The Workers’ Movement in Modern Iraq Pt. 1

Report presented at the May 2003 and May 2005 party meetings.

Iraq under the monarchy

The social structure

The region we know today as Iraq was incorporated into the world market in the second half of the 19th Century, from when the Suez Canal opened in 1869, and it entered it as a grain exporting country. Within the space of a few decades market oriented agriculture would experience an unprecedented development. If between 1867-1871 the value of cereal exports was 140 thousand pounds sterling per annum, by 1912-1913 it had risen to 8 million pounds per annum.

This almost sixty-fold growth in production over a space of 40 years was determined by a process of agricultural modernisation that would cause the disintegration of the earlier pastoral economy, structured at the social level around tribes, and lead to the abandonment of nomadism. Between 1860 and 1930 nomads would decrease from 37% of the overall population to 7%, whilst the percentage of peasant farmers would increase from 41% to 68%. Meanwhile, due to the direct intervention of the Turkish State, in whose territory Iraq lay, the land hitherto held as common property would be divided up, and the old tribal chieftains (known as shaikhs in the Arab areas and aghas in the Kurdish ones) would be transformed into landed proprietors. Indeed in the 1870s a reform to the system of land ownership was introduced which made ownership dependent on the production of a title deed; the land remained State property, but the registered owner of the title deed could enjoy virtually total rights of ownership.

According to the new code,

‘collective landed property was expressly prohibited and registration of the title deeds could only be in the name of an individual. In the areas of largely tribal cultivation, it was often the name of the Shaikh, as the most powerful and prestigious individual, that was placed on the title deed. Either through ignorance or suspicion, or through a misplaced trust in the altruism of the shaikhly families, the great majority of the tribal cultivators failed to register and were thus transformed into tenant farmers’ (Charles Tripp, History of Iraq, 2nd edition, p.16).

This process of centralisation of landed property in the hands of the shaikhs was later aggravated by the English occupation, then control, of the three Ottoman provinces of Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and by the birth of the Iraqi State under the Hashemite monarchy in 1921. The English would confirm the landed proprietors as the mainstay of Iraqi society. The pro-British monarchy would be propped up by this social class of rich landowners and work exclusively in their interests, promulgating laws that broadened and protected their rights, repressing peasant uprisings and using a good part of the state budget to benefit them. Within the space of a few decades they managed to concentrate virtually all the land in their hands. When the monarchy fell, in 1958, 2% of the landowners owned two thirds of the land under cultivation and just 49 great families owned 17% of it. Meanwhile, at the other extreme, 64% of the peasant proprietors owned a mere 3.6%.

The predominant lease-holding system was the iqta, by which the great land holdings were divided into small plots that were rented or share-cropped by peasant families, bound by a quasi-servile relationship to the owner.

     ‘In 1933, the dominant influence of the landowners was again apparent in the Law Governing the Rights and Duties of the Cultivators. This gave landowners wide powers over their tenants, holding the latter responsible for crop failures, making them vulnerable to eviction at short notice on one hand, and tying them to the land until all their debts to the landowner were discharged on the other. Given the condition of peasant indebtedness in certain areas, this caused many to flee the land for a life of destitution in the sarifas (reed and mud hut slums) around Baghdad’ (Tripp, p.85).

One of the consequences of this lease-holding system was that agricultural production, destined mainly for export, was increased, both by bringing more land under cultivation (increased fivefold between 1913 and 1943 and doubling again between 1943 and 1958) and by ramping up the pressure on the peasant farmers (in the 50s many sharecroppers only received 15-20% of the harvest). The technical improvement of agriculture, meanwhile, was obstructed.

The backwardness of these relations in the countryside was also one of the causes of the country’s slow industrial development. Since the often absentee landlords were loathe to invest their earnings in industry, industrial development was slow and confined largely to the processing of agricultural products and the production of goods for the very restricted internal market.

Oil production, completely in the hands of foreign companies, started to become significant around 1934.

Within this economic context the main concentrations of workers that arose were the dockers in Basra (5,000 workers in the 1940s), on the railways (11,000) and in the oil industry (13,000). Taken as a whole the number of Iraqi workers in enterprises with more than 100 employees rose from 13,000 in 1926 to 63,000 in 1954, of whom half were concentrated in Baghdad and Basra. In the 1950s, if we include workers in the transport and services sector, there were around 400,000 proletarians out of a total urban population of 2,600,000, but for the most part these were employed in minuscule companies employing less than five workers.

During the entire first half of the 19th Century proletarians existed in conditions of dire poverty. In the 1950s, 80% of the population, and 90% of women, were illiterate; there was one doctor to every 6,000 people and one dentist to every 500,000. Welfare assistance for the unemployed, the elderly and the disabled simply didn’t exist. Life expectancy in the rural areas was between 35 and 39 years.

During this phase of economic development the Iraqi bourgeoisie, as a social class, was inevitably very fragile; its most important sector, the commercial bourgeoisie, was totally uninterested in long-term investments whereas the industrial bourgeoisie was directly linked, often via family ties, to big landed property, with 34% of the young Iraqi industrial sector taken up with the processing of agricultural products.
 

The birth of the trade unions

The first economic organisation of a trade-unionist type was called the ‘Association of Artisans’, founded in 1929. It was led by Muhammed Salih al-Qazzaz, a mechanic who became the first workers’ leader in Iraq, and it combined features both typical of a corporation and a modern trade union organisation. Exclusively class characteristics were lacking since along with the workers in the railway workshops of Baghdad it also organised artisans and small traders, who were fighting mainly for a less iniquitous tax system.

