The Workers’ Movement in Modern Iraq Pt. 2

Study presented at the party meetings held between May 2003 and May 2005
 

The Bourgeois Revolution

The Coup d’état of the Free Officers

The Hashemite monarchy in Iraq fell on 14 July 1958, brought down by the coup d’état of a group of army officers.

The causes are summed up well in an article written a few months later by H.G.Martin, a United States General: ‘The chasm dividing the rich from the poor constituted a perennial incitement to revolt: the cost of living was sky high; students, state employees, workers in industry and the poverty-stricken tenant farmers in the countryside all found themselves in a state of dire need. Communism was very widespread. Hatred of Nuri [the head of government] and the landowners (Arab shaikhs and Kurdish aghast) who made up his party, had by now become a pathological phenomenon. There were also two objects of general execration: the oil agreement entered into on a 50% basis with the Iraqi Petroleum Company in 1952 [according to which the Iraqi State took 50% of the profits with the other 50% remaining in the hands of the companies exploiting the wells] and the adherence to the Baghdad Pact, signed in 1955 by Iraq, Turkey, Great Britain, Pakistan and Iran [which ranged Iraq against Egypt and Syria]’ (A Decade of Cold War, in ‘Middle Eastern Affairs,’ March 1959).

There were special features which characterised the Iraqi revolt. Guido Valabrega writes: «Whereas the Egyptian revolution of 1952 could be characterised as a capitulation of the monarchy faced with pressure from the opposition due to its incapacity to resolve the country’s problems, there were aspects to the Iraqi revolution of 1958 which were darker and more violent, more exhilarating and overwhelming» (La rivoluzione araba, 1967).

A few months before the coup d’état, the main parties which were opposed to the monarchy – the Independence Party (Istqual), the National Democratic party, the Communist Party and the Ba’th – had already come together to form a clandestine United National Front. They called for a republic, freedom of association, free elections and freedom from British control, but diverged on a number of fundamental issues, namely, the relationship with the Iraq Petroleum Company and the question of the nationalisation of oil, the agrarian question, trade union freedom and the social question, on international alliances.

But it was not the National Front but a group of army officers (referring to themselves as the Free Officers, after the example of the organisation which had taken power in Egypt a few years before), who early in 1958 would decide to take action under the impetus of the increasing tension in the region, now become a zone of confrontation between the Russian and American imperialist blocs.

Lebanon, which was on the edge of civil war, and Jordan, both of them under Western influence, feared the recent union between Egypt and Syria, the so-called United Arab Republic, approved by Moscow. The Iraqi monarchy, with its strong links to its Jordanian counterparts, had therefore decided to despatch some military units to its Western border, ready to intervene in support of that regime. The troops, stationed in the East of the country, and commanded by the young Colonel ‘Abd al-Salam ‘Arif, a Free Officers supporter, had to go past Baghdad on their way to the Jordanian border. The conspirators took advantage of the situation: the military units instead of bypassing the capital entered it and in a rapid action occupied all the strategic buildings, including the radio station, from where colonel ‘Arif announced the fall of the monarchy and the formation of the Republic.

On 14^th July 1958, as the radio broadcast the Marseillaise, in memory of that other 14^th July back in 1789 when the people of Paris stormed the Bastille, the troops launched their attack on the royal palace. After a rapid bombardment the Royal Guard surrendered and King Faisal II, the crown prince ‘Abd al-Ilah, and a number of other members of the royal family were arrested and then summarily shot. The Prime Minister, Nuri Said, making his attempted getaway dressed as a woman, was recognised by some soldiers and shot on sight; indeed popular hatred towards this individual was such that his body was taken as a trophy and dragged through the streets of Baghdad by an enraged mob.

To consolidate the coup d’état, and to discourage any foreign intervention, the army officers urged the people to take to the streets to demonstrate against the monarchy and to attack imperialism and its agents. They also called on the parties belonging to the United National Front to mobilise their forces. The masses responded enthusiastically and Baghdad and the other cities in Iraq immediately became the scene of massive street demonstration; some American businessmen and ministers in the Jordanian government were killed and looting and expropriations were massive and widespread.

The Free Officers were alarmed by what they’d unleashed and in the days following the coup d’état a curfew and martial law were introduced. The social situation was so explosive that the new government, which represented the interests of the rising bourgeoisie, found itself immediately having to settle accounts not only with the urban and rural proletariat but also with the still entrenched and powerful class of landowners.

One sure criterion for measuring how radical a bourgeois revolution actually is its agrarian policy: a revolution is all the more widespread and sweeping to the extent it manages to oust the landowning class from power and forcibly impose measures of expropriation of the land, extending possibly even to the transference of ownership to the State. But the bourgeoisie, despite the fact that radical agricultural reforms enormously favour the development of the capitalist system of production, has always proved most circumspect when it comes to attacking the rights of landed property. The fear of a revolutionary process, propelled by the proletariat of city and country, that crosses over into property relations founded on private property and the products of capital, forces the bourgeoisie into a compromise with landed property, its ever dependable ally against the exploited classes.

The new Iraqi government conformed to this general pattern of class rule. It sought the support of the landowners to keep the turbulent proletariat and peasantry in check; hence its polity was extremely moderate, not only in the field of agriculture but also in general as far as both domestic politics and foreign policy were concerned.

By 18^th July, it had already declared its preparedness to respect the oil treaties signed by the previous governments whilst the Iraqi representative at the UNO confirmed his country’s adherence to the Baghdad Pact. Two of the fundamental points that had featured in its anti-monarchist propaganda were thus hastily ditched. In the following August the new prime minister, General Qasim, received the American under secretary of state, Bob Murphy, and was able to reassure him that he hadn’t ‘fought the revolution in Iraq in order to hand over his country to the USSR or Egypt’.

Notwithstanding this cautious policy the Anglo-Americans reacted to the coup d’état with force, mainly in order to prevent the revolt from spreading. The 6^th Fleet disembarked 10,000 men in Lebanon, a greater force than the entire Lebanese army at the time, whilst the English despatched 2,500 parachutists, the famous ‘Red Devils’, in defence of the ever faithful Jordanian monarchy.

Once the group of revolutionary army officers, headed by Brigadier ‘Abd al-Karim Qasim, had established themselves in power, they passed a new constitution proclaiming the republic and conferring on Qasim the title of prime minister, minister of defence and commander in chief of the army. To Colonel ‘Arif, who had contributed directly to the success of the coup, was entrusted the office of deputy prime minister and minister of the interior; the remaining members of the government were selected mainly from civilians associated with the National Democratic Party.

