From Dictatorship to Democracy

An Insider's Account of the Iraqi Opposition to Saddam

Hamid al-Bayati

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780812242881, 9780812242881
• eBook ISBN: 9780812290387
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic TitleToday, Hamid al-Bayati serves as Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations. But for many years he lived in exile in London, where he worked with other opponents of Saddam Hussein's regime to make a democratic and pluralistic Iraq a reality. As former Western spokesman for the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and as a member of the executive council of the Iraqi National Congress, two of the main groups opposing Saddam's regime, he led campaigns to alert the world to human rights violations in Iraq and win support from the international community for the removal of Saddam.An important Iraqi diplomat and member of Iraq's majority Shia community, he offers firsthand accounts of the meetings and discussions he and other Iraqi opponents to Saddam held with American and British diplomats from 1991 to 2004. Drawn from al-Bayati's personal archives of meeting minutes and correspondence, From Dictatorship to Democracy takes readers through the history of the opposition.We learn the views and actions of principal figures, such as SCIRI head Sayyid Mohammed Baqir Al-Hakeem and the other leaders of the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmed Chalabi and his Kurdish counterparts, Masound Barzani and Jalal Talabani. Al-Bayati vividly captures their struggle to unify in the face of not only Saddam's harsh and bloody repression but also an unresponsive and unmotivated international community. Al-Bayati's efforts in the months before and after the U.S. invasion also put him in direct contact with key U.S. figures such as Zalmay Khalilzad and L. Paul Bremer and at the center of the debates over returning Iraq to self-government quickly and creating the foundation for a secure and stable state.Al-Bayati was both eyewitness to and actor in the dramatic struggle to remove Saddam from power. In this unique historical document, he provides detailed recollections of his work on behalf of a democratic Iraq that reflect the hopes and frustrations of the Iraqi people.

1

The Birth of the Iraqi Opposition

The Baath Party came to power in Iraq through a military coup on February 8, 1963. Prime Minister Abdul Karim Qasim, the man who had led the July 14, 1958, revolution against the monarchy in Iraq, was killed in the coup. Abdul Salam Arif, a military officer and a former partner of Qasim, assumed presidency after killing Qasim, while Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, another military officer and Baath leader, became Prime Minister. The Baath party ruled cruelly for nine months, oppressing the Iraqi people through unjust arrests, torture, and murder. Located in western Baghdad, the “Palace of the End,” Qasir al-Nihaya, became a detention center where many executions took place, while party members also raped women in prison. These crimes were revealed after the first fall of the Baath regime in November 1963.

I conducted a study about the coup based on British documents in the National Archives in London, which were revealed thirty years after the event. I concluded that the coup was supported by the West; evidence showed that Western governments feared Iraq would fall under the control of communism after Prime Minister Abdul Karim Qasim made the Iraqi Communist Party legal because it was banned during the monarchy. Moreover, Prime Minister Qasim issued Law No. 80, under which the Iraqi government took back 95.5 percent of the Iraqi lands not explored by the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC). The IPC was owned by U.S., British, and other European companies, and had a concession to explore for oil throughout Iraq for seventy-five years.¹

The Baath party returned to power on July 17, 1968. Al-Bakr became President, and in 1969 Saddam Hussein became Vice President. Saddam was in charge of the regime’s intelligence apparatus, which used extreme brutality against different political groups and all the Iraqi people. The Palace of the End was used again as a detention and execution center, with Saddam in charge. The Iraqi people continued to oppose the regime, and many military coup attempts and uprisings were viciously crushed in the 1970s and 1980s.

After studying the secret U.S. documents in the National Archives in Washington, D.C.—revealed nearly thirty years after the 1968 coup—I concluded that the overthrow of Abdul Rahman Arif (the Iraqi President who succeeded his brother Abdul Salam after the latter’s 1966 death in a helicopter crash) was supported by some Western countries. Abdul Rahman had been acting against U.S. and British interests in attempting to get French and Russian companies to explore for oil in the lands taken back by Abdul Karim Qasim under Law No. 80.