The Association organised a 14-day general strike on July 1931 against the new municipal taxes, mobilising opposition to the British backed monarchy on a nationwide scale. The government responded by outlawing the Association and arresting its leader. It would nevertheless be an undaunted al-Qazzaz who in 1932 formed the first trade union federation. In January 1934, after it had organised a month-long boycott of the British-owned electric power company in Baghdad, this would be outlawed as well.

For the next ten years any kind of legal trade union activity was impossible, but that didn’t stop workers throughout Iraq taking mass strike action for higher wages in April-May 1937, with an estimated 20,000 workers taking part in the strike.
 

Communist penetration

The spread of the communist movement in Iraq during the 1920s was similar to what had occurred in Russia, where the penetration of communist theory was accomplished by intellectuals, the only ones able to read the communist literature, which was almost non-existent in the Russian language; thus it happened in Iraq, where the first communists came mainly from petty bourgeois families. But if in Baghdad propaganda was mainly confined to intellectual circles, in Basra and Nasiriyya, workers’ cities, it was also aimed at workers.

The first appeal, ascribable to a communist organisation, we know about was signed by “a communist worker” and appeared in Nassiriyya in December 1932, entitled ‘Workers of the world unite! Long life to the union of worker and peasant republics of the Arab countries!’ The text was very basic, but its tone was nevertheless clearly classist. This, along with most of the other Iraqi Communist Party documents we will cite, is taken from the book by Ilario Salucci entitled: al-Wathbah (il salto) Movimento comunista e lotta di classe in Iraq (1924-2003) which also includes a detailed bibliography.

Not long after the circles in Baghdad, Basra and Nassiriyya would fix a date for a congress of unification. On March 8, 1935, the birth of the Iraqi communist party was proclaimed in Baghdad under the very generic title of ‘The Anti-Imperialism Association’, probably a way of trying to evade repression, at least temporarily. The Manifesto of the Association was addressed

     ‘To the workers and peasants, soldiers and students, to all the oppressed!” and certainly expressed a greater political maturity than before by delineating a clear critique, also from an economic point of view, of the system of exploitation to which the Iraqi proletariat had been subjected by the indigenous ruling classes, who in their turn were inseparably linked to British imperialism. The Association immediately launched a programme of demands for both the city and rural proletariat.
     The first Iraqi revolution [against the British occupation in 1920] would grow thanks to our efforts, thanks to us, the worker and peasant masses. It was our class that bore the anguish, the sacrifices, the tens of thousands of victims (…) The beneficiaries were the financiers, the feudal lords, and the high-ranking officials (…) Our lot instead was hunger, cold and terrible illness (…) and a horde of tax inspectors without a shadow of human pity or dignity (…)
     Today the English and the dominant class are united in their aim of perpetuating the oppression and exploitation from which we suffer… The country’s oil and other raw materials have become an exclusively English preserve, and Iraq is reduced to being an outlet for their commodities and their surplus capital, and into a base for their wars against the neighbouring peoples and any aspiration for liberty that the Arab countries may have. The dominant class, for its part, gorges itself on the tax income, unlawfully appropriates the land, and builds palaces on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates. Meanwhile millions of peasants and workers continue to die of hunger, bleed to death, and suffer torment (…)
     We must put an end to these unjust and intolerable conditions. We demand a change in the very foundations of life, a decisive change of advantage to all the productive classes (…) Let us again raise our voices in the countryside, a sound which fills the hearts of our oppressors with terror (…) City-dweller and villager, worker and peasant, united together, of whatever sect or race, supported by the revolutionary thinkers, we march side by side in order, in the first phase of the struggle, to conquer: – the cancellation of all peasant debts; their liberation from burdensome taxes; the distribution of state land to the poor; and the guarantee of all necessary credit; – a guarantee to the workers of their right to organise and to freedom of speech (…) The reopening of their clubs and trades unions; the promulgation of laws to protect workers (…) against arbitrary dismissals and to insure them against hunger in old age; and the realisation of the 8 hour day in all workplaces, applicable to both Iraqi and foreign workers (…)
     Down with English imperialism! Down with the slave-owners’ treaties! Long live the united front against imperialism and against the oppressors of peasants and workers’.

However, after only a month in existence, the party would break up over the question of whether or not to present itself publicly as a communist party: some groups would split off (in Basra, in Nasiriyya, a partial split in Baghdad), whilst the remaining nucleus decided to publish an illegal newspaper, The People’s Struggle, subtitled ‘organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Iraq’, whose first number came out in July.

The six-point programme, published in August 1935, was a call to fight for:

     ‘1. The expulsion of the imperialists; for the people’s liberty to be guaranteed, for complete independence for the Kurds, and cultural rights (…) for all minorities in Iraq; 2. The distribution of land to the peasantry; 3. The abolition of all debts and mortgages on land (…); 4. The requisition of all property belonging to the imperialists, primarily the banks, oil fields, railways, and the expropriation of the big landowners; 5. The concentration of power in the hands of workers and peasants; 6. An immediate commencement of the social revolution in all areas of life and the freeing of the people from all the various existing forms of oppression’.

It is interesting to note how the programme addressed both workers and peasants without distinction. It focused on class contradictions alone and totally ignored religious differences, recognising the existence of a national question only in the case of the Kurds and other minorities.

