Posted on 04/18/2003 5:00:05 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
BASRA, IRAQ--The bookkeepers of the police state were meticulous. Payoffs to tribal leaders, quotas for cheering crowds on Saddam Hussein's birthday, long lists of "bonuses" paid out to party members on every state occasion, reports on suspicious families and pro-Iranian Shiite "traitors" in their midst -- at the Mother of All Battles Branch of Iraq's ruling Baath Party, they wrote it all down.
Here at the chief party headquarters for Iraq's second city, near the party villas and the date palm groves and the decayed elegance of the Shatt-al-Arab waterway, officials kept a hand in nearly every aspect of daily life. They tracked thousands of army deserters and demanded still more recruits, they kept copious files on every comrade in their ranks, and they passed on warnings about spies and saboteurs.
No detail was too small to escape the party's attention -- from making sure women turned up at a military parade to determining the location of machine guns for defense of party buildings.
When British forces seized Basra little more than a week ago and the guards disappeared from the sandbagged entrance to the Mother of All Battles Branch, these documents and thousands more were left scattered about the looted party compound in the shadow of a defaced portrait of Saddam. The documents, hundreds of pages of which were translated in recent days, record the minutiae of party life in a dictatorship, details not previously available before the fall of Saddam's government.
Dozens of interviews in Basra over the past week -- with Baath Party members and former members and ordinary residents affected by the party's decisions -- help explain what this secretive bureaucracy meant to daily life: Children were urged to inform on their parents, officials in the regime were arrested and tortured then sent back to work, ambitious students who joined the party never believed in it as anything more than a tool for advancement.
To those who benefited, and there were many among Basra's Sunni Muslim minority, Baathism meant power and security and hero worship of Saddam. Although top leaders of the party have been arrested or killed or simply ran away, much of the party hierarchy is still in Basra, an unknown number still believing, as Ali Ahmad Majid Alghanim, a party member, said at his spacious family home the other day, that "Saddam Hussein is not finished, the Baath Party is not finished."
Asked where Saddam was now, he placed his hand over his chest. "In my heart," he said.
Overall, the documents and interviews offer of a portrait of a regime that ruled with two main tools: fear and money. The fear was of a party that watched everyone, that ordered the arrests of those who opposed it, that used torture and more mundane forms of coercion like withholding jobs and higher education from those who refused to join the party. The money was for those who cooperated with the system, whether tribal leaders whose authority grew in recent years or educated technocrats who got perks and power.
"We were made to do it," said Yakthem Hussein, a police officer who just weeks ago was carrying out arrest orders for the Baath Party. "Every employee in Iraq, even students, was in the Baath Party. It was an order, but we didn't believe." His fellow police officer and Baath Party member standing next to him had been arrested for refusing to obey an order, spent more than a year in jail, then returned to work on the force. "We were all afraid," Hussein said. "The only safe people were those at the top of the Baath Party."
But the Mother of All Battles Branch was not the all-powerful place it might have seemed.
The documents left behind also reveal in ways large and small the weaknesses of Saddam's regime. Army deserters were perhaps the single biggest preoccupation, alongside lack of adequate food and water for the troops, and failure to meet recruiting quotas.
"Everyone knew things were wrong in the party," said Baadai Anasazi. Once Anasazi was an insider, a party member for decades. As the former head of the statistics department of the Planning Ministry office in Basra, he can recount in detail the methods of the Baath Party: the false statistics the party put out, the elaborate ranking system for payoffs to tribal sheiks, the huge amount of time and effort wasted on demonstrations of support for Saddam.
Seventeen times a year "bonuses" were handed out to loyalists, he said.
Party demonstrations were more important than work. Reports said millions had been recruited for paramilitary groups, "but you couldn't even find 10 of them in reality."
Anasazi had been that rare thing in Saddam's Iraq: a true believer since the 1950s in the Baath Party's original mix of pan-Arab nationalism and socialism. But in 1998, he confronted a powerful official at a party meeting in front of more than 1,000 people over repression of the Marsh Arabs. Later, he said, he lost his job, quit the party, was arrested and spent six months in prison. His two sons also were arrested, and officials at his daughter's school tried to convince her to inform on her parents as a condition of finding work as a teacher.
"We lived in a state of terror," he said. "The party's principles were to ignore social and economic issues and to only pay attention to security. The job of a party member was only security and to love the president and to show support for the party."
Security was an obsession throughout the hierarchy.
Several documents concern the danger posed by Iranian agents and suspected acts of sabotage in southern Iraq.
Not all threats to the party came from outside, though. One slide found in the files was a photograph of a detailed hand-drawn map. The caption on the outside identified it as "location of traitors in the city's marshes."
Another document, from March 2 of last year, recorded the dismissal of a party member who had been deemed a security risk. The report on Haithen Hussein Tahir could serve as a narrative all on its own of the story of resistance and repression in southern Iraq. That he still was trying to be a party member at all speaks to the many benefits of Baath affiliation.
According to the report, Tahir had a long dossier. It claimed he and his brothers had participated in the 1991 Shiite uprising against Saddam's government after the Persian Gulf War. Another brother fled to the U.S., the report said, and an uncle had been hanged by the Iraqi government for belonging to a banned Shiite religious party.
"For these reasons, he is not qualified to be a party member," the report dryly concluded.
Basra is a poor city in the poorest part of a poor country, and the Baath Party had money from Baghdad to hand out. For every holiday or Baathist special occasion, favorites of the regime got a handout.
Money also also spent to keep up the regime's appearances. Saddam's birthday party, for example, was orches-trated carefully from Baghdad, which sent the Mother of All Battles Branch 3 million dinars last April to cover expenses. "God keep him safe," said the instructions.
Hundreds of pages in the files were reserved for documenting another kind of Baath Party payout -- to guards who managed to catch an army deserter. The papers suggest this was an everyday occurrence in an army with serious morale problems.
A Basra resident, Daoud Khalaf, said he had been arrested and tortured in 1998 for allegedly killing two Baath Party officials.
"There's no one who wasn't tortured in some way in Iraq," he said. "Any person the Baath Party wanted to take to prison, they would take to prison in Iraq."
In the end, an old man spoke for the rest in addressing the Baathists. Sattar Tahir quoted an Arabic proverb. Roughly translated, it means, "May they die and never come back."
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