No member of the Communist Party was co-opted into the government, and Massud Barzani’s Kurdish Democratic party was kept out as well. And yet the reflected credibility gained by association with these two parties, both of which had widespread popular support, was precisely what enabled Qasim to get his political line, based on an exaltation of Iraqi nationalism, accepted. The Iraqi Communist Party was totally opposed to the idea of any approach being made to the UAR, where communists were outlawed and persecuted. The Kurdish party was also opposed the UAR, conscious that the possible transformation of Iraq into a province of a vast state would make the struggle of the Kurdish regions for self-government and independence that much more difficult.

The importance attributed to the Kurdish question by the new government is reflected in the new constitution of 1958, which established that ‘Arabs and Kurds are associated in the nation’, and their ‘national rights’ are guaranteed within the limits of ‘Iraqi unity’. This association was symbolised by the new national flag, on which the golden disc of Saladin (who was of Kurdish origin) and the Kurdish curved dagger are united with the Arabic scimitar. Recognition of the Kurds did not however extend much further than that, and the economic situation in the Northern regions continued to be characterised by extreme backwardness and poverty.

‘The objective of the national revolution as described by its leaders – writes the historian, Samira Haj – was to free Iraq from the oligarchic monarchy, and from its creator, British imperialism, and reconstruct the nation by promoting social and economic development in the interests of its people. The revolution, representing the ‘will of the people’, had ‘universal’ objectives that transcended class, ethnic, religious and class differences’ (The Making of Iraq, 1900-1963, New York, 1997).

Of course this ‘universalist’ program existed only in the minds of the bourgeois ideologues. In practice it could only mean defence of the bourgeoisie and the big landed proprietors at the expense of the proletariat and poor peasant farmers, just as happened during the French Revolution, which although it was fought to the cry of Equality, Liberty, Fraternity culminated in the bourgeois dictatorship and in the anti-proletarian Terror.

Only the Stalinised leaders of the Iraqi Communist Party, who were thoroughly indoctrinated into defending the suicidal theory of ‘revolutionary stages’, wanted to bury their heads in the sand and, despite the severe warning signs (the severity, that is, with which the mass demonstrations had been put down and the way their own party had been excluded from the government), they gave their full support to the new regime. As one of the party’s main leaders, ‘Amer ‘Abdullah, would explain: ‘Our party supports the economic interests of the national bourgeoisie as fundamental precondition for the development of a bourgeois democratic state (…) The scope of the revolution is to establish social and economic reforms within the framework of capitalist relations of production (…) We consider the revolution to be a popular revolution’ (quoted by Ilario Salucci in al-Wathbah Movimento comunista e lotta di classe in Iraq 1924-2003, Milano, 2004).

By pursuing this line the Iraqi Communist Party would not only ensure its own political suicide, but consign the Iraqi proletariat, bound hand and foot, into the hands of its tormentors.
 

Pan-Arabism and nationalism

From its first days in office the new government was faced with certain fundamental questions concerning domestic and foreign policy, and there was a lack of consensus on all of them, even within the small clique that held power.

In domestic policy it was a matter of making decisions about how to achieve agricultural reform; about what relations to maintain with the foreign oil companies; about the fundamental question of freedom of association of parties and trade unions; about what social policy to adopt; and about the thorny question of the Kurdish independence movement.

In foreign policy, once the link with Great Britain was broken, it was a case of choosing, just as the struggle between the super powers for control of the Middle East was becoming more acute, between a pan-Arabist policy, which, in short, would have resulted in union with Egypt and Syria, or a nationalist policy, which aimed to establish Iraq as a regional power by exploiting the possibilities opened up by the clash between the USA and the USSR.

The first rift in the government concerned a question of foreign policy and was between the pan-Arab tendency, backed by the Ba’th Party and by Colonel ‘Arif, who wanted to join the UAR immediately, and the Iraqi nationalist tendency, supported by the liberals, the Communist Party and the Kurdish Democratic Party and defended by General Qasim.

The Minister of the Interior, ‘Abd-al-Salam ‘Arif, was convinced that joining the UAR was the only way Iraq could ensure its survival and, to win support for his ideas, during the turbulent days of August 1958, he set out on a provincial tour seeking to mobilise the poor peasantry, delivering speeches which were as passionate as they were demagogic in support of a ‘popular, patriotic, socialist republic’ which was opposed to any ‘differences or privileges of rank or power’; he even provoked uprisings amongst the peasants who, no longer prepared to accept their oppression, downed tools to sack and take possession of the shaikhs’ land.

Prime Minister Qasim immediately moved onto the offensive, and supported by the Communist Party – which denounced ‘Arif and his slogans as “driving patriotic social strata into the arms of imperialism” (but which patriotic strata, the landlords’?) – he dismissed the colonel from his government post and sent him off as ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany. ‘Arif returned in secret to Iraq but was arrested, tried and condemned to death, a sentence later transmuted to life imprisonment.

The Iraqi Communist Party countered the pan-Arab nationalists by appealing to Iraq’s ‘national peculiarities’. According to this analysis the July revolution was ‘national bourgeois’ and a union with Syria and Egypt (the latter’s industrial development far outstripping Iraq) would be an obstacle to the development of industry and a national capital. In the words of Aziz al-Hajj, a leading official in the Iraqi Communist Party at the time: «It is natural that we oppose a ‘Prussian Style’ union (…) We are for a federal form of unification which guarantees the interests of all classes within each Arab state (…) a unification that takes into account the uneven development of these countries (…) that respects the popular choice of ‘democratic government’. We are opposed to an anti-democratic union that brings about the growth and expansion of the Egyptian national bourgeoisie at the expense of the workers, the merchants and the capitalists of the other Arab countries. In this period it is natural for us to struggle on the side of the Iraqi national bourgeoisie, supporting its development».

By lining up against the Union the Communist Party facilitated the policy supported by Moscow, which didn’t look kindly on its still unreliable ally Egypt becoming to powerful too rapidly. At the same time the party was turned into an instrument of the narrowest interests of the national bourgeoisie, thus also preventing the possibility of any kind of regional solidarity emerging amongst the proletariat. When the divergence with the pan-Arabists passed onto the terrain of street fighting, the Communist Party would be the main force suppressing those fighting for the Arab Union in a series of bloody battles, with repression and expulsion from the trade unions meted out to those workers who supported it.
 

