[Mb-civic] Iraqi Alliance Seeks to Oust Top Officials of Hussein Era By Ellen Knickmeyer The Washington Post

[Michael Butler]

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    Iraqi Alliance Seeks to Oust Top Officials of Hussein Era
    By Ellen Knickmeyer
    The Washington Post

    Monday 18 April 2005

    Baghdad -- The Shiite Muslim bloc leading the new Iraqi government will
demand the removal of all top officials left over from the era of former
president Saddam Hussein, a top official said. The move would be part of a
purge that U.S. officials fear could oust thousands of the most capable
Iraqis from military and intelligence forces the United States has spent
more than $5 billion rebuilding.

    The Shiite-dominated United Iraqi Alliance also will insist on trials
for every former official, soldier or worker suspected of wrongdoing during
that time, Hussain Shahristani, who helped form the Shiite alliance, said in
an interview that outlined plans for handling members of Hussein's Baath
Party in the armed forces and intelligence services.

    Shahristani said the alliance would also seek prosecution of what he
said were the few thousand leaders of the Sunni Muslim-led insurgency.

    For the alliance and the long-persecuted Shiite community it represents,
Shahristani said "justice prevails" over everything else.

    Concerns about the purge have drawn sharp U.S. concern. Defense
Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, flying unannounced to Iraq last week, warned
the Shiite-led government not to "come in and clean house" in the security
forces.

    The Shiite alliance's plan also runs counter to efforts by other Iraqi
politicians who say they hope to defuse the insurgency by drawing the
disgruntled Sunni minority, routed from power with Hussein, back into the
political process. The new president, Jalal Talabani, whose Kurdish bloc is
in the governing coalition with the Shiite alliance, has called for an
amnesty and government negotiations with some insurgents.

    But Shahristani said the Shiite-led alliance believes weapons, not
appeasement, will end the insurgency.

    "I don't think the insurgency can be beaten by negotiations," said
Shahristani, who is close to Iraq's most politically influential religious
leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. "For us in the alliance, we don't think
it's serious. We think it's surrender, and the Iraqi people will not accept
surrender."

    How the purge is handled stands as one of the most potentially divisive
and dangerous tasks facing the Shiite-Kurdish coalition brought to power by
the Jan. 30 national elections. Adnan Ali Kadhimi, an aide to the incoming
prime minister, Ibrahim Jafari, said Sunday that he was working to announce
Jafari's new cabinet by early next week. Jafari is the country's first
Shiite premier in a half-century.

    Under Hussein, registration in the Baath Party was a requirement for
jobs on almost all levels, from army general to teacher. Hussein's armed
forces and his nearly two dozen intelligence agencies were responsible for
mass killings, imprisonment, uprooting and torture. Members of the Shiite
and Kurdish opposition made up hundreds of thousands of the victims.

    Politicians say that people responsible for some of those abuses and
Baathist die-hards have made their way into the new security forces and
should be removed.

    But too broad and deep a purge threatens to worsen one of the biggest
legacies of Hussein's overthrow and the U.S. occupation: the growing
sectarian and ethnic cast to the country's politics.

    The perception of Shiite-dominated security forces and intelligence
would heighten the sense of siege among some Sunni communities. Kurds and
other Shiite groups might be less willing to disband their militias, seeing
them as a last defense to Shiite Islamic ambitions.

    Wamidh Nadhmi, the leader of the Arab Nationalist Trend and a spokesman
for a coalition of Sunni and Shiite groups that had boycotted the elections,
said an aggressive purge of Iraq's security forces would end up riddling
them with partisan loyalties, a frequent theme in Iraq's history, as parties
vied for power.

    "These people are threatening us with a warlord system that will destroy
the country," Nadhmi said.

    U.S. and many Iraqi leaders say throwing Baath-era officials and
officers out of work could encourage them to join the insurgency.

    A top U.S. concern is that the purge will go too far in military terms
alone, decimating the new forces as they battle the insurgency across the
country, a U.S. official in Baghdad said.

    If the Shiite-led bloc "is going to do a very hard purge of everybody
who ever carried a Baathist registration card, you're going to get rid of
people who really have the experience and have proved themselves," the
official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

    "We're really convinced that they're the key," he said of the Baath-era
veterans, citing the performance of mid-level former Baath officers in
important battles -- and the American lives and dollars invested in
rebuilding Iraq's military.

    And in a climate where sectarian and ethnic divisions are sharp,
mistakes could gain a momentum of their own, a senior U.S. military official
said, also speaking on condition of anonymity.

    "Parties that come to the table don't come to the table with a great
deal of trust for each other," he said. "And so any perceived missteps, any
perceived overuse of power or underuse of power, depending on where you sit,
I think, is going to be magnified. And so there is a danger just going down
this entire process."

    He said he saw a risk and a benefit in a purge.

    "If you're talking about a purge, you have the very simple fact that you
have a force that is gutted so you have a less capable force," he said. "If
you don't have a purge, you've got some group that will sit on the side that
looks at the members of the security forces and say some number of those
should have been purged and that feeds the level of mistrust."

    Shahristani pointed to the intelligence services as one of the main
battlegrounds, as the Shiite alliance vies with Baath-era holdovers for
control of the agencies and files.

    Postwar intelligence services are staffed by many Baath officials and
agents called back to duty by the CIA, in its search for solid intelligence
against insurgents, U.S. and Iraqi officials have said.

    "We know that most senior officials in the department are from the
previous intelligence department who've been oppressing the Iraqi people,"
Shahristani said.

    Lawmakers of the governing coalition say the Shiite alliance has agreed
not to disband the key intelligence services. The question will be who
directs and staffs them, they say. Any bloc that holds unchallenged control
of national security agencies and their files would have the means, and
information, to identify its political enemies.

    If Sunni intelligence officials are purged, Shiite hard-liners would be
ready to move in intelligence units of Shiite militias including the Badr
Brigade, a group formed by Iraqi Shiite leaders when they were in exile in
Iran while Hussein was in power.

    "You have to assume -- Allawi assumes -- that the Badr Brigade would
want to infiltrate security," a top Kurdish official in the coalition with
the alliance said, referring to Ayad Allawi, prime minister in the interim
government and one of the main officials now working to counter Shiite
sectarianism in the new government.

    Shahristani said the alliance's take on the purge was only slightly
tougher than Allawi's. For the alliance, he said, "de-Baathification does
not mean de-Sunnification, nor does it mean every single member of the Baath
Party is guilty until proven innocent."

    With only 17 Sunni lawmakers in the new 275-member assembly as a result
of the Sunni boycott of elections, Sunnis largely have to look to others to
represent their interests in the upcoming purge.

    Nadhmi said he suspected that the United States would serve as a check.

    "I cannot see that the Americans would allow the total dissolution of a
system which they helped and which they initiated," he said. "They will be
forced into a lot of compromises."