Probably their inexperience, and a lack of the necessary discipline required under conditions of illegality, meant the militants publishing The People’s Struggle were soon arrested, and the newspaper, which had had a print run of around 500 per issue, folded at the end of 1935.

But also the external environment in which the young party had arisen and put down roots was dominated by a Stalinized Communist International which was already completely subjected to the interests of the Russian State. The ex-soviet Russian government was by now just another bourgeois state amongst others in a capitalist world. No longer did it support the taking of power by the proletariat in other countries since any such support would threaten its various collaborative relationships and diplomatic alliances.

The suicidal tactic of the Revolution in stages, imposed on the various national sections, lent itself very well to the aim of burying revolutionary politics. First of all the CPs were supposed to complete, or carry out as the case may be, the bourgeois revolution side by side with the bourgeois nationalists, and only then, with the bourgeois revolution completed and all its institutions up and running, could they go on to fight for socialism.

The VIIth Congress of the Communist International in 1935 imposed the tactic of the Anti-imperialist Popular Front in the colonial countries, which relegated communists to

‘taking an active part in the anti-imperialist mass movement headed by the national reformists, and striving to implement joint action with the national reformist and national revolutionary organisations on the basis of a well-defined anti-imperialist platform’,

thereby taking away from them any autonomous function.
A later resolution, approved by the secretary of the Communist International in 1936 and addressed to the Arab sections, made no reference to class struggle at all:

     ‘Communists in the Arab countries must be profoundly aware of the fact that they respond to the destiny of their people and their country, that on them falls the responsibility of the outcome of the struggle for national independence and social emancipation. They must be conscious of the fact that they are the heirs and defenders of the best national and cultural traditions of their peoples’.

The Communist parties were urged to

‘ensure a strict collaboration with the national-revolutionaries, to achieve strict collaboration with the national-reformist organisations, to support the demands of these organisations directed against the positions of imperialism’.

Political Crisis in the Thirties

In the 1930s the structure of Iraqi monarchical power ran into crisis. On June 30, 1930, the incoming prime Minister, Nuri al-Sa’id, signed a new treaty, replacing the 1922 one, with Great Britain.

     ‘This diplomatic act recognised Iraq’s independence, with the reservation that important privileges for Great Britain would be maintained for a period of twenty five years, amongst which the possession of two military bases, Habbaniyya near Baghdad and Shu?aiba near Basra. The nationalists were indignant and the population became restive, but Nuri al-Sa?id, who combined in his person the functions of president of the council, and Minister of Foreign Affairs, of the Home Office and of Defence, held the country in a grip of iron. On October 3, 1932, Iraq, under British sponsorship, entered the League of Nations: the British mandate was brought automatically to an end’ (P.Rondot, L’Irak, p.28).

The rapid growth of a powerful elite was based mainly on the Sunni community and the army, formed by the English in 1921, and on the monarchy.

In 1934 the king managed to introduce obligatory military conscription. This provision incurred the hostility of London, who wanted a less numerous, less expensive and more controllable professional army; the monarchy instead intended to use the army as an instrument to unify the country and reinforce national sentiments; the introduction of obligatory conscription was however greeted negatively by the Shiite landowners in the South and by the Kurds.

In January 1935, unrest erupted in the mid-Euphrates region and in 1935 prominent tribal shaikhs would present a People’s Charter, outlining the concerns of a large section of the population, to the government:

     ‘It accepted the Iraqi State, but focused on the lack of proportional representation for the Shi’a in parliament and the judiciary and called for free elections, freedom of the press and tax reductions’ (Tripp, p. 82).

After weeks of negotiations, the government decided to resort to repression. Martial law was proclaimed and the Shaikh’s rebellion would be crushed by the army, which was composed mainly of officers and troops from the Sunni areas and under the orders of Bakr Sidqi, the commanding officer of the southern region, who didn’t hesitate to use the recently formed air force against the insurgents. Following this bloody repression ‘it was clear – commented Tripp – that the tribes were no longer a threat to the power of the central state’.

Meanwhile a political opposition to the monarchical power was growing in the cities as well. Composed mainly of intellectuals and professionals, the rising bourgeoisie, it was critical of the cliques and factions which had entrenched themselves at the summit of the Iraqi state. This opposition, organised around the Al-Ahali newspaper, saw that many of Iraq’s financial difficulties, many of its social and economic problems could be laid at the door of the country’s principal landowners, who were accused of conducting a policy of out and out robbery against the poorest classes, and of provoking a situation so fraught with social tension that it even endangered the interests of the bourgeois Iraqi state.
 

The Coup d’Ètat of 1936

In October 1936, whilst the new prime minister’s brother and chief of the general staff, Taha al-Hashimi, was on a state visit to Turkey, having appointed Bakr Sidqi acting chief of the general staff, the latter, in collusion with Hikmat Sulaiman and other leaders of the Ahali group, would order units under his command to march on Baghdad. At the same time he asked the king to dismiss Yasin al-Hashimi as prime minister and appoint Hikmat Sulaiman in his place, which the king hastened to do.

The new government was formed principally from members of the Ahali group, including a significant numbers of Shi?i ministers, but Bakr Sidqi, who only a few months before had given the order to massacre the insurgent peasants, would become permanent chief of the general staff. Despite this, the new government seemed to promise a new era of social reform and its formation

«was greeted by demonstrations of support in towns throughout Iraq, arranged by various radical discussion groups, by the informal and underground labour associations and by the embryonic Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), all expecting that their various goals could now be achieved» (Tripp, p.91).