The Mosul Rebellion

The struggle culminated in the defeat on the streets of the military revolt which took place in Mosul in March 1959, led by a group of Free Officers of an anti-communist and Pro-Nasser persuasion. It is an episode that offers important lessons about the relations between classes during those months of immense social upheaval.

The commander of the Mosul garrison ordered the troops to disperse a massive rally of the Iraqi Communist Party-inspired Peace Partisans. A section of the army, supported by the populace, disobeyed the order and turned their guns on their officers, triggering the uprising.

It has been observed of the movement that there was a high degree of correlation between economic, ethnic and religious divisions. For example, many of the soldiers were not only drawn from the poorest section of the population but were also Kurds; the officers for the most part belonged to the Arab middle classes; a lot of the poor peasant farmers in the villages around Mosul were Aramaic Christians; the big landowners were mainly Arab Muslims. But when economic divisions didn’t coincide with confessional or ethnic divisions it was the class factors and not the racial or religious factors which predominated. Arab soldiers aligned not with Arab officers but with other Kurdish soldiers; Kurdish clan leaders who were large landowners aligned with Arab leaders who were large landowners; the rich and long-established Christian merchant families made no common cause with poor peasant farmers simply because they were also Christian. When peasant farmers acted on their own initiative, whatever their ethnic composition, they directed their anger at the large landowners in an indiscriminate way and regardless of any political stance. As for the workers and dispossessed of the Arab quarters, they united with the Kurdish and Aramaic peasant farmers against the Arab Muslim landowners.
 

Suppression of the Proletariat

The situation was reckoned to be dangerous in Washington as well and Allen Dulles, the Director of the CIA, described it as “the most dangerous in the world today”. Spontaneously and enthusiastically the great masses rebelled, mobilising and organising themselves within the workers’ unions and the peasant farmers’ associations, and within the women’s and youth organisations. The Communist Party, whose membership in no time at all increased to 25 thousand members, seemed a formidable force, albeit one used to divert this movement into non-revolutionary channels and lead it toward dispersal and defeat. A trap painted red.

‘Having effectively contributed to save the regime – writes P.Rondot in his book Irak (Paris, 1979) – the communists were insistent they should take on government responsibilities. The Kurds and the Shiites, who considered the communists their allies, supported these demands’. But the Qasim government, despite the Communist Party’s moderate political stance, didn’t want to give the impression it was succumbing to pressure, and nor did it want to fall out of favour with the wealthy classes and the United States further down the line. It therefore decided to mount an offensive against the CP. In May 1959 two articles of the old penal code were reinstated, punishing those who professed communist views with seven years in prison.

The Political Office of the Communist Party, instead of mobilising the lower classes which would have been extraneous to its true nature, continued to seek a compromise. Beating a hasty retreat, it not only ceased the campaign to get its people into government but also withdrew its demand for a more radical reform in the countryside. The Political Office’s decision was endorsed in July by the Central Committee. It is very probable that this clearly self-damaging policy was imposed on it by Moscow, which was worried that the turn of events in Iraq was in conflict with the policy of ‘peaceful co-existence’, which was the slogan it was pushing at the time. The fact remains that this decision marked a decisive shift in the Party towards supporting the government.

This political ‘shift to the right’ didn’t rule out the final struggle but simply postponed it for 4 years, necessary for the total destruction of what the Iraqi working class believed to be its party, this belief being the only reason it was deemed to be a objective danger by the bourgeoisie; 4 years of continuous erosion and decline of the party, of the support it enjoyed in the trade unions and other mass organisations.

The government’s repressive action would be unleashed against the most combative workers and against communist militants, with the two attributes often being combined in the same proletarian individual: and herein lies the worst effect of the Stalinian counter-revolution at the international level. Between July and August 1959 hundreds were arrested, hundreds more killed and across the country anyone suspected of being a Communist Party militant or even a sympathiser risked being intimidated or beaten up. The youth organisation, whose membership had reached 84 thousand by the spring of 1959, and which was controlled by the Communist Party, was dissolved by the police in May 1960 (by which time 20 thousand had already left), who also arrested 200 of its cadres. The League of Iraqi Women and the student federation, also controlled by the Communist Party, met with heavy police repression too. In 1960, six thousand workers’ leaders were sacked from their places of work. But, significantly, the aim of Qasim’s suppression of the communists (which lasted until the Coup d’état that ended his regime in February 1963) was always to weaken and neutralise the social base of the communists, not to actually eliminate the party – indeed its leaders were never hit by the repressive measures.

And yet the Communist Party, despite the suppression it suffered after May 1959, continued to give its unconditional support to the government due to the ‘need to reinforce national unity and support the current leaders in their efforts to protect the republic’. It even engaged in self-criticism, considering its activity in the spring of 1959 to have been ‘ultra-leftist’. On 7 October 1959 Qasim was wounded in an assassination attempt. On 4 December the Communist Party organised huge demonstrations to celebrate his leaving hospital, issuing the following slogans: ‘Join hands with the national government to preserve order! More grain to the people, brave peasant! Produce more, valiant worker! Long live the solidarity of the people, the army and the Government under the leadership of ‘Abd-ul-Karim Qasim!’.

Shoulder to shoulder stood the two executioners of the Iraqi proletariat and of the poor peasant farmers: the national bourgeoisie and Stalinism.

In January 1960 the government, which wanted to give the impression of a more open political life, passed a law legalising political parties. Such liberty was however denied to the Communist Party, even though it had accepted all the government’s conditions and changed its programme, its name, and altered the composition of its Political Office. After April 1960, at various times and in various places, the publications of the Communist Party were suspended, and from October 1960 it was forced to suspend publication of its daily newspaper, which had been legalised only a couple of months before.

It is interesting to note, especially today when some view Islamic radicalism as a potential ally in the struggle against imperialism, that although the Qasim government consigned the ‘communists’ to clandestinity, it did allow the constitution of an Islamic party, which ‘although it was dedicated to the ultimate goal of forming a Islamic order, its hostility to atheism, materialism and communism was very much to the fore, helping to explain its appeal for Qasim at the time’ (C.Tripp, A History of Iraq, Cambridge).