Abdul Rahman also wanted to give sulfur concessions to France and to enter an agreement with Dassault Arms Company to buy 54 advanced Mirage jet fighters. This contract was canceled by the Baath regime after the coup. In his first press conference, on July 23, 1968, the post-coup Foreign Minister, Nasir al-Hani (later assassinated by Saddam’s intelligence forces), announced that the contract was not signed and the Iraqi government had not paid a deposit, so there was little hope that the new government would continue the contract.²

Both Shiite and Sunni religious scholars opposed the Baath regime. Hundreds were arrested, tortured, and killed, including Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Badri, a Sunni religious scholar in the Tobchi neighborhood of Western Baghdad, who was kidnapped and killed in 1969. Many religious Sunni movements, including the Al Tahrir Party and the Muslim Brotherhood, were crushed by the regime. Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Muhsin al-Hakim in Najaf³ opposed the Baath party and sent his son Sayyid Mahdi al-Hakim to President al-Bakr to protest Baath policies. The regime accused al-Hakim of being a Western spy and plotting with military officers and tribal chiefs to overthrow the regime; they attempted to arrest him, forcing him to flee.

Muhsin al-Hakim was put under house arrest and surrounded by security forces until his death in 1970. Millions of Iraqis attended his funeral in protest, using the occasion to express their anger with the Baath regime. When President al-Bakr tried to join the funeral, the people shouted at him, “Listen, Mr. President, Sayyid Mahdi is not a spy.”

Sayyid Muhsin al-Hakim had been the highest religious authority in Najaf between 1955 and 1970. He defended all Iraqis against the successive dictatorial regimes in Baghdad. In 1966, for example, President Abdul Salam Arif wanted to carry out combat operations against the Kurds in Northern Iraq, so he arranged for a conference of Muslim religious scholars from Iraq and many Arab and Muslim countries to issue a religious decree (fatwa) allowing the government to kill the Kurds. Many Muslim scholars attended, and they issued a fatwa based on a Quranic verse, which reads, “The recompense of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and do mischief on earth is only that they shall be killed or crucified or their hands and their feet be cut off from opposite sides, or be exiled from the land. That is their disgrace in this world, and a great torment is theirs in the Hereafter” (Al-Maeda 5:33). Sayyid Muhsin al-Hakim was invited to the conference, but he refused to attend; instead, he issued a fatwa against killing the Kurds. This decision cemented ties between Kurdish leader Mullah Mustafa al-Barzani and al-Hakim that have since ensured the strong relations between the Kurds and the al-Hakim family.

When the Christian community was oppressed in the 1960s by the dictatorial regime in Baghdad because its members lived in the same areas as the Kurds in Northern Iraq, they appealed to Sayyid Muhsin al-Hakim, who issued a fatwa against the repression of Christians in Iraq. The relationship between the Christians and al-Hakim and his family has also remained strong ever since. Indeed, Iraqi priests and archbishops used to participate in Islamic festivals and celebrations in Baghdad, Basra, and other provinces, and Muslim scholars frequently visited Iraqi churches to join Christians during their celebrations.

The Jewish community in Iraq also received al-Hakim’s benevolence. Meer Basri, an Iraqi Jewish scholar who later found refuge in London, republished the History of the Jews of Iraq, written by Yusuf Ghanimah at the beginning of the twentieth century. Basri added a supplement on the history of the Jews of Iraq in the twentieth century in which he wrote: “the circumstances of Jews worsened after the 1967 war, as they were subjected to killing, kidnapping, and arrest in a way which is not acceptable by manhood and humanity. Sayyid Muhsin al-Hakim, the highest religious authority for the Shiites, issued a religious decree ‘Fatwa’ that it is a duty to treat the Jews well and to remove injustice and oppression against them.”⁴

A large uprising against the Baath party took place in 1977, when the regime tried to prevent Shiite pilgrims from going on foot to the holy city of Karbala to visit the holy shrine of Imam Hussein on the occasion of Arbaeen (the fortieth day after the Ashura, the martyrdom of Imam Hussein commemorated on the tenth day of the lunar month of Muharram). The regime deployed military forces, tanks, and armored vehicles to stop the pilgrims, but the Iraqi people insisted on practicing their rituals no matter what the sacrifice. (Centuries before, the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties also attempted to prevent people from visiting the shrine of Imam Hussein through arrests, torture, and killing, but devout Muslims have insisted on performing these rituals for hundreds of years.) Iraqis peacefully began their unarmed marches toward Karbala a few days before the religious observance, but they were faced with the Baath regime’s military might. Sadly, thousands of people were arrested and tortured, while others were executed and killed in the streets.

Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr dispatched Sayyid Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, a son of the late Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Muhsin al-Hakim, to calm the people, who were surrounded by troops between Karbala and Najaf. Sayyid Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, a politically active religious scholar in Najaf and university lecturer in Baghdad, was arrested and tortured; following protests, he was released in a general amnesty for prisoners in 1979.

When Saddam Hussein became president on July 17, 1979, he began a more brutal campaign against the Iraqi people. There was an uprising in 1979 when Saddam’s regime arrested the Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr in the holy city of Najaf and took him to Baghdad. Demonstrations erupted in Baghdad and many other Iraqi provinces. The regime was forced to release al-Sadr, but he remained under house arrest and continued surveillance. Through complex means, al-Sadr maintained daily communication with Sayyid Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim through his brother Sayyid Abdul Aziz al-Hakim.

Saddam’s intelligence services knew that Sayyid al-Sadr continued his contacts with the Iraqi people despite his house arrest and the security surrounding the house, which included listening devices and surveillance cameras. The regime also knew that Sayyid al-Sadr was issuing fatwas to oppose Saddam and the Baath Party and ordering people to use military means to do so in response to the state-sponsored killings of religious scholars and their followers.

On April 9, 1980, Saddam’s regime executed Sayyid Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr along with his sister Amina al-Sadr (often called Bint al-Huda), because she had called on people to demonstrate when her brother was arrested the first time in 1979. Twenty-four years later, on the same day in 2003, Saddam’s regime fell. Many Iraqis believe this was God’s justice against the regime.

The Origins of SCIRI and the Opposition to Saddam

Sayyid Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim and his brother Sayyid Abdul Aziz al-Hakim left Iraq in 1980 to start an opposition movement outside the country. In 1982 they established the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Al-Majlis Al-ala lil-thawra Al-Islamiya fil Iraq, SCIRI). (As noted earlier, SCIRI was renamed the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, ISCI, after Saddam was deposed.) The Supreme Council was an umbrella organization of many political movements and prominent personalities that included Shiite and Sunni religious scholars as well as Arab, Turkmen, and Kurdish participants.

The major Iraqi political currents of the Iraqi opposition were Islamist, Kurdish, nationalist, leftist and liberal. Besides the Supreme Council (and in addition to many other smaller Islamic groups), the other main Islamist groups included the Dawa Islamic Party, headed by former Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and later by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and the Iraqi Islamic Party, formerly headed by Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi. This party was the continuation of the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamic movement established in Egypt in the 1930s that had spread throughout the Arab world.

The main Kurdish opposition parties (in addition to Islamic Kurdish groups and other smaller Kurdish parties) were the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), headed by Massoud Barzani, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), headed by Jalal Talabani. The nationalists consisted mainly of the Iraqi Baath Party (supported by Syria and called the Regional Command of Iraq); the former Baath movements, such as the Iraqi National Accord (INA) headed by Dr. Ayad Allawi, a Baath leader who defected and opposed Saddam’s regime; and some Arab nationalist and Nasserite movements.

The leftist current was mainly the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) and some former communist groups that had become democratic movements, such as the Iraqi Democratic Movement and the Iraqi Democratic Party. The liberal current included some supporters of monarchy, such as Free Iraqi Council headed by Saad Saleh Jabur, son of Prime Minister Salih Jabur during the monarchy in the 1950s, and the Constitutional Monarchy Movement headed by Sharif Ali bin Hussein.

In the 1980s, the Iraqi opposition movement was mainly based inside Iraq and in some neighboring countries, including Iran and Syria. As the Iran-Iraq war raged during the 1980s, most of the countries in the region—in fact, most of the world’s nations—supported Saddam’s regime out of fear of the Islamic revolution in Iran. The two Kurdish parties (the KDP and PUK) and the Supreme Council were the most powerful groups during that period because they had political leaders known to people inside Iraq, organizations within Iraq, and military force. The three groups cooperated against Saddam’s regime and were major contributors to the Iraqi opposition and its activity.

The First Gulf War

With Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, everything changed. The Iraqi opposition became known around the world, and its activities became international, because the whole world stood against the invasion of Kuwait.

