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IRAQ
NOTEBOOK
Reds under the ruins
By Paul Belden
BAGHDAD - He still calls
himself Abu Ayad, but that's only because old habits die
hard. "It's my secret name," he explains with a smile,
wiping his professorial spectacles against the sleeve of
his neat, nerdy, button-down yellow shirt.
This
secret-named, hardened political fighter is, it turns
out, a shy man at heart.
Shy - but not
embarrassed. The name and the reason behind it, may seem
to be holdovers of a different era, but they were once
the dead-serious necessities of political activism in
this land where even the suspicion of such an
undertaking was enough to get one arrested, tortured,
killed. Such is the fate Abu Ayad has no reason to doubt
befell the two nephews he has not seen in 25 years, and
it is the fate that almost befell him, too, when his
party was outlawed in 1979 and he was forced to flee in
his socks to Syria.
But now the setting sun
pours mellow light into his brand-new party headquarters
- the swept-clean foyer of an otherwise blasted building
on Baghdad's riverside Sharia Abu Nuass that a month ago
housed the local Mukhabarat (intelligence
service), a touch he savors - and the man calling
himself Abu Ayad leans back, crosses his legs and takes
a deep, gratifying hit off a borrowed Gauloises.
"Call me Malik," he says, exhaling smoke into a
slanting beam to set off a celebratory display of
red-gold images that dance across the airborne screen.
He's not trying to hide anything. Not anymore.
Far from it. The political slogans splashed
across the front exterior wall of the building in which
he sits - "Free Country, Happy People" and "Organize for
the Unity of the People of Iraq", among others - are
impossible to miss from the road out front. They're
printed on posters tacked to the wall, and scrawled
directly onto the yellow-brick facade in a cursive
Arabic script that stretches as high and wide as the
human arm can swing a can of spray paint.
Spray
paint colored red, of course - for this is the Baghdad
party headquarters of the Iraqi Communist Party, come
home and back to life after decades of exile and
disrepair, and now determined to snatch power from under
the treads of American tanks.
A lovely thought,
is it not? The potential for irony delights.
By
any means necessary? By no means. "Oh no!" he says, his
hand in the air. "Enough. No more guns. We need
democracy here."
So no guns, then, but flyers
galore. These means he has, by the boxful, and intends
to use. Also stickers and slogans and symbols and signs.
There are stacks of these sitting on a broken-down desk,
the only furniture in the room other than a line of
beat-up vinyl-seated kitchen chairs, and they're printed
and ready for national distribution. The distribution
chain, he says, is already in place; Baghdad's first
postwar newspaper, the ICP's "People's Path", is on the
street as we speak.
"We already
have headquarters set up in all the major cities,"
Malik says. "And we are ready to move." He sees his job
over the next months and years as trying to persuade the
people of Iraq that it is possible to forge a middle
path between kick-the-poor capitalism American-style and
kill-the-poor statism Saddam-style.
What he
represents isn't really communism any more, but more a
soft, leftward-leaning blend of principles deriving from
a concern for society's weakest and specifics deriving
from various West European socialist
experiments-in-progress. The most important planks in
his current platform, he says, would include an open,
democratic process; a federal union; separation of
church and state; and - most importantly, in his view -
a ban on foreign financial support for Iraqi political
parties. In fact, to enforce this ban, "there should be
government funding for all parties and candidates in
Iraq", he says.
Asked to point to a specific
existing model that he would use as a guide for building
a government, he mentions Sweden.
At the moment,
it's a little difficult to look around this
still-burning war-torn city of tanks and Kalashnikovs
and imagine it ever turning into some kind of new
Stockholm. But then, it's also a little difficult to
look around and imagine it turning into a new Kansas
City or a new Des Moines. If Jay Garner can dream big,
so can Malik.
And anyway, he is nothing if not
persistent, a characteristic he shares with his party,
whose most potent symbol at the moment is the number
"69". This number, woven artistically into many of the
wall posters that the party is now passing out and
putting up around town - one poster features a flying
dove, another a worker's hammer - refers to the age of
the party, which was founded on March 31, 1934, by Yosif
Salman Yosif (secret name "Fahad" or "Leopard").
Yosif, who now serves the party as an iconic
figure, was publicly hanged in 1949 by the government of
Nuri Pasha as-Said, then controlled by the British. But
the party lived, going on to support the revolution of
1958 when a military coup toppled the monarchy and
brought to power a republic headed by Brigadier General
Abdel Karim Kassem. The 1950s had seen fierce political
warfare between the Arab Nationalist Party and the ICP,
a war both ended up losing when the Arab Socialist
Ba'ath outfit seized power briefly in 1963. Both Kassem
and Salaam Adel, who was then the leader of the ICP,
were killed in the chaos. In 1979, when Saddam assumed
the presidency, one of his first steps was to outlaw the
ICP, forcing its leadership - including a then
30-year-old Malik - to flee the country, dispersing to
Syria, Sulaimaniya in Kurdish Iraq, London or Moscow.
That didn't stop the jockeying for power and
influence among political Iraqi exiles, a battle which
intensified after 1991. Malik tried his best to use the
American lever to unseat Saddam, but never to the point
of supporting occupation of his country. "In 1993, I
went to the US ambassador in London and said, 'Why not
brand Saddam like an international criminal? After all,
he dried the marshes, he used chemical bombs, he has
proved himself an international criminal.' But they said
they didn't do that sort of thing."
Now, he
thinks the Americans are making a grave mistake by not
internationalizing the situation in Iraq. "We need
support from other countries, but what kind of support? -
that is the question," he says. "We need the United
Nations to help us, not just America." He takes offense
at the idea that Iraqis are somehow too ignorant to
figure out how to build a democracy on their own without
an American overseer. "I have relatives who are poor
farmers, and even when I was a child, six or seven years
old, I remember that everyone would listen to the news
and talk about politics all the time. This is who we
Iraqis are."
Indeed, as we are talking, a tall
loud man dressed in an expensive suit comes striding
into the foyer, looking for an argument, and finding
one. His name is Majid, and he is a university professor
at Saddam University, and he wants to know about the
party's position on the role of America on rebuilding
Iraq.
The debate surges and flows in Arabic, and
eventually draws in another party activist, a man
named Ehsan, who finds himself defending the party's
failure to call for an immediate American withdrawal
from Iraq. He's not exactly pro-invasion: "If the world
had only used United Nations Resolution 688 as its basis
for dealing with Saddam, this problem could have been
solved without so much killing," he says. "I think the
American regime and English regime want more than Iraq -
they want division among the Arab states, and they want
to draw a new map." But that isn't good enough for
Majid, who says the party must prove its relevance and
independence by refusing to work with any
American-imposed provisional government.
Who
would have thought that a communist party in Iraq would
be in a position of losing support by being perceived as
too pro-American?
After Ehsan leaves, Malik
mentions that when the US Congress passed the Iraqi
Freedom Act in 1999, it explicitly listed only two (of
about 70 that were jockeying for influence then) of the
Iraqi exile parties that could not receive American
funding. One was the religious al-Dawa party; the other
was the Iraqi Communist Party. "I think we may want to
put that on our banners if we want to win any
elections," he says with a sigh.
Earlier
articles in this series:
Lessons
of crass destruction
Apr 30
Oh
no, not again
Apr 23
Freedom
unbound, and out of control
Apr 22
All
according to the notebook
Apr 19
Suddenly,
a war without a border
Apr 18
A
lady with real attitude
Apr 18
(©2003
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