on the spot" and excelled above all in political intrigue. (Khadduri, 202 ; 207).
As will be seen in the following chapter, because of the virulent exclusionary tone of it’s pan-Arab outlook (at least from the perspective of the excluded and repressed non-Sunni communities), because of the absolutist ideals it inherited from the founding fathers of Arab Ba`thism, and above all because of its propensity to resort to violence, the Iraqi Ba`th Party (IBP) could not possibly have attained power in any other way but through force. The IBP may not have been a violent party when it was founded by Iraqi Shi'a political activist Fu’ad ar-Rikabi. But as the Iraqi Communist Party increasingly overshadowed all other parties in the late 1950s, the IBP’s desperation increased. Because the Ba`thists had no comparable pull to the Communists over the broad spectrum of the population, their only effective weapon of influence were Ba`thist officers of the army high command, like the powerful General Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr (Saddam’s paternal cousin and intimate protégé), or Nasserist pan-Arab sympathizers like General Abd-us Salem Aref.
The IBP’s level of violence increased sharply following the Mosul massacre. The street tactics of the Ba`th against the ICP or suspected ICP sympathizers resembled those of Hitler’s S.A. storm troopers during the street battles of the late 1920s in Weimar Germany. Moreover, contrary to what one would have expected - that this level of violence was simply the acne of a young political party going through its adolescence and would eventually fade away - the Iraqi Ba`th Party became increasingly violent with the passage of time. If the 1959 assassination attempt on Qasim was not bad enough, then consider the 1963 bloodbath. It began with a macabre spectacle on the night of February 8, when the Ba`thists seized power for the first time. Having executed Qasim, they displayed his bullet-ridden body on national television for three nights running in order to convince the masses (who still supported him) that he was actually dead.
The violence of the Ba`th had a way of devouring even its own. In 1959, shortly after leaving the party with his close circle of Shi'a friends, Fu’ad Rikabi (the IBP’s founding leader) was discovered stabbed to death in his bed. Because no items where reported missing from his home, the bludgeoning was assumed to have been politically motivated. Since the ICP would have had no motive to kill him, the deed was presumed to be the work of rival Ba`thists with whom he had become disenchanted prior to leaving the party.
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