Saddam Hussein claimed that Kuwait was historically part of Iraq’s Basra province and that it was stealing from Iraqi oilfields near the borders of Iraq and Kuwait. According to this rationale, he could take over countless other Arab countries, since many were once part of Basra province during the Otto-man Empire. Since assuming the presidency and initiating war with neighboring Iran, Saddam had the support of the West, especially the U.S., so he believed that his decision to invade Kuwait was not illogical. Indeed, before Saddam carried out the Kuwaiti invasion, he first met with the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, on July 25, 1990. He told Glaspie that relations with Kuwait had deteriorated and there were serious border disputes between the two countries. Glaspie told Saddam that the United States did not want to interfere between Arab brothers and that the two countries should work out their problems bilaterally. Saddam concluded from the meeting that the United States would not object to an invasion. Many Iraqis believe that Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, similar to the war against Iran, came with a green light from the United States.

In his book The End of Iraq, former UN Deputy Special Representative for Afghanistan Peter Galbraith wrote that the weakness of the stance the U.S. conveyed in meetings with Ambassador Glaspie and subsequent messages to Saddam, although not a green light to invade Kuwait, was taken by Saddam in the context of American diplomacy toward Iraq since 1980. This history included UN resolutions that did not demand Iraq withdraw from occupied Iranian territory (passed with President Jimmy Carter’s blessing); intelligence sharing and other assistance to Iraq’s war effort authorized by President Ronald Reagan; the Reagan administration’s turning a blind eye when Saddam used chemical weapons on Iranian soldiers in 1983, and providing shortly thereafter hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies to Saddam’s regime; and the Reagan Administration’s resistance to imposing sanctions after Saddam gassed the Kurds in 1988.⁵ Based on these signals, Saddam probably expected no more than a slap on the hand for invading Kuwait.

The invasion was the beginning of the end for Saddam, and a large boost to the Iraqi opposition. He had miscalculated the results of the invasion, both internationally and domestically. The United States, under President George H. W. Bush, instead of accepting the invasion, created an international coalition to reverse it. The U.S.-led Gulf War of 1990–1991 restored Kuwait’s sovereignty and decisively defeated Saddam’s military.

In his study of the Iraqi opposition and the Gulf War, Ali Mohammed al-Shamrani—a diplomat in the Saudi Embassy in London in the 1990s who worked for Prince Turki al-Faisal when he headed Saudi intelligence and with whom I had very good relations—points out the effects of the invasion of Kuwait on the Iraqi opposition. He argues that since Saddam had involved Iraq’s military in a war it could not win, many Iraqi soldiers and officers became oppositionists and crossed the borders to Iran and Saudi Arabia to join factions of the Iraqi opposition before the liberation of Kuwait. Furthermore, oppositionists in exile suddenly found themselves the center of attention by their host countries and became reenergized and reinvigorated with the flow of new political support. The opposition in exile believed that the convergence of international opposition to the invasion—Iraq’s new enemy was not a third world country like Iran, but the greatest power in the world, diplomatically backed by the international community and militarily and financially supported by thirty countries—along with the signs of fatigue among the Iraqi people, who were still healing the wounds of the Iran-Iraq war and thus not ready to go through another bloody experience, provided a golden opportunity.⁶

Another factor also channeled support to the opposition: the financial impact of UN sanctions. The UN reaction to Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, was to adopt a series of Security Council resolutions toward the aggressor. Resolution 660 condemned Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. A total trade embargo on Iraq was imposed by Resolution 661 (Resolution 666 excluded food and medicine). In the months after the end of the war, Resolution 706 gave Iraq permission to sell limited amounts of oil to buy food and medicine under strict UN control as laid down ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Birth of the Iraqi Opposition
• Chapter 2: The Journey from Salah al-Din to Washington
• Chapter 3: Failed Coups and U.S. Policy Shifts
• Chapter 4: A Strategic Shift: From Containment to Liberation
• Chapter 5: Uniting the Opposition
• Chapter 6: War and Occupation
• Chapter 7: Dealing with Bremer
• Chapter 8: Negotiating the Transition
• Chapter 9: Self-Rule
• Conclusion: The New Iraq
• Notes
• Index