Paper Trail Shows Saddam's Baath Party Fueled By Money (Iraq - Kanan Makiya's "Memory Foundation")

New London Day ^ | 24 November 2003 | JOEL BRINKLEY

[Stultis]

Paper Trail Shows Saddam's Baath Party Fueled By Money

By JOEL BRINKLEY
Published on 11/24/2003

Baghdad, Iraq — In the end, after the secret investigations, the middle-of-the-night arrests, the obsequious genuflections to Saddam Hussein, a common passion drove these members of Iraq's Baath Party to excel at their special occupation. It was all about the money.

Just as soon as any of them apprehended a malefactor and saw to his execution — or immediately after rounding up an army deserter, amputating his ears and arranging to have food rations denied to his family — Baath Party functionaries filled out forms in triplicate and forwarded them to headquarters with a note asking: Please send my bonus.

That is one finding from a review of documents among 2.5 million pages of records taken from a series of underground vaults beneath the Baath Party's national headquarters here — much of the documentary record of the party's work over a decade or two.

The records show that party functionaries often regarded the party as if it were a rich uncle. In December 2000, Yousef Mahmoud wrote to Baath headquarters, saying: “I am passing through difficult times. I just got married and have lots of debts. Please send 250,000 dinar,” about $125. A short time later, the records say, he got a check for $75.

Kanan Makiya, a Brandeis University professor and author, said he stumbled upon the records last summer while trying to save a monument to the party's founder, Michel Aflaq, that was scheduled for demolition. A few years ago, the United States gave Makiya custody of another large trove of Iraqi documents seized in Kuwait and northern Iraq after the Persian Gulf War in 1991, and so he won permission from the occupation authorities to take custody of the new papers as well.

Makiya intends to share them with the public by opening a museum and archive that he calls the Memory Foundation. The Americans plan to give him some of the financing for the project, and he is soliciting the rest.

The Baath Party was Saddam's political base, but it grew to be much more. The party was one element of a three-sided security apparatus that kept Iraqis cowed. The other two were the army and the Mukhabarat secret service.

If the files are to be believed, party members investigated ordinary citizens, and party apparatchiks won promotion based on the number of perceived political enemies they arrested and punished.

The Communists of the Soviet bloc used similar systems of control, and delving into the issue of who was spying on whom has produced tensions in those countries as records have been unearthed and made public. In Iraq, many people have aggressively tried to find records of the Saddam era. But their goal, generally, is to learn the fate of missing family members — not necessarily to implicate individual Baathists.

The party's ubiquitous influence has locked the nation in a divisive debate over de-Baathification — whether every party member or just its most senior players should be denied employment in the new Iraq. Makiya hopes the membership records among his documents will help the new government decide who among them were truly pernicious.

“At the end of the day,” Makiya said, “we will see whether Iraqi society can handle the burden of so much memory. It's about shame, it's about acknowledgment, it's about settling something within yourself.”

For now, the records sit in a warren of rooms in the basement of Makiya's ancestral home, in a wealthy section of Baghdad. He permitted this reporter to browse among them at will, and some of the folders had bold titles on their spines that were immediately intriguing.

“Mass Graves,” said one, dated 2000.

Inside was a record of a somber declaration by Saddam, as transcribed by a party acolyte. “The Comrade Leader, may God protect him and make him prosper, on the subject of the martyrs of back stabbing and betrayal, would like to document that saboteurs and traitors have committed crimes against martyrs of the party after the Mother of all Battles. This issue should be addressed in the fastest possible way.”

In other words, after the first Gulf War, Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south attacked and killed dozens of Baath Party workers. Nine years later, Saddam decided to document those deaths.

Initial entries show that party officers did not immediately grasp the true value of Saddam's order. One writer dutifully recounted the killing of the governor of Sulaimaniya, a Kurdish town in the north.

“He was tortured and dragged to death” behind a car racing through town, the account said. “Please add him to the file.”

Soon, however, party members saw the silver lining. Saddam's declaration described the dead as “martyrs of the party.” When party members died as martyrs — killed in battle defending the party or the country — surviving family members were awarded special payments for life. So, according to the paper trail in Makiya's basement, a stampede began, of family members trying to clamber aboard the gravy train. Dozens filed declarations describing the heroic acts of their long-dead relatives.

“My son, Abid Badr Hussein, fought at the police station in Erbil for the cause of Saddam Hussein and died as a martyr,” wrote the dead man's father, Aqub, to party leaders. “Please send the amount that was promised,” about $75 a month.

Another folder titled “Martyrs Regulations” notes that the president “has decided to give the martyrs of the Saddam's Muslim War (otherwise known as the Iran-Iraq war) and the Mother of all Battles a higher-ranking martyrs' position,” which would entitle families “to more generosity and benefits.” That generated a raft of appeals.