Thus the ‘embryonic’ ICP, in deference to Moscow’s orders, although meeting resistance from some comrades, supported General Bakr Sidqi’s coup d’ètat and entered the Popular Reform Association, a progressive organisation which was fighting for democratic freedom, the legalisation of trade unions, the eight hour day and the fixing of a minimum wage, for land reform and for the introduction of a progressive income tax.

The support given by the communists to the bourgeoisie’s ‘progressive’ faction would cost them dear: it would need only the Popular Reform Association’s modest proposal to distribute a limited amount of government land to individual peasant proprietors to bring the big landed proprietors and bourgeoisie back into a common front against the reformists, who were accused of wishing to introduce radical land reform and of being communists in disguise.

     ‘A series of strikes in March and April over questions of pay and conditions of work were taken up by those reformists who wanted to put on a show of defiance against their growing exclusion. However, this only hardened the lines of conflict. Hikmat Sulaiman showed his own authoritarian preferences by using police to end the strikes, arresting some of the organisers and sending others into internal exile’ (Tripp, p.92).

On 12 July 1937, the Popular Reform Association was suppressed, and numerous high-ranking communists were arrested, expelled from Iraq, or forced to flee abroad. From then until 1946 all party political action was made illegal.

A few decades later, after the Iraqi proletariat had suffered several bloody defeats, the Stalinist Aldo Agosti would comment on these tragic events in his Storia dell’Internazionale Comunista (Vol II, book 2, p.927):

     ‘The orientation given by the Comintern to the action of the Arabic communist parties also had a positive effect in Iraq, where the coup d’ètat of the military progressives in October 1936 was, after some hesitation, resolutely supported by the small communist party, which had an important role in mobilising the masses by posing land reform and the nationalisation of industry as objectives. The Popular Reform Association, which took over the reins of government, in some ways resembled a real popular front, and the experiment was followed in the Comintern press with much hope and interest. But by June 1937, deep conflict had already emerged in the new leadership between moderates and revolutionaries, and the left-wing elements, including the communists, were expelled from the government and forced on to the offensive’.

Nothing here about the bourgeoisie’s repressive action, not a word of criticism against the suicidal tactic the Comintern imposed on the young Iraqi party, which was forced to tail behind the bourgeoisie and renounce its defining features.

Our current’s organ at the time was Bilan, and in its Autumn 1937 issue we find a rather more lucid interpretation:

     ‘Centrism – it wrote – evidently sees the nationalist movements as very important and invites their representatives to its “anti-imperialist” congresses. However, it is indisputable that the Wafd in Egypt, the Arab Executive Committee in Palestine, the National “bloc” in Syria and the Destour (nationalist party) in Tunisia are always prepared to come to terms with imperialism. And when they have headed violent protests, they have done so with the aim of putting a break on them and preventing them from being resolving in a class way. For both foreign imperialism and for the privileged Arab classes, the enemy is the same: the exploited masses seeking an outlet. The great revolt in Morocco in 1924-26 (Abd-el-Krim), in Syria in 1925, the movement in Palestine in 1929 and 1936, the protest movements in Tunisia and Egypt, rather than being the work of nationalists are expressions of the masses’ discontent about being doubly exploited. And less still are they anything to do with the “red hand” of Moscow (…)
     Clearly there are communist parties in the Middle East, at least in Egypt, Palestine, Syria and in French North Africa, but they are all very weak numerically and are being subjected to the most ruthless repression by ‘democratic’ France and England. Their internal history has been shaped by the ‘arabization’ demanded by Moscow, which means, in short, their integration into the nationalist movement. Naturally they have their trotskist minorities, and we all know what that means’.

By 1937, despite all the repression, a ‘communist’ cell had already re-formed in Baghdad, and in January 1938 Yusuf Salman Yusuf, a militant who had been out to Moscow in 1935 where he had attended the party schools, would become a member.

In this period, the young party appears in line with traditional communism and internationalism: the war is imperialist and must be fought on both fronts; the party fights for Iraq to remain neutral and opposes the transit of English troops. This position, however, was dictated by the Kremlin, which after concluding the non-aggression pact with Hitlerite Germany on 23 August 1939 had, by the end of September, transformed it into an out and out pact of friendship. This forced the Communist International to ‘review’ the watchwords regarding the war, which was no longer a battle between democracy and fascism, as was maintained at the time of the Popular Fronts, defended just four years earlier at the 7th Congress of the C.I., but an ‘imperialist war’.

This new about-turn in the orientation of the Communist International was made official in an article by Dimitrov and in the appeal for the 22nd anniversary of the October revolution in November 1939, in which the war is defined as ‘unjust, reactionary and imperialist’ and is presented as the fruit of rivalry between the great powers for colonies and for control of the sources of raw materials, for domination of the maritime routes and for the exploitation of other peoples. The responsibility for the war is no longer attributed to Nazi Germany but to the English and French imperialists.

     ‘In this situation – wrote Dimitrov in his article – there is only one correct position: a courageous and uncompromising struggle against the imperialist war, a struggle against those responsible and the agents of this war, primarily in their own respective countries, a struggle to put an end to this brigandish war’.

