Sorting The Bad From The Not So Bad

By Brian Bennett/Baghdad

From his prison cell, Hilal Aboud al-Bayati used to dream of U.S. troops overthrowing Saddam Hussein's regime. A member of Iraq's Academy of Sciences and father of its national computer center, he was arrested in March 2000 at his University of Baghdad office and, in a secret trial, convicted of espionage. "All we discussed in prison was when the Americans were coming," says al-Bayati, who spent nearly three years behind bars with thousands of other political prisoners.

Today U.S. troops guard the entrance to Baghdad University, but al-Bayati, who gained his freedom in October 2002 in a general amnesty granted by Saddam and has returned to the school, says he is trapped in the past. His tormentors are still in power on the wooded campus. And, to his horror, the U.S. occupiers who are trying to reopen the university are working closely with officials there who colluded with the old regime. "Americans are dealing with the wrong people," says al-Bayati. "They were tools of Saddam Hussein who sat on our chests for 35 years."

It is a valid concern. But U.S. officials say they have to accept some compromises as they scramble to get the nation functioning again. Electricity supplies remain sporadic, garbage is mounting, and schools are only a third full. The streets are so dangerous and police so scarce that Iraqi mothers are afraid to let their daughters leave the house. Iraqis want things fixed fast, and their patience is wearing thin. Getting institutions functioning and bureaucrats back to work are necessary first steps. But what is to be done with the old bosses who were in tight with a cruel regime? Under Saddam, most high-and mid-level government officials joined the ruling Baath Party to advance their careers, as did many lower-level officials, including every police officer, letter carrier and teacher. Excluding all 1.5 million party members from the new government would mean shutting out virtually every public servant, precisely the people who know how to get things running again. "You cannot use this phrase," says Tim Carney, a former U.S. diplomat who is helping Iraq restart its industries, "but you don't want to throw out the baby with the Baath water."

For now, the U.S. occupation authority, headed by retired Lieut. General Jay Garner, is asking all Iraqi civil servants, whoever they are, to return to their desks. Said Garner in a press conference last week: "As in any totalitarian regime, there were many people who needed to join the Baath Party in order to get ahead in their careers. We don't have a problem with most of them. But we do have a problem with those who were part of the thug mechanism under Saddam." Once the U.S. identifies those in the second group, it will "get rid of them," Garner promised. Within that category, there has already been some self-selection. "The real thugs won't dare go back to work--we will throw them out," says Sala Korshed, 61, who manages the janitors and maintenance workers in the central office of state-run Rasheed Bank.

But Garner has doled out several high-level appointments to members of the Old Guard. The moves have infuriated coworkers and heightened fears among some that the defeated regime is not truly finished. Expediency is a factor. With the school year coming to a close, the Americans opted to maintain continuity at universities so students could finish their degrees and enter the job market on schedule. As a result, says Professor al-Bayati, everywhere he looks he sees colleagues who were integral figures in the old order. University president Mohammed al-Rawi, who was also Saddam's personal physician, kept his job. Al-Bayati says al-Rawi did nothing to defend him when he was framed as a spy after quitting the party in 1991 to protest Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. Al-Bayati's replacement as head of the university's computer program, Ahmed Makki Saaed, has retained his position too. Saaed, who al-Bayati says regularly denounced him as a spy for the U.S., is married to the recently nabbed Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, a microbiologist whose alleged involvement in bioweapons research earned her the nickname "Mrs. Anthrax."

Al-Bayati is incensed: "Coalition forces paid a big price to get rid of Saddam. If these people are left in office, they are capable of killing liberty again." He and other professors have gathered 300 signatures petitioning the U.S. to purge regime hard-liners from the education system. Last Friday U.S. officials met with a non-Baathist academic group assembled by al-Bayati. But al-Bayati still has concerns.

Similar controversies are brewing on other fronts. Last week a group of Baghdad health-care workers gathered in front of the Palestine Hotel, home to many foreign journalists, to protest the Americans' appointment of Ali Shnan al-Janabi as Health Minister. The workers opposed al-Janabi because he is a branch member of the Baath Party and is suspected of taking money and gifts from the regime. At the State Oil Marketing Organization, a former director says he is refusing to return to work under the U.S.-appointed head of the Oil Ministry, Thamer Ghadhban, because of the man's Baathist past.