The Islamic organisation Al-Da’wa (The Call), which formed around the young ‘alim Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr (father of the al-Sadr who for some months made life difficult for the American marines, before he returned to milder counsels) was an organisation of Shiite Muslims. A few months previously, in the Autumn of 1958, it had come to the attention of the government when it had organised protests against the agricultural reforms, arguing that the sequestration of private property was contrary to the Shari’a. Using this as its pretext, the government agreed to exclude waqf land (religious endowments) from the reforms, thereby further reducing their impact.

In November 1960, ministers close to the Communist Party were forced to resign and the main mass organisations led by the party – the Peace Partisans, the League of Iraqi Youth and the women’s organisation, al-Rabita – were closed down.

In the summer of 1961, the Central Committee of the Iraqi Communist Party, on the initiative its secretary ar-Radi, condemned the positions of the Party ‘right’ (‘Amer ‘Abdallah, who was accused of being Qasim’s ‘agent’, left Iraq and went off to live in Bulgaria). But what resulted from this in practice was just a superficial change, namely, the clandestine publication of the party’s newspaper. On the level of principles there was virtually no change at all. To give an example of this, when Qasim launched the war against the Kurds in September 1961 the Communist Party was a lot more critical of the Kurds than the government, and whilst insinuating that behind that movement there lurked the long hand of imperialism it made not attempt to identify the tasks of the Iraqi proletariat, which had no interest at all in supporting the government’s repressive action.

A brief thaw towards the Communist party would ensue. In 1961 Qasim annulled the concessions to the oil companies in the areas which weren’t already being exploited, and freed all political prisoners. However in May 1962 hundreds were arrested again after a few thousand people had taken part in a demonstration, called by the Communist Party in Baghdad, ‘for peace in Kurdistan’.

On the eve of the February 1963 Coup d’état, which would erase the Iraqi Communist Party from the country’s political life, the party’s membership had already dropped from 25,000 in 1959 to less than 10,000, of whom 5,000 were from Baghdad. Above all it had lost the enormously strong positions it had held four years earlier within the youth organisations, the trade unions, the peasant unions, and within the popular militias created in the aftermath of the July Revolution.
 

The agrarian question

In 1958 the situation in the countryside was characterised by extreme concentration of the land into huge landed estates. Out of the 48 million donum under cultivation (one donum = just over half an acre) a good 32 million of them belonged to 168,346 proprietors; a dozen or so shaikhs divided 20% of the South between them. Three quarters of the families living in the country districts, around 4 million people, were landless peasants.

In past years there had been a series of peasant revolts, and one of the first promises made by the new regime in fact was agricultural reform. In many cases the mere announcement was enough to prompt the peasants to occupy the land of the big landowners, to burn down their houses and to destroy the cadastral registers and property contracts. The agrarian question therefore represented the second field of conflict between the various classes and between the various powers that supported the government, and it was certainly the most important.

Despite this situation, which highlights the seriousness of the problem, the reform, which passed into law on 30 September 1958, was largely inspired by the Egyptian agrarian reform of 1952, although it was more moderate in its extent. It was extolled as ‘The liberation of the peasant’, ‘the reorganisation of agrarian relations’ and ‘the liquidation of the feudal system’. However, behind the propaganda slogans, the objective toward which the reform tended was not the expropriation, and consequent social disappearance, of the old feudal classes, but their survival and the defence of their interests. It was a means of ensuring they had an easy and painless transition across to the new regime. The medium used was the market. Land would be put up for sale and the market’s relentlessly slow processes would encourage a modernisation of the technical conditions of production and an evolution towards capitalist relations of production and property in the countryside. Certainly such a reform would do nothing to alleviate the poverty of the millions of poor and landless peasants. The land actually confiscated was the least productive and the cost of acquiring it was still beyond the capacity of peasants, who were without capital or credit, and it would bolster instead the section of the peasantry with small and medium-sized holdings. The landless peasants, who were the vast majority, continued to live in poverty and to suffer from still greater levels of exploitation.

To begin with the Communist Party supported the reform – although recognizing its conciliatory nature towards the old landed classes – and still justified it as a ‘necessity’ dictated by the ‘stage’ of the revolution. ‘Amer ‘Abdallah, one of the Communist Party’s theoretician’s, would explain it in the following terms, ‘we never demanded a radical agrarian reform (…) because we take into consideration the class nature of the national revolution, and the close ties between the national bourgeoisie and the big landed estates and landed property’.

The reaction to this was the creation and rapid spread of ‘peasant’s associations’, and it is estimated that by May 1959 there were around 3,500 of them. The Communist Party, continuing its deleterious political practice of abrupt ‘turns’, would now set itself up as the defender of the interests of the poor and landless peasants and conduct a widespread campaign against the reform. All of a sudden it took an interest in the ‘peasants’ associations’, of which more than 60% would end up under Stalinist control. Throughout the month of April 1959 there were huge demonstrations, which the Communist Party took over and provided with slogans. These would culminate in a huge demonstration on May 1^st in Baghdad, attended by a million people according to the organisers.
 

A belated bourgeois revolution

The July Revolution brought down the oligarchic monarchy and initiated a period of political change and power struggles.

A common denominator was the ferocity of the struggle against the proletarian movement and its organisations. The power of the class of landed proprietors, the traditional basis of the monarchy, was not broken but merely scaled down and the land question and the problem of the poor peasantry remained dramatically unresolved. The new regime only broke the English monopoly on oil so as to allow a greater number of multinationals to exploit it.

The revolution in Iraq, just like its classic predecessor in France, claimed to have universal objectives which transcended class, religion, and ethnic and other divisions, but in practice it clearly defended, and with the utmost ferocity to boot, the privileges of the new dominant classes, which were no longer those tied to the monarchy, but the bourgeois and landowning classes who pocketed the revenue from the land, the oilfields, and the profits derived from trade and from the still limited industrial network.

Despite its limitations the national revolution would set the whole of Iraqi society in motion. Relations between individuals and within the family were revolutionised. Women started to cast off centuries of oppression. Poor peasants transformed themselves into proletarians and flooded into the cities. Within a few decades the new Iraq, shaken by a series of bloody convulsions, would become one of the most powerful states in the area, a regional power that imperialist diplomacy wouldn’t hesitate to push into a terrible war with neighbouring Iran in order to cut down the economic, financial and military power of both.
 

