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作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
Iraqis Killing Former Baath Party Members
U.S. Punishment Seen As Not Harsh Enough
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By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, May 20, 2003; Page A08
BAGHDAD, May 19 -- Iraqis have begun tracking down and killing former members of the ruling Baath Party, doubtful that the United States intends to adequately punish the mid-level government functionaries who they say tormented them for three decades.
The assassinations appear to have picked up since the United States issued a decree last Friday that prohibits senior Baath Party officials from holding positions in Iraq's postwar government. A senior U.S. official said the order was intended to "drive a stake through [the Baath Party's] heart," but many Iraqis who continue to see party officials walking free believe it did not go far enough.
The number of former Baath Party officials killed since the war ended is difficult to pin down in a city of 5 million people with only two functioning police stations, no recordkeeping and a destroyed government. Drawing on anecdotal evidence, however, former exile groups and Iraqis familiar with some of the killings say it could reach several hundred in Baghdad alone.
Many of the killings have been carried out in the slum formerly known as Saddam City, a neighborhood on the eastern edge of the capital largely inhabited by Shiite Muslims, they say. Revenge killings on a smaller scale have been reported in the cities of Najaf, Karbala and Basra in the Shiite-dominated center and south of the country, where a bloody rebellion was put down in 1991 by the Sunni-controlled Baath government.
At least three former Baathists have been killed over the past two days in just three of the former Saddam City's 80 sectors, residents said. Residents of the neighborhood, since renamed Sadr City for a Shiite cleric assassinated by the government in 1999, said the killings have increased in recent days partly out of a sense of discouragement that the United States is not doing more to punish members of the old order under then-President Saddam Hussein.
The killers appear to be working from lists looted from Iraq's bombed-out security service buildings, which kept records on informants and victims alike. But others are simply killing Baathist icons or irksome party officials identified with the Hussein government. The singer Daoud Qais, known for his odes to Hussein, was shot dead on Saturday. So was the president of the Iraqi Artists Union.
"We want the Americans to kill them, but we don't think they are going to," said Muntathar Mohammed, a 40-year-old unemployed Sadr City resident. "Why can Americans kill anyone they want? Why can't we? I will kill Baathists myself. This is my right."
The United States has begun deploying more troops to Baghdad in an attempt to recover credibility lost in a crime wave that descended over the city after April 9. A looting spree has left large parts of the capital gutted, and the inability of U.S. forces to catch Hussein has given many Iraqis who suffered under Baath Party rule the impression that the mission is not a priority.
L. Paul Bremer III, the chief civil administrator of U.S.-occupied Iraq, issued the Baath prohibition decree soon after arriving to show Iraqis that "we mean business," in the words of one senior U.S. official. The order prohibits former party members from occupying the top three tiers in ministries or other public institutions, meaning that roughly 2,000 people will immediately lose their posts. As many as 30,000 other senior Baath Party members could also be affected by the ruling.
But the decree covers only government employment. Any potential criminal cases against former party members will eventually be handled by a justice system that is just now taking shape. The policy was hailed by the exile-dominated opposition parties that make up Iraq's government-in-waiting, but so far has struck many Iraqis as only a small step toward a full reckoning for the past crimes.
Entifadh Qanbar, a spokesman for the Iraqi National Congress, an exile-led opposition group with supporters in the Pentagon, endorsed Bremer's decree but said he had heard that hundreds of former party officials have been killed in Sadr City since the end of the war.
Founded on socialist principles with a pan-Arab foreign policy, Iraq's Baath Party was turned into a political control machine under Hussein. Party membership was required for many public jobs. In some restive neighborhoods it was the ticket to continuing education. Some people joined out of fear, others for the privileges. U.S. officials say 600,000 to 700,000 of Iraq's 24 million people were party members, although others say it might have been twice as many.
Nowhere, perhaps, was the party loathed as intensely as it was in what is now Sadr City. "Oh Baath Party," reads some recent graffiti, "There is no place to hide."
The Mohsin Mosque is the focal point for Sadr City's Jamila district, and the Shiite cleric Sayd Hasan Naji is one of its most influential leaders. Closed by Hussein, the mosque opened its doors for the first time in four years the day U.S. troops arrived. During a midday prayer today, Naji implored several dozen worshipers and the community beyond through minaret loudspeakers to "stop these hostilities."
"I'm going to give you these lectures every day," said Naji, who wears the black turban signifying that he is a descendant of the prophet Muhammad. "If you do not follow the law of Islam, you are not a Muslim."
The message at the mosque, however, was different last Friday when a visiting cleric from Najaf told worshipers that they should allow Baath Party members only a certain a period of time to leave office voluntarily. "If not, then we should kill them," Ali Nasir, 30, who sells aluminum on Sadr City's street, remembered of Sheik Kadhum Ubadi's sermon.
A