Fine. A pity that these were just empty words, given that the policies of the International weren’t intended to save the proletariat from the terrible experience of a new even more devastating imperialist war, by preparing it to transform the war into a class war, but rather designed to support Moscow’s complex diplomatic manoeuvrings.

The small group that formed the Iraqi Communist Party was strong enough in December 1940 to form a ‘Central Committee’ and launch its own newspaper, The Spark, and although to begin with the latter only had a circulation of 90 copies this would rise to 2,000 within the space of two years. But the reconstituted party had initiated its task at a particularly difficult moment, for the second imperialist conflict was now in full swing, and the Middle-East would be one of the principal theatres of war.
 

Iraq in the Second World War

The outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939 led to a consolidation of Britain’s grip on Iraq. London asked the Iraqi government to sever diplomatic relations with Germany, to intern all German citizens present in Iraq and to assist the English army in every way possible. King Ghazi, who had barely disguised his hostility to British policy in the Middle East, had died in a car accident in April 1939 leaving the three-year old King Feisal II as his successor. Prince ‘Abd al-Ilah, who was far more tolerant of British pressure, would be nominated regent.

Meanwhile a series of Coup d’ètat’s had led to sectors of the modernist bourgeoisie being expelled from the government and to a reinforcement of the power of the military hierarchies. The government was led by Nuri al-Sa’id, who had already demonstrated his political gifts, and loyalty to British interests, by repressing the strike of the summer of 1931.

     ‘As the war in Europe unfolded, bringing with it a succession of German victories, Italy’s entry into the war and the fall of France, opinion within the cabinet and in Iraq became more clearly divided between those who believed that Iraq should do what it could to assist the Allied cause and those who believed this would be fatal for Iraq’s interests’ (Tripp, p.101).

Gathered around the so-called ‘Golden Square’, a faction within the military hierarchy, convinced of the imminent victory of the Axis powers and intolerant of English pressure, forced Nuri al-Sa’id to resign and to flee to Transjordan, with the regent, whilst divisions of the Iraqi army occupied Baghdad. A government of national defence was formed presided over by Rashid ‘Ali al-Kailani, with the aim of ‘safeguarding the integrity and security of the country’.
As the German troops flooded into the Balkans and in North Africa marched on Tobruk with the Italians, it was a critical moment for the Allies. Faced with this very serious threat they needed to prevent the possibility of a breach opening up to the rear of the British front.

Despite the new government’s attempts to reassure Great Britain that it would respect its obligations under the treaty, London refused to recognise it, and decided to test its intentions by requesting permission to immediately land troops at Basra. Faced with the temporising attitude of the Iraqi government, British troop landings went ahead without awaiting Iraqi authorisation. The Iraqi government responded by ordering units to take up positions overlooking the British air base at Habbaniyya and, on May 2, the base commander ordered his forces to attack them. The ‘thirty day war’ had begun. The communists supported the new regime, which obtained diplomatic recognition from Russia. There was great popular excitement. The communists awaited arms from Russia, which needless to say never arrived. The government meanwhile suspended the constitution and rights of political and trade union association.

Despite the popular mobilisation, the English would easily gain the upper hand over the Iraqi army. From the South, English troop reinforcements from India worked their way up towards Basra, whilst from the West, the Arab Legion (a Bedouin force trained by English army officers) headed out from the secure base in Transjordan to attack the key strategic and oil bearing zone of Rutba. It was a race against time to head off the possibility of Germany and Italy intervening on Iraq’s behalf (the German operation in Crete had got underway on May 20) but only a few planes would get through to al-Kailani. On May 31, 1941, the prime minister was overthrown in a Coup d’ètat inspired by the pro-British prince regent ‘Abd al-Ilah. On the 1st of June, English troops occupied Baghdad.

On June 22, 1941, Germany mounted its surprise attack on Russia. This event, for which Russia was totally unprepared, prompted it to impose a sudden change of policy on the communist parties: those states newly allied with the USSR became ‘democratic’ again, and every action against them, and their colonies, would have to stop. The Iraqi Communist Party found this a particularly bitter pill to swallow, and it is not until November that we read in ones of its documents:

     ‘If the English government were to seek the support of the great masses, alleviating the bitter crisis they have been caught up in (…) then free and enlightened Arab youth, followed by the vast Arab masses, will also take up arms and fight for the democratic front that is also our front (…) With the entry into the war of the Soviet Union and the Chinese Republic and as a consequence of the attitude taken by the American and English people, the hostilities have lost their imperialist character (…) The war is now a war of humanity as a whole since on its outcome the destiny of every nation depends (…) The war is therefore our war and we must take up our post before the democratic and free peoples’.

It was not until May 1942 that the Iraqi PC’s newspaper would fully endorse Moscow’s positions, affirming that:

‘Our party sees the English army, which is now fighting nazism, as an army of liberation (…) we are on the English side (…) we must therefore help the English army in whatever way possible’,

which, as far as the Iraqi workers were concerned, meant the CP siding with the monarchists and rich landowners who ruled the country.

In the six years between the party’s foundation and its reconstitution in 1940-41, a profound change had come about. Subjection to the policies of the Russian state would become the determining factor in the elaboration of the party’s policies and directives, and a marked moderation in its watchwords would take the place of the revolutionary thrust – even if it was sometimes ingenuous – of the first generation of communists.

On October 29 1941, the police arrested Abdallah Mas’ud, the most prominent leader of the reconstituted communist group. Yusuf Salam Yusuf would replace him as the party’s secretary general, and under his leadership the Iraqi communist party would increasingly fall into line with the directives imposed by Moscow and become a mass party, establishing itself over the next seven years as the most important political force in Iraq.
 