Caught between nationalism and suppression

The new republican government, headed by General Qasim, pursues a nationalist policy, opposing those, mainly in the armed forces, who want immediate unity with Egypt. It is a choice which expresses the interests of a part of the national bourgeoisie who fear union with the more industrialised and powerful Egypt, and he finds allies in the Communist Party, which in the space of a few months had become an organisation powerful enough to control both the mobilisation of the proletariat in the cities and of the peasantry, and in the parties of Kurdish ethnicity which have traditionally attempted to obtain self-government for the region in the in the North of Iraq.

Qasim would immediately find himself in a very difficult position. After having broken not only with Egypt and Syria, but also with Iran and Kuwait, with whom he’d opened up old territorial disputes, he was totally isolated on the international plane; on the domestic front, his social policy had caused discontent not only amongst the lower classes but amongst the Kurds, who, despite all the promises, had obtained very little from their support for the regime.

This situation would be taken advantage of by Egypt, which we rather neglected in the last report. It would support a new coup d’état, this time organised by the Ba’th party, which voiced a populist program which was not only pan-Arabist but ferociously anti-communist. It seems Egypt’s drive against the Qasim Government had already begun in 1959 when Cairo supposedly provided weapons and political support to the Mosul rebels, in line with Nasser’s general policy of making Egypt leader of the Arab world and obtaining western support by attacking communist organisations both in his own country and throughout the rest of the Middle East.

The historian Anouar Abdel-Malek describes Cairo’s action as follows: ‘Meanwhile an extremely violent press and radio campaign was directed against Iraq, which was presented as the enemy of Arab nationalism. On 12 September 1958 John Foster Dulles, who on 8 April had already declared that “the United States are in perfect agreement with President Nasser», announced the resumption of American aid to Egypt with a first instalment of 13 million dollars’ (Anoar Abdel-Malek, Esercito e societá in Egitto 1952-1967, 1967).

On 7 October 1959 a Ba’thist military cell, to which the young Saddam Hussein belonged, made an unsuccessful attempt on Qasim’s life. Saddam Hussein fled to Syria and from there to Egypt, ‘where the Egyptian secret services warned Nasser about the young Iraqi’s contacts with the American ambassador’ (Pierre Jean Luizard, La Questione Irachena, 2003).

Meanwhile the Kurdish question was likewise forcing itself onto the agenda. In June 1961 the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) issues a series of demands to the government which responds with repressive measures: Kurdish newspapers are closed down and there are numerous arrests. This triggers a Kurdish uprising which is soon transformed into an all out war; a long, harsh and inglorious war that would impact negatively on the morale of the Iraqi army and result in a significant reduction in the support Qasim enjoyed within the armed forces.

As we have seen, the Qasim government, in order to restrict the Communist Party’s influence, had tried to gain the support of the Muslim Brotherhood. It now forced the communist ministers to resign from the government.

We can hardly fail to admire the courage with which the militant communists and the proletariat in Iraq threw themselves into the fray, often in opposition to their political leadership, in a ferocious confrontation with the repressive apparatus of the bourgeoisie; and we can likewise hardly fail to be struck by the depth and profundity of the violence which characterises the class struggle in this country, where the hangman, the firing squad and torture chamber are considered the normal means of silencing opposition.

Western commentators, whether of the liberal or social democratic persuasion, attribute these repressive methods to a lack of democratic and ‘party’ traditions, to a lack of a correct ‘democratic dialectic’, in a word, to the country’s political ‘backwardness’. We think, on the contrary, that radical political struggle is a characteristic of societies in which a young, energetic and numerous proletariat represents an objective menace to ruling classes which have extremely little to offer the very masses, but who have nevertheless been forced to mobilise those same masses in their effort to shake off, at least partly, the yoke imposed on them by imperialism. The open dictatorship is therefore a characteristic feature of modernity; the mirror image of a proletarian vitality that the Western proletariat, lulled asleep for decades by the soporific action of opportunism, is sorely lacking.
 

Turbulent stabilization

On February 8^th 1963, a coup d’état, supported by the CIA they say, overthrows the Qasim government. The Communist Party issues a call to mobilise with the slogan ‘To arms! Crush the reactionary and imperialist conspiracy!’ On the same day demonstrations take place in the main towns and cities but Qasim refuses to distribute arms to the people. The army, which from the outset had aligned itself with the organisers of the coup, opens fire on the demonstrators who for the most part are armed only with wooden staffs, and there are hundreds of casualties. On the following day all resistance is broken, leaving a few isolated pockets, particularly in Basra, who fight on until the 12^th. Qasim surrenders and is summarily shot. ‘Abd-al-Salam ‘Arif, the ex ‘number 2’ of the July 1958 revolution, becomes the new head of State.

The ‘National Council of the Revolutionary Command’, the organisation that takes power, states in its ‘Proclamation No. 13’, ‘The commanders of the military units, the police and the National Guard are authorised to annihilate anyone who disturbs the peace. The loyal sons of the people are asked to cooperate with the authorities by providing them with information and by exterminating these criminals’. Between the 8^th and 10^th of February, during the first days of the coup d’état, between 1,500 and 3,000 people are killed, amongst them at least 350 communists. The city districts where the resistance had been stiffest are treated as enemy territories and subjected to mass executions, indiscriminate arrests, massacres and rapes.

Looking back on these days, al-Hajj, the future leader of the left of the Communist Party, would state that resistance to the coup d’état had been a ‘glorious’ act by the party, which would ‘save it politically’, whereas the real ‘error’ had been committed in 1958-63, when the ‘entire strategy of our party was based on an erroneous principle, which held that rather than starting a civil war we should avoid it at all costs. At the same time other forces (…) were sharpening their knives, waiting for the best moment to slaughter us’. Even admitted that the proletariat should have fought in defence of the bourgeois government, the Communist Party didn’t in fact prepare for armed resistance in 1963 either. The reality is, the conscious aim of the bourgeois workers’ parties is to ensure their own defeat and dispersal, dragging along behind them a betrayed and deceived proletariat.

In the coalition that takes power the Ba’th is the predominant element, even though in February 1963 it was still a small organisation. Both the prime minister, Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr, and the deputy prime minister and minister of the interior, ‘Ali Salih al-Sa’di, are members of the Ba’th. The latter is also the general secretary of the party, and the real government real strong man since he personally controls the National Guard, the party’s paramilitary force which heads the repression, and which within the space of a few months had enrolled 30,000 men.

