Iraq to allow Saddam regime officials back into government..

Iraq to allow Saddam regime officials back into government jobs

Law reaches out to sacked Ba'ath party members
· Hopes new bill will help to quell Sunni insurgency

Michael Howard in Baghdad
Wednesday March 28, 2007
The Guardian

Former members of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party who lost their jobs in the wake of the 2003 invasion will be allowed to take up posts in the government and security forces under a new law designed to foster reconciliation between Iraq's Shia and Sunni Arabs.

The US has been putting intense pressure on the Shia-led government to meet a series of benchmarks designed to bring Iraq's once all-powerful Sunni Arabs back into the fold and take the sting out of the insurgency, which is raging in many Sunni areas of the capital and beyond.

Leading Sunni figures hope the bill will also encourage the return to Iraq of thousands of Sunnis who have fled abroad since 2003. Under the new legislation, which will be sent to parliament by Iraq's president, Jalal Talabani, a Sunni Kurd, and prime minister Nuri al Maliki, a Shia Arab, those who do not find new employment will be eligible for state pensions.

The bill covers Ba'ath party members who served in Saddam's civil service and military organisations. But it excludes Ba'athists who have been charged with or are wanted for crimes committed under the former regime. According to the law, there would be a three-month challenge period after which former Ba'ath party loyalists would be immune from legal punishment for their actions under Saddam.

Saleh al Mutlaq, a leading Sunni politician who has links to the former Ba'ath party, said he backed the new law. "It is a belated opportunity to correct the mistakes made by Paul Bremer," he said. In May 2003, the US administrator Paul Bremer sacked the army and all civil servants and officials above the Ba'ath party's lowest levels. Critics of this so-called de-Ba'athification process say it has been one of the main factors in Iraq's current turmoil.

"You have to understand how much we feared the Ba'ath party," said one government official, a Shia, who had supported Mr Bremer's measures in 2003. But, he acknowledged: "The wholesale removal of the pillars of Iraq's administrative and security structures paralysed institutions and created half a million discontented and jobless people, many of them Sunni."

One of the main problems, said one western diplomat, was that the legal process to decide who was eligible for dismissal was too murky and there was no credible right of appeal.

"Despite the fact there were also many Shia Ba'athists, Sunnis saw de-Ba'athification merely as revenge against them on behalf of the Shia," he said. "Dealing with all Ba'athists the same way was wrong. Membership of the Ba'ath party was unavoidable for many people. Should they punish them for that?"

Despite the new proposals, it is unclear how many former Ba'ath members will apply for their jobs back. With militias and death squads linked to the ruling Shia alliance operating with relative ease in the capital and infiltrating the ministries, some former Ba'athists may simply opt to lie low.

Some Shia politicians are suspicious of the move, arguing that bringing former Ba'athists into security structures is irresponsible. "The fear is there will be even more bombs going off that kill us," said one member of the Shia Sadr movement in parliament.

As the US-Iraqi security plan for the capital entered its seventh week, the US army claimed a breakthrough yesterday saying it had netted leaders of a gang behind a wave of car bomb attacks that had killed and maimed civilians in mostly Shia areas of the capital.

In a statement the military said one of the alleged bombers, Haitham al Shimari, was suspected in the "planning and execution of the majority of car bombs which have killed hundreds of Iraqi citizens in Sadr City".

The US said the men were captured last week in the district of Adamiyah, a Sunni redoubt.

Guardian