The post-war period

After the country’s military occupation by the British army, and the regent’s return to Baghdad with the troop of politicians who had accompanied him in his flight to Transjordan, political life in Iraq resumed much as before. Reinstated as head of government, Nuri al-Sa’id, true to his usual methods, would immediately embark on a radical purge of the armed forces and various branches of the public administration.

Nuri’s policy of outright repression nonetheless put him at loggerheads with a section of the dominant class, who believed reforms were needed to prevent the social situation from worsening.

Even the regent

‘began to voice his own concerns about the lack of social and economic reform and of political freedoms. Although not publicly broadcast, the regent’s views were known to the political elite and at the British Embassy, where there was growing apprehension about the explosive consequences of Nuri’s repressive and conservative regime’ (Tripp, p.112).

The reconstruction of the CP under Yusuf Salam Yusuf (‘Comrade Fahd;) had brought about a total centralisation of the party structure and all criticism of the secretary general was rejected. This caused numerous disagreements, leading in August 1942 to the expulsion of a first group of militants who would go on to publish their own newspaper, Forwards. In November of the same year there would be an out and out split leading to the formation of two Iraqi CP’s: one under the leadership of Abdallah Mas’ud, recently released from prison, whose organ was The Spark, and the other, led by Fahd, with The Base as their organ. After both organisations had been severely weakened following a wave of arrests, the warring groups reunited and published the newspaper United Struggle.

A central demand of all the scissionist groups was that the ICP should hold a congress to establish statutory rules to govern the party’s internal functioning. Fahd was opposed to this demand since

‘under present international conditions the holding of a clandestine conference of communists in countries adhering to the democratic camp might provoke conflict between communists and the authorities that are in nobody’s interests, nor are they in the interests of the peoples fighting against fascism’.

Fahd’s CP, along with every other Stalinist party in the semi or fully industrialised countries, would devote itself from the beginning of 1944 to organising industrial workers with the aim of preventing the from becoming trade-unionised on a class basis. The Stalinists formed clandestine cells firstly in Baghdad and then in the rest of the country, drawing into the party leadership intellectuals drawn from the poorest elements of the petty bourgeoisie (the so-called ‘people’s intelligentsia’) and eventually convoking a party conference in March 1944, followed by a first congress in March 1945.

The conference adopted a party ‘National Charter’, which combined patriotic and democratic positions with a social-democratic program within which workers’ demands were restricted to those of a legalitarian and trade-unionist type. No more socialist outlook, no more republic, no abolition of the Anglo-Iraqi treaty (which established Great Britain’s de factopower over Iraq), just the call for a revision of a few of its clauses; no demand to expropriate the big landowners and foreign capitalists; no more Arab unity; and no more independence for the Kurdish people (a demand now held to be reactionary and in the interests of imperialism). The struggle was supposedly at the ‘stage’ of ‘national liberation and the struggle for democratic rights’, and the objectives mustn’t conflict with the phase of the ‘national bourgeois revolution’.

It nevertheless deserves to be recognised that the policy propounded by Moscow at the time, and adopted by the Syrian CP, which even went as far as dissolving itself, was never welcomed by the Iraqi CP, which in fact always strenuously opposed it, and which had entered into fierce polemics with the ‘liquidators’, who in Iraq as well had made themselves the interpreters of this line.

From January 1944, in deference of course to orders from Moscow, which was getting ready to break with yesterday’s allies, the leadership of the ICP initiated a new turn to show that support for the English army and the government was terminated or was being terminated.

Naturally the reasons for opposing the government or its English overlords were not in short supply. The ICP’s new line was introduced gradually, involving first a denunciation of the cost of living, then in April 1945 a major attack on the English presence in Iraq.

The new Iraqi government, under al-Suwaidi, in charge since February 1947, put an end to martial law, closed down the al-Faw prison camp, lifted press censorship and introduced a new electoral law to allow greater representation in the urban areas where the population was in rapid expansion. The new government also allowed political parties to be formed again. Along with the National Democratic Party, which was nationalist with social-democratic tendencies, and the Independent Party, with pan-Arabic tendencies, two small socialist parties were also recognised; on the other hand, despite the moderation of its political program, the ICP’s application to constitute itself as the National Liberation Party was rejected.

The new freedom to associate and issue political propaganda allowed trenchant criticisms of the country’s social and economic conditions to be advanced.

     ‘Against a background of mounting social and economic grievances, some born out of the long-term structural inequalities of Iraqi society and many out of the immediate concerns of people who had seen the cost of living outstrip their wages, the activities of the opposition parties and of the newly recognised trades unions seemed to promise a period of escalating social protest. Strikes were organised at Basra port and unrest continued among the workers of the Iraqi railways whose union had been banned the previous year following the strikes of April 1945.
     The economic conditions of many ordinary Iraqis had deteriorated markedly during the previous five years. Wartime shortages, bad harvests and the increased purchasing power of the British forces stationed in Iraq had dramatically forced up the prices of most commodities, affecting foodstuffs and clothing most of all. There had, consequently, been a fivefold increase in the cost of living, hitting salaried employees, whether government officials or industrial workers, hardest, especially since this had not been matched by any corresponding increase in their wages. The spiralling price of cereals (by this stage Iraq’s main export), not simply in Iraq but throughout the region, had encouraged landlords and merchants to profit from the export opportunities this offered. This not only added to the inflationary pressures within Iraq by creating scarcity, but, in some parts of the country, particularly in the Kurdish regions, created real hardship, amounting to starvation. The strikes organised during these months of relative freedom were almost all aimed at securing wage increases and better conditions for the workers concerned’ (Tripp, pp., 115-16).