Over the course of following months the anti-communist repression is extremely vicious. Not a single Communist party structure in Arabic Iraq manages to withstand it. The Secretary General ar-Radi is arrested on 20 February and dies following four days of torture. The two secretaries who succeed him, Jamal al-Haidari and Muhammad Salih al-Aballi, are arrested on 21 July and executed. Over the course of 1963 seven members of the Central Committee (out of a total of nineteen) are killed. There are 150 ‘legal’ executions of communists, but many more are killed ‘illegally’. In November 1963 there are 7,000 communists in prison. The party’s less accountable members try to save as many militants from the repression as possible, getting them out of the cities into the countryside or to Kurdistan. For a year and a half the party’s activity is virtually non-existent. The blow suffered by the Communist Party in 1963 is even harsher than the one that would hit it in 1949.

The ba’thist-military coalition might have been efficient when it came to anti-worker repression but it was nevertheless very unstable and was wrought by internal divisions. Batutu describes the government structure of this period with the words of Dostoyevsky: ‘nothing’s easier than cutting off heads, and nothing’s harder than to have an idea’.

‘The Ba’th Party’s advocacy of pan-arabism and social welfare under the slogan ‘Freedom, Unity, Socialism’ had always allowed for wide interpretation and in Iraq, as elsewhere, people joined the Ba’th Party for a variety of reasons. Consequently, the Iraqi section of the Ba’th comprised a number of disparate factions’ (C.Tripp, A History of Iraq, 2^nd edn, p.172).

The Nasserites present in the government are removed as early as May 1963. Iraq breaks with Egypt in July. The war in Kurdistan, following a brief period of truce, is resumed in June (with the Communist Party this time supporting the Kurd forces and in July attempting a coup de main (which fails) on the country’s main military base at ar-Rashid). The Ba’th itself splits; in October, at its national (pan Arabic) congress, the “left wing” prevails, rallying behind slogans advocating “socialist planning”; “a collective agriculture managed by the peasants”; “democratic workers control of the means of production”, and “a party based predominantly on the workers and peasants”. In Iraq the “left wing” is represented by al-Sa’di, who suddenly proclaims himself a ‘Marxist’. Aligned with him are the National Guard, the Student Federation and the General Union of Workers.

This situation alarms the army officers and the ‘right wing’ of the Ba’th, represented by the head of the government, al-Bakr. From 11 to 18 November Iraq is in chaos. Army officers intervene, weapons in hand, at the Iraqi Ba’th congress to impose a ‘rightist’ direction. Al-Sadi is sent off into exile in Madrid, but ‘leftist’ Ba’th army officers try to resist and bombard the ar-Rashid military base. The streets are in the hands of ‘leftist’ Ba’th militants and the National Guard. The General Union of Workers issues a call for the execution of those bourgeois who are sending their capital abroad and calls for the immediate socialisation of the factories and for the collectivisation of agriculture.

On 18 November there is another uprising orchestrated by the President, ‘Abd al-Salam ‘Arif and his brother, brigadier-general ‘Abd-al-Rahman ‘Arif. Army divisions attack the headquarters of the National Guard and control is quickly re-established in Baghdad.

In the preliminary phase, from November 1963 to February 1964, the bloc in power is a coalition of armed forces officers personally faithful to ‘Arif, along with Ba’thist and Nasserist military men. In a second phase, from February to August 1964, it is the Nasserist military men who predominate at the apex of the State whilst their Ba’thist colleagues are chased out of the centres of power (and respond with a failed coup). It is in this period that a joint Presidential Council with Egypt is announced. In addition it is decided that a new State sponsored political party, along the lines of Egypt’s Arab Socialist Union, would be formed. There are decrees in July1964 to nationalise the banks, insurance companies and leading industrial and commercial companies with 25% of profits to be distributed to the workers. The Nasserist army officers demand a foreign trade monopoly but come up against the flat refusal of their allies. This prompts a split with the officer corps who are faithful to ‘Arif, who in August take power on their own.

A third phase extends from August 1964 to the accidental death of Abd-al-Salam ‘Arif on 13 April 1966. It is a period that is characterised by the presence in power of a group with a conservative nationalist orientation that attempts, in a situation of economic chaos, and with massive flights of capital abroad and large-scale redundancies, to go into partial ‘reverse gear’ with respect to the measures adopted by the Nasserists in the Spring of 1964. Another failed coup d’ état also occurs during this period.

On the death of Abd-al-Salam ‘Arif he is succeeded by his brother, ‘Abd-al-Rahman ‘Arif. The latter remains in power, continuing his brother’s policy, until July 1968, when he is deposed by the Ba’thist coup d’état and forced into a gilded exile in Great Britain.

In the years following the tragic upheaval of the 1963 coup d’état, the suppression of the Communist Party would ease up to a certain extent, allowing a slow reconstruction of the party to take place. The party’s governing body, until the summer of 1964, is the ‘External Committee for the organisation of the Communist Party’. Its members live in the countries of Eastern Europe from whence they denounce Arif’s regime as a ‘reactionary military dictatorship’.

The cease-fire agreement with the Kurds in February 1964, the events in Egypt (release of communist detainees, establishment of strong links with the USSR, discussions about auto-dissolution of the two Egyptian communist parties and their merger with Nasser’s single party, the Arab Socialist Union) and the switch to Nasserism in Baghdad (with nationalisations and an improvement in relations with the USSR, which starts supplying arms to Iraq again) prompt an unprincipled Communist Party, which is passively obedient to Moscow, to make an abrupt political turn in August 1964. The Central Committee, after a clandestine meeting in Baghdad, adopts the new, so-called ‘August line’, which describes even Egypt as a country that ‘is situated on the road of non-capitalist development headed toward socialism’. This prompts the party to reconsider its position on Arab unity, with an open self-criticism of the policy it had adopted regarding this between 1958-63: ‘It is wrong (…) for communists to cling to political democracy as the condition for supporting Arab unity (…) [the latter must be seen] in the light of the phenomenon of the non-capitalist development and social advance that enriches the progressive content of Arab Unity’.

