Posted on 05/02/2003 11:41:59 AM PDT by Forgiven_Sinner
Middle East
BAGHDAD - He still calls himself Abu Ayad, but that's only because old habits die hard. "It's my secret name," he explains with a smile, wiping his professorial spectacles against the sleeve of his neat, nerdy, button-down yellow shirt.
This secret-named, hardened political fighter is, it turns out, a shy man at heart.
Shy - but not embarrassed. The name and the reason behind it, may seem to be holdovers of a different era, but they were once the dead-serious necessities of political activism in this land where even the suspicion of such an undertaking was enough to get one arrested, tortured, killed. Such is the fate Abu Ayad has no reason to doubt befell the two nephews he has not seen in 25 years, and it is the fate that almost befell him, too, when his party was outlawed in 1979 and he was forced to flee in his socks to Syria.
But now the setting sun pours mellow light into his brand-new party headquarters - the swept-clean foyer of an otherwise blasted building on Baghdad's riverside Sharia Abu Nuass that a month ago housed the local Mukhabarat (intelligence service), a touch he savors - and the man calling himself Abu Ayad leans back, crosses his legs and takes a deep, gratifying hit off a borrowed Gauloises.
"Call me Malik," he says, exhaling smoke into a slanting beam to set off a celebratory display of red-gold images that dance across the airborne screen. He's not trying to hide anything. Not anymore.
Far from it. The political slogans splashed across the front exterior wall of the building in which he sits - "Free Country, Happy People" and "Organize for the Unity of the People of Iraq", among others - are impossible to miss from the road out front. They're printed on posters tacked to the wall, and scrawled directly onto the yellow-brick facade in a cursive Arabic script that stretches as high and wide as the human arm can swing a can of spray paint.
Spray paint colored red, of course - for this is the Baghdad party headquarters of the Iraqi Communist Party, come home and back to life after decades of exile and disrepair, and now determined to snatch power from under the treads of American tanks.
A lovely thought, is it not? The potential for irony delights.
By any means necessary? By no means. "Oh no!" he says, his hand in the air. "Enough. No more guns. We need democracy here."
So no guns, then, but flyers galore. These means he has, by the boxful, and intends to use. Also stickers and slogans and symbols and signs. There are stacks of these sitting on a broken-down desk, the only furniture in the room other than a line of beat-up vinyl-seated kitchen chairs, and they're printed and ready for national distribution. The distribution chain, he says, is already in place; Baghdad's first postwar newspaper, the ICP's "People's Path", is on the street as we speak.
"We already have headquarters set up in all the major cities," Malik says. "And we are ready to move." He sees his job over the next months and years as trying to persuade the people of Iraq that it is possible to forge a middle path between kick-the-poor capitalism American-style and kill-the-poor statism Saddam-style.
What he represents isn't really communism any more, but more a soft, leftward-leaning blend of principles deriving from a concern for society's weakest and specifics deriving from various West European socialist experiments-in-progress. The most important planks in his current platform, he says, would include an open, democratic process; a federal union; separation of church and state; and - most importantly, in his view - a ban on foreign financial support for Iraqi political parties. In fact, to enforce this ban, "there should be government funding for all parties and candidates in Iraq", he says.
Asked to point to a specific existing model that he would use as a guide for building a government, he mentions Sweden.
At the moment, it's a little difficult to look around this still-burning war-torn city of tanks and Kalashnikovs and imagine it ever turning into some kind of new Stockholm. But then, it's also a little difficult to look around and imagine it turning into a new Kansas City or a new Des Moines. If Jay Garner can dream big, so can Malik.
And anyway, he is nothing if not persistent, a characteristic he shares with his party, whose most potent symbol at the moment is the number "69". This number, woven artistically into many of the wall posters that the party is now passing out and putting up around town - one poster features a flying dove, another a worker's hammer - refers to the age of the party, which was founded on March 31, 1934, by Yosif Salman Yosif (secret name "Fahad" or "Leopard").
Yosif, who now serves the party as an iconic figure, was publicly hanged in 1949 by the government of Nuri Pasha as-Said, then controlled by the British. But the party lived, going on to support the revolution of 1958 when a military coup toppled the monarchy and brought to power a republic headed by Brigadier General Abdel Karim Kassem. The 1950s had seen fierce political warfare between the Arab Nationalist Party and the ICP, a war both ended up losing when the Arab Socialist Ba'ath outfit seized power briefly in 1963. Both Kassem and Salaam Adel, who was then the leader of the ICP, were killed in the chaos. In 1979, when Saddam assumed the presidency, one of his first steps was to outlaw the ICP, forcing its leadership - including a then 30-year-old Malik - to flee the country, dispersing to Syria, Sulaimaniya in Kurdish Iraq, London or Moscow.
That didn't stop the jockeying for power and influence among political Iraqi exiles, a battle which intensified after 1991. Malik tried his best to use the American lever to unseat Saddam, but never to the point of supporting occupation of his country. "In 1993, I went to the US ambassador in London and said, 'Why not brand Saddam like an international criminal? After all, he dried the marshes, he used chemical bombs, he has proved himself an international criminal.' But they said they didn't do that sort of thing."
Now, he thinks the Americans are making a grave mistake by not internationalizing the situation in Iraq. "We need support from other countries, but what kind of support? - that is the question," he says. "We need the United Nations to help us, not just America." He takes offense at the idea that Iraqis are somehow too ignorant to figure out how to build a democracy on their own without an American overseer. "I have relatives who are poor farmers, and even when I was a child, six or seven years old, I remember that everyone would listen to the news and talk about politics all the time. This is who we Iraqis are."
Indeed, as we are talking, a tall loud man dressed in an expensive suit comes striding into the foyer, looking for an argument, and finding one. His name is Majid, and he is a university professor at Saddam University, and he wants to know about the party's position on the role of America on rebuilding Iraq.
The debate surges and flows in Arabic, and eventually draws in another party activist, a man named Ehsan, who finds himself defending the party's failure to call for an immediate American withdrawal from Iraq. He's not exactly pro-invasion: "If the world had only used United Nations Resolution 688 as its basis for dealing with Saddam, this problem could have been solved without so much killing," he says. "I think the American regime and English regime want more than Iraq - they want division among the Arab states, and they want to draw a new map." But that isn't good enough for Majid, who says the party must prove its relevance and independence by refusing to work with any American-imposed provisional government.
Who would have thought that a communist party in Iraq would be in a position of losing support by being perceived as too pro-American?
After Ehsan leaves, Malik mentions that when the US Congress passed the Iraqi Freedom Act in 1999, it explicitly listed only two (of about 70 that were jockeying for influence then) of the Iraqi exile parties that could not receive American funding. One was the religious al-Dawa party; the other was the Iraqi Communist Party. "I think we may want to put that on our banners if we want to win any elections," he says with a sigh.
Does anyone else find any of this funny?
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