As the Americans struggle to fill key posts, unreformed Baathist hard-liners are trying to reassert their authority. "We've left the bad Baathists a lot of latitude, and they have had a lot of time to regroup," says retired Colonel Ted Seel, Central Command liaison to the Iraqi National Congress, a group opposed to Saddam that recently returned from exile. Dr. Goran Talabani, a neurologist who is advising the Americans on Iraq's health-care system, says Baath loyalists are threatening Health Ministry employees and telling them not to cooperate with the Americans. Talabani, a cousin of Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani and a close adviser to Ahmed Chalabi, who heads the Iraqi National Congress, says he hears from several sources that the Baathists are allegedly reconstituting in secret under a new name: Hizballah al-'Auda (Party of the Return).

In time, the U.S. may adopt a formal system for determining who can serve in the new government. According to an American consultant on Garner's team, the U.S. is considering a plan to purge the top three tiers of Baathist leadership--involving at least 30,000 people. Another proposal would require all government employees to forswear loyalty to the Baath Party. Of course, people desperate for work are likely to sign anything.

Until it adopts a set of criteria for allotting official posts, the U.S. is relying on the advice of Iraqi exiles like Talabani. A member of Garner's staff in Kuwait before the war, Talabani gave the Americans a report on Iraq's health officials and their connections to the Baath Party. The most high-profile vetter is Iraqi businessman Saad al-Janabi, who fled the country in 1995 after falling out with Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay. Al-Janabi, who still has close ties with remnants of the old regime, has returned from Hemet, Calif. (where his wife Lori Van Arsdale is mayor), to his family home, now frequently visited by Americans, in the Mansour area of Baghdad. Al-Janabi, a well-heeled Arab with a pencil-thin mustache and an affinity for American slang, describes Garner as "my homie."

Al-Janabi says that over the past two weeks, he has held meetings at each Iraqi ministry to discuss which officials would be suitable to bring back. At the same time, he hopes to assuage fears among "acceptable" Baathists who are reluctant to work with the Americans. "After 35 years of dictatorship," says al-Janabi, "they cannot believe nothing will happen to them." He may have underestimated popular objections to some of the officials he is willing to rehabilitate. The Health Ministry's controversial Ali Shnan al-Janabi (no relation), for instance, was one of his recommendations.

But Iraqi objections to Ali Shnan al-Janabi and his ilk are precisely the kind of feedback the Americans say they need in order to rout out the irredeemable. "There will be a vetting process," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last week. "People will say, 'Well, wait a minute--those people were part of the senior Baath Party,' in which case they'll be taken out." The Garner camp has another fear: that some Iraqis may try to use the de-Baathification process to settle old scores, demanding that a boss be sacked for personal rather than political reasons. But generally U.S. officials are optimistic that the system can work. Says a Pentagon official: "We are bound to appoint some wrong people, but we are determined to correct any mistakes."

Just such a corrective exercise took place last week at the Ministry of Industry. Forty top officials had gathered in a boardroom when Carney, the U.S. adviser, walked in, downed a glass of sweet tea and announced something unthinkable under Saddam's rule: a free election. Carney, a former ambassador to Sudan and Haiti, had discovered that the man the U.S. had put in charge, ex-deputy minister Ahmed Rashid Gailini, was disliked by many of his subordinates for his ties to Saddam's regime. Rather than dismiss Gailini, Carney had persuaded him to step down and put his name up for re-election against another candidate, Mohammed Abdul Mujib, a ministry official in charge of investment. Carney and the two candidates left the room, and the attendees began a vigorous debate and then voted. When the results were announced, Abdul Mujib was in; Gailini was out. The vote was 38 to 2. U.S. officials had already dismissed four other Industry Ministry officials, either for Baath Party connections or for abrasive management style, but removing someone as powerful as Gailini was a delicate task. "This is the time of democracy," he said, clearly crestfallen. "Should I leave now?" Abdul Mujib, magnanimous in triumph, asked him to stay on as an adviser. --With reporting by Joshua Kucera, Terry McCarthy and Michael Weisskopf/Baghdad and Mark Thompson/Washington

With reporting by Joshua Kucera, Terry McCarthy and Michael Weisskopf/Baghdad and Mark Thompson/Washington