This new policy fully conforms to Moscow’s directives at that time. In La storia segreta del KGB by C. Andrew and O. Gordievski, we read: ‘In the early ‘60s Khruschev and the Moscow Centre, but not the entire Presidium, were persuaded of the existence of a «new correlation of forces» in the Middle East which had to be exploited to fight the «main enemy» [the USA]… The soviet ideologues came up with the terms ‘non-capitalist road’ and «revolutionary democracy» to define the intermediate stage between capitalism and socialism reached by some leaders in the Third World. Nasser’s decision, in 1961, to nationalise a large part of Egyptian industry furnished encouraging proof of his progress along this «non-capitalist road».’

They are the same terms used by the leadership of the Iraqi Communist Party, which did nothing other than slavishly imitate Moscow’s ‘new’ policy. The coup d’état of November 1963 is re-evaluated, and retrospectively deemed to have been a positive; as something which ‘banished the nightmare of the fascist regime and the National Guard (…) and created more favourable conditions for the struggle of the anti-imperialist forces to preserve national independence, to alter Iraq’s official political line and to get the country to rejoin the path to Arab liberation’. The political upshot of the new ‘turn’ was that ‘if we admit the possibility of Iraq developing along non-capitalist lines, from this it inevitably follows that we must not address our policy towards the conquest of power by our party: we must remain in the vanguard, but there are forces that are gradually adopting our objectives (…). At the present stage the best government in Iraq would be a coalition of all the patriotic forces which are fighting for complete emancipation and for social progress’.

According to left critics in the party, ‘cooperation with Cairo was seen (…) as the key to any revolutionary development in Iraq (…) and therefore the party’s practical policies were subordinated to the will of Cairo and its partisans in Baghdad’. But of course that wasn’t all; by now the upper echelons of the party had long since reneged on every principle of revolutionary Marxism.

The August 1964 Plenum of the Central Committee elects a new Central Committee, partly in Iraq, partly abroad, and the new party secretary, Aziz Muhammed (‘Mu’in’, ‘Nadhim ‘Ali’).

The ‘August line’ prompts outrage amongst party militants, who rightly deemed the new party line as support to those ‘whose hands are dripping with the party’s and people’s blood’. Very frequently the party’s rank-and-file groupings would ignore the CC’s instructions and act on their own initiative. The rank-and-file moves progressively to the left, and the leadership – after having unsuccessfully tried to impose the new line by disciplinary means – finally effectuates a new ‘turn’ in the spring and above all in the autumn of 1965, resulting, we are sure, in no small amount of bewilderment amongst militants.

With the definitive disappearance of the Nasserist elements from the government and the resumption of the war in Kurdistan, the Communist Party leadership adopts the slogan of ‘violent struggle’ to overthrow ‘Arif’s ‘dictatorial regime’ and ‘for a provisional Government of National Coalition to include all patriotic and anti-imperialist groups (…) to institute parliamentary, constitutional life’. It calls on Nasser to reconsider his relations with the ‘Arif government because of the latter’s readiness to lay itself open to the influence of English imperialism and the oil monopolies.

From October 1965 the Communist Party maintains a hostile position towards Abd-al-Salam ‘Arif ‘s government, and then towards his brother’s government, despite both of them having been approved by both Moscow and the Lebanese Communist Party. But it is only in February 1967 that the Communist Party decides to form small armed units, both mobile and static, in the rural areas and in a number of cities, and to start a limited guerrilla war.

Naturally this superficial radicalism is not enough to maintain party unity, On 17 September 1967 a significant part of the organisation, which had been fighting to ‘democratise’ the internal life of the party, would split off to form the Iraqi Communist Party (Central Command). The I.C.P. (Central Command) refuses to align itself with China or with the USSR and defends the necessity of arming the masses and of the popular armed struggle in the cities and the countryside. Their ambiguous objectives include: a ‘revolutionary democratic popular regime under the leadership of the working class’; ‘revolutionary Arab unity with a socialist content’ and support for ‘the destruction of the State of Israel and the creation of an Arab-Jewish democratic state’.

In February 1969 everyone in the Political Office is arrested. Two die under torture whilst the other three (including the secretary al-Hajj) agree to collaborate with the Ba’th, denouncing their comrades and conducting public interviews in support of the Ba’th (later on al-Hajj would carve out a successful career for himself in the diplomatic corps, obtaining a posting in Paris).

The I.C.P (Central Command) takes a year to re-build its organisation, and only in the Kurdish areas, where it would establish a “strategic alliance” with Barzani’s KDP, the only Kurdish nationalist organisation in existence at the time.

The Kurdish defeat in 1975 would also bring about the ruin of the I.C.P. (Central Command). Its five main leaders are arrested and executed in Sulaimaniyya; a blow from which this group would never recover. Many militants withdraw from political activity and the few surviving units had disbanded by the end of the ‘70s.
 

The suicidal tactic of the United Front

Following the split, the official Communist Party, known after 1967 as the I.C.P (Central Committee) to distinguish it from the secessionist I.C.P. (Central Command), calls an emergency national conference (the third in its history) in December 1967, where it reaffirms the policy of building democratic United Fronts with the aim of forming a coalition government to replace ‘Abd-ur-Rahman ‘Arif’s government. Despite the conference confirming its faith in the USSR and Egypt, Moscow doesn’t support the policy and responds two months later by closing down the ‘Voice of the Iraqi People’, the Communist Party’s radio station transmitting from Prague via booster stations in Bulgaria.

On 17 July 1968 the Ba’th and the armed forces carry out yet another coup d’état and Abd-ur-Rahman ‘Arif is forced into exile, replaced by Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr. Many of Arif’s collaborators take part in the coup d’état and remain in post, but only for a matter of weeks; indeed only a few days later, on 30 July, another coup d’état eliminates Arif’s long term allies and leaves the men of the Ba’th in sole charge. The latter, organised in a Revolutionary Command Council, retain all powers, leaving the nominated government to perform exclusively administrative tasks. This power structure will endure over the ensuing decades. Apart from al-Bakr, the new strong man that emerges is Saddam Hussein. Throughout the chaotic 1970s he manages to manoeuvre himself into a key position within the Revolutionary Command Council by eliminating all potential competitors. In February 1979 he forces al-Bakr to resign and takes over as head of State.

The Ba’th immediately seeks support from the I.C.P (Central Committee), going on to release a few political prisoners in September 1968 and offering ministerial posts to the communists. Initially the I.C.P (Central Committee) turns them down, declaring as the condition for their support peace in Kurdistan, a constituent assembly and the reestablishment of civil liberties (legalisation of political parties, democratic elections, etc), but in the Spring of 1969 (when the Ba’th signs important oil deals with the USSR) it opens negotiations with the Ba’th, which allows the legal publication of the Communist Party ‘monthly magazine of general culture’, al-Thaqafa al Jadida, and calls on the Communist Party to participate in a ‘National Patriotic Front’.