The ICP took an active part in organising strikes and despite the illegality of the party it seems that communists controlled at 12 of the 16 legally recognised trades unions. The most important ones coincided with the heaviest concentrations of workers: the port of Basra, the railways and the oil extraction industry. In these three sectors the rate of unionisation was between 30 and 60 % and all the main leaders belonged to the ICP. The first, massive wave of strikes in these three sectors (never time limited, always ‘to the bitter end’ and lasting several weeks) took place between April 1945 and May 1947 The demands were for wage increases, legalisation of the trades unions and for true national independence – opposing the English presence in Iraq.

‘For the British, who had a strategic interest in the major industrial sectors of transport and oil, strikes of this kind and the unions that promoted them seemed to be part of a more general assault. Our party sees the English army, which is now fighting nazism, as an army of liberation (…) we are on the English side (…) we must therefore help the English army in whatever way possible’, (Tripp.p.117).

Many representatives of the Iraqi ruling class even saw them as the prelude to social revolution. The government and the English therefore responded by conceding wage increases, but also by dissolving the unions after the strikes, arresting the workers’ leaders and persecuting the communists. Fahd himself was arrested in February 1947 (but not identified as the secretary general of the ICP) and condemned to death (later commuted to life imprisonment after numerous international protests).

‘The Leap’, the Revolt of 1948

Following the signing of the Portsmouth Treaty between Iraq and Great Britain in January 1948, the Iraqi regime was hit by another serious crisis: in Baghdad there was the most formidable mass insurrection in the history of the monarchy, known as al-Wathbah – or The Leap.

It all started with student demonstrations on January 4, which had been called to protest against the projected new Anglo-Iraqi treaty and its endorsement of Britain’s continued ‘protection’ of Iraq. Over the days that followed the marches continued, with various incidents taking place, and more widespread protests after the announcement of the signing of the treaty on January 15; a treaty which although anticipating the withdrawal of all British forces from Iraq nevertheless formally sanctioned British influence in Iraq for a further 25 years.

All the opposition parties sought to mobilise public opinion against the treaty. On January 20th and 21st the railway workers and Baghdad factory workers, the unemployed and the mass of peasants recently moved to the city, all took to the streets. The police aimed to halt the demonstrators, who were armed with sticks, by shooting to kill, but it wasn’t enough to halt the protest marches despite numerous casualties. ‘The atmosphere which enveloped Baghdad was scented with social revolution’ was how the historian Batatu described those days.

The ICP, which was yet to become republican, embarked on a polemic against ‘extremist sectors’, who took part in the demonstrations marching under banners calling for the fall of the monarchy and for a republic.

Despite the regent refusing to ratify the treaty, the demonstrations were not called off. On the 23rd there was a massive demonstration, and another one on the 27th; the government decided to break the mass movement by force of arms. The police fired continuously and indiscriminately into the crowd to disperse the demonstrations. The death toll was between 300 and 400 demonstrators, but the marching started up again and faced with their advance the police decided to totally withdraw from the streets.

The prime minister fled to Great Britain. A new government was formed. The new head of government, the Shi’i Muhammed al-Sadr, promised new elections, but it wasn’t enough.

Throughout the country there began a period of continuous mobilisations that would last until Spring, with important strikes taking place in the railways in March and May (after the union was outlawed in April 1945, the ICP organised the workers and the strikes); in the oil pumping stations in April and May (including the legendary workers’ strike at the K3 station near Haditha, with the ‘great march’ of 3,000 workers on Baghdad) and at the port of Basra. There was also a peasant’s revolt at Arbat led by the communists. The demands put forward by the workers were for wage increases, for ‘bread and shoes’, democratic rights, the release of political prisoners, and for national independence.

The response, as in 1945-47, was a banning of the workers’ organisations, arrest of the trade-union leaders, and in exchange for that a partial acceptance of the wage claims.

The revolt greatly bolstered the growing influence of the ICP, which nevertheless continued to support the ‘national democratic government’ of the Iraqi bourgeoisie. The demonstrations ceased only in May 1948 when the government proclaimed martial law, using the outbreak of the war in Palestine as the pretext.

Defeat in this war, which Iraq had participated in by despatching a few thousand troops, would bring about the fall of the government in January 1949. The accusations made by the Egyptian government, which blamed the defeat on the Iraqi forces and its lack of action, provoked serious disorder, mainly in Baghdad; the regent thus called once again on his faithful executioner, Nuri al-Sa’id, to head the government. Those accused of instigating the disorder were subjected to court martials and hundreds of people were thrown into prison. Those who paid the highest price were the communists who, yet again, would pay with the blood of hundreds of militants for acquiescing in Moscow’s policies.

The ICP’s acceptance of the line dictated by Moscow, which approved the division of Palestine and the creation of the State of Israel and which was finalised only on July 6, 1948, after seven months of resistance, provoked great bewilderment and general demoralisation in the party, and hundreds of militants would abandon it in disgust. The state’s repressive apparatus, profiting from this situation, would arrest hundreds of communists in the latter months of 1948. The government, having discovered Fahd’s role as secretary general, subjected him to a public hanging in February 1949 along with two of his comrades. Membership of the ICP plummeted from 4,000 to just a few hundred militants.

The process of rebuilding the party happened slowly. It had got underway by June 1949 but not until the Autumn of 1951 could the crisis be said to be over.

Thus was the ICP able to participate in – and take a leading role – in the wave of strikes of the Spring and Autumn of 1952, which culminated in the revolt of November 22-24 of that year, when in Baghdad and other cities there were mass demonstrations calling for civil rights and democratic and free elections. The government responded exclusively with force of arms and declared martial law. All parties were declared illegal (although the ICP was permanently illegal in any case) and their leaders arrested. However, as soon as martial law was lifted in the following year, a new wave of strikes spread across the country and in Basra the government imposed martial law again in January 1954. In June 1954, with Nuri al-Sa’id again in power, every party, cultural club, trade union and even vaguely liberal-leaning newspaper was outlawed.

In these years the ICP experienced a ‘swing to the left’ with the adoption of a new ‘National Charter’ in March 1953, to replace the 1944 one, in which was posed the objective of ‘a popular democratic republic which represents the will of the workers, the peasantry, and the popular masses’, and the recognition of the right of the Kurdish people to self-determination, up to the point of secession.

This provoked the expulsion of 73 members of the party who opposed the new ‘National Charter’ in the name of the old positions of Fahd. These would then proceed to set up their own organ, The Workers Banner.

Over the months which followed the party would call for a ‘popular revolution’, with ‘the conquest of power by the proletariat (…) as the immediate task’, to be attained through the construction of a ‘popular revolutionary army’, which ‘is to practise the armed struggle’, setting up ‘revolutionary strongholds’ throughout the country. It was a line that assumed its most bombastic tone between June 1954 and June 1955, with a party of a mere 500 militants supposedly to accomplish it all.

In June 1955, this line was repudiated by the Central Committee and of the ‘extremist’ positions adopted since 1953 were rejected.

In 1955 there is the signing of an arms agreement between the USSR and the ‘Free Officers’ in Egypt, who, in a coup d’ètat three years earlier, had overthrown the monarchy. It is a change that almost immediately leads the ICP to embrace the cause of pan-Arabism, which was being championed by the Egyptian leaders. This line is further reinforced in July 1956 when, following the nationalisation of the Suez Canal, Egypt is attacked by an English-French-Israeli coalition. The line is made official at the Party’s 2nd conference, held in September 1956.

But all in all, this was a short-term policy incapable of withstanding the impact of the 1958 revolution. For the ICP, ‘the immediate task is formation of a patriotic government that will put an end to Iraq’s isolation from the Arabic liberation movement and follow an independent and Arabic patriotic policy’.

The drawing up of the Baghdad Pact – entered into against Russia and Arab nationalism, under American supervision, and whose signatories included Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Pakistan – and the subsequent attack on Egypt by Israel, supported by Great Britain and France, provoked a wave of protests and revolts throughout Iraq, centred this time in the more peripheral areas of Mosul, Kirkuk and Basra, and in Najaf and Havy where the protests became out and out insurrections. The government responded, as usual, with military repression.

It was during this new wave of rebellion that the ‘United National Front’ was formed, which brought together the ICP, the national Democratic Party (the party of the anti-monarchist and Iraqi nationalist bourgeoisie), the Ba’th (or ‘renaissance’ party, formed in the early 50s under the pan-arabist banner) and some other groups. Its platform advocated political and economic independence, the abolition of the Baghdad Pact, the destruction of the iqta agrarian system, democratic rights, civil liberties and Arabic solidarity against imperialism and Zionism.

Apart from the brief ‘extremist’ period between 1953 to 1955, the strategic perspective of the Iraqi CP during remained consistently social-democratic over these years, as indeed it would later. According to the historian Samira Haj,

‘whilst the ICP’s theoretical positions endorsed the class struggle and internationalism, the party’s policies in practice were constantly compromised by the doctrine of the revolution in two stages (…) The party saw the anti-colonial struggle in Iraq as part of an inevitable evolving process which would lead to the national bourgeois revolution. The party saw its central role as providing leadership to the “oppressed classes” (workers and peasantry) in alliance with the progressive fraction of the national “bourgeoisie”, in order to forge the liberation struggle, accomplish social reforms and extend democratic rights within the framework of a bourgeois state (…) This dogmatic position of a “democratic bourgeois” stage of separate development proved dangerous to the ICP, to its cadres and to the national revolution itself. To abide by these principles the ICP was obliged to subordinate class conflict to the national struggle (…) by supporting Iraqi nationalism as opposed to pan-Arab nationalism (…) and make the assumption that there actually was a “national bourgeoisie” capable of achieving [the agrarian revolution]. The ICP didn’t recognise the intrinsic weakness of the Iraqi bourgeoisie and the strict links which tied this group to agrarian structures’.

Even with this strategic orientation, and despite the conditions of illegality and clandestinity to which it was permanently condemned, the ICP nevertheless managed to take on a central role in Iraqi political life. But if during the terrible period of the struggle against the monarchy the social-democratic line could only partially hinder the party from taking root within the working class, in the period of national revolution, the enslavement of the party to the bourgeois national movement would spell catastrophe, and – in the absence of an alternative workers’ leadership – spell catastrophe for the entire workers’ movement as well.

(to be continued)