Tuesday, November 07, 2006

 

Baathists could be reinstated

Politics
Thousands of former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party, purged after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, could return to public life under proposals being presented to parliament, a senior official said on Tuesday. Ali Faysal al-Lami, executive director of the De-Baathification Committee set up by the United States after Saddam's 2003 overthrow, said the committee will recommend allowing most former Baath party officals to return to work. About 1.5 million of Iraq's 27 million people belonged to the Baath party — formally known as the Baath Arab Socialist Party — when Saddam was ousted. Most said they joined for professional, not ideological, reasons. The proposals to be put to parliament will reduce the number of senior ex-Baathists excluded from public life from 30,000 to just 1,500 senior officials, he said. "We are going to deliver these proposals to parliament in a few days," Lami told Reuters. The move addresses long-standing demands of Saddam's fellow minority Sunni Arabs. Critics complained too many people were affected, including vital bureaucrats and many who joined the party from necessity rather than conviction.
Ahmed al-Alwani, a Sunni member of parliament from the Accordance List, said the original de-Baathification law had been used selectively, targeting Sunni Arabs far more than Shi'ites who had also been members of the Baath Party. Lami said that if parliament approved the draft amendment, all but the 1,500 most senior former Baath Party officials would be allowed either to return to their jobs or to take retirement. Reform of the de-Baathification Committee is among a series of "benchmarks" for progress in Iraq that the U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said last month Washington was hoping to see.
COMMENT: This appears to be an olive branch from the Shias and is something the Sunnis have requested for a long time in return for containing the insurgency. It is possible the Shias are finally bowing in to pressure on this issue as they fear their position may be weakened due to direct negotiations between the U.S. and the Sunnis which have recently been reported. However, it may not be as generous as it appears because currently it is only a draft law which will take months of negotiations and amendments before it is enforced. Also, we have not heard the Sunni reaction yet. COMMENT ENDS.





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