Negotiations continue until the spring of 1970 when it is the Ba’th who break off relations, proceeding to make hundreds of arrests and to ‘discretely’ murder various well-known communists, or arrange their ‘disappearance’. In September 1970 the Communist Party holds the 2^nd Congress in its history, still in secret, in Iraqi Kurdistan. The final documents recognise the ‘positive’ action of the Ba’th on the economic and social fronts, and acknowledge its ‘anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist’ positions but still denounce the absence of ‘democratic freedom’. Relations are re-established in the autumn of 1971, and then strengthened following the nationalisation of the Iraq Petroleum Company and the ‘solid strategic alliance’ concluded between Baghdad and Moscow.

Throughout this period (1968-72), the Ba’th uses a carrot and stick approach in its relations with the Communist Party, alternating open co-operation with violent repression, both overt and covert. A common practice was to arrest ordinary militants, subject them to torture in the police stations and then release them a few days later, but there was no lack of cases of leaders being murdered as well, even during periods of ‘negotiation’ and ‘openness’.

During the same period, the Ba’th government would: enact a new agrarian reform far more radical than anything the Communist Party had demanded up to that point; enact a Labour Code establishing the social rights of workers (but severely restricting the right to strike and prohibiting free trade-union organisation); nationalise the Iraq Petroleum Company; introduce a monopoly in Foreign Trade; sign a treaty with the USSR; adopt an ‘anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist’ international position and provide support to some of the currents within the Palestinian movement.

In April 1972 the Communist Party declared that ‘recent developments have marked a turning point in the popular struggle’ and it declares itself disposed to enter the National Patriotic Front. The following month two communists (one of whom, predictably, is Amer ‘Abdallah) are appointed to the cabinet. But it is only in 1973 that the Communist Party finally enters the Front by signing the National Action Charter, and the party and its daily newspaper are legalised.

1972-3 marks the beginning of a period in which the Communist Party depicts Saddam Hussein as a kind of Iraqi Fidel Castro, as the Ba’th’s ‘man of the left’, the one who is closest to the communists. In February 1974 the Communist Party dissolves all of its independent (and still illegal) organisations in the workplace. In the four years after 1972 the Ba’th fully exploit this communist acquiescence and acquire almost total control over the trades unions, the peasant unions and the other mass organisations.

The Communist Party supports all the Ba’th’s initiatives, including the bloody war against the Kurds in 1974-5, but it is actually the agreement with Iran (the Algiers Agreement), enabling the defeat of the Kurdish forces, which gives Saddam Hussein the strength and security to launch an attack on his Communist Party allies, on whom he is no longer so dependent. Towards the end of 1975 communist militants are being arrested once again, and the activities of the Communist Party start to be severely curtailed from the spring of 1976.

In May 1976 the party holds its third congress in Baghdad. On the one hand it reaffirms the classic position whereby ‘the national-democratic revolution has entered a new progressive stage, the non-capitalist stage of development», on the other it emphasises «that capitalist relations of production are expanding in the countryside and that on the non-capitalist road (as distinct from the period of transition to socialism) private capital carries a lot of weight and could cause a retrogressive situation, drawing the country back into a dependence on imperialism’. The Egyptian example of this, with Sadat suddenly breaking off of all relations with the USSR, had occurred a few years before. The congress also took a position, although adopting a ‘constructive’ and conciliatory tone, against the restrictions put on its political freedom and for a return to the original arrangements within the Front, and against the dissolution of the communist led mass organisations (the Democratic Youth Federation, General Federation of Students and the Women’s Association).

This would prompt a new anti-communist propaganda campaign by the Ba’th which became increasingly violent. At the beginning of 1978 it is clear that a new break between the Communist Party and the Ba’th is only a matter of time. In March 1978 it is announced that 12 communists had been executed for conducting political activity within the armed forces, and in May 1976 a law is passed making any non-Ba’thist political activity by any member or ex-member of the armed forces a capital offence. In the summer and autumn, torture, arrests and executions follow.

The final break, marking the Communist Party’s passage to clandestinity, occurs in April 1979. The Central Committee approves a document which demonstrates a conscious wish to self-destruct, just at a time that the most combative workers in the unions find themselves, yet again, on the edge of the abyss: ‘Our party has fought with all the means at its disposal to prevent this country plunging into crisis. Out of an exalted sense of responsibility to the people, it has made great efforts to persuade the government to adopt a policy which corresponds to the people’s interests (…) The bloody violence our party has encountered reflects the Ba’th leaders’ apprehension about the existence of a Communist Party (…) that exercises its own political and ideological independence (…) All the arguments invented by the Ba’th leaders to justify their criminal campaign against our party have failed, registering for them a political and moral defeat, whilst at the same time party unity, and the party’s position amongst the masses has been consolidated’.

Faced with a new wave of repression following those of 1949 and 1963, all the Central Committee does is vindicate the ideal ‘political and moral’ defeat of its enemy, whilst failing to provide any criticism of the suicidal policy it had pursued up to that point!

For the third time, following 1949 and 1963, legions of combative worker are cut down by the forces of repression; a repression, moreover, conducted with greater precision than before. In Arab Iraq not a single proletarian organisation remains. The Communist Party manages to maintain its presence in Iraqi Kurdistan alone, as was the case with the I.C.P (Central Command) in its day, to whose manu militari destruction the Communist Party had itself contributed in its capacity as Ba’th ally. Between 1978 and 1981 it is estimated there were between 20 and 30 thousand arrests and hundreds of communists ‘disappeared’, or were ‘legally’ executed.

The violent subjugation of the rural and city proletariat would allow the Iraqi bourgeoisie, having discovered its sanguinary ‘administrator’ in the person of Saddam Hussein, to stabilise its power base by strengthening its commercial relations with the East and the West; by accumulating massive fortunes through the sale of oil; and through its attempts to go down the road of forced industrialisation. Meanwhile it would continue to strengthen the army, both as an agent of internal repression and as an instrument to extend its sphere of influence beyond its frontiers.

On this bloody path, with proceeds from the sale of the black gold, the Saddam Hussein clique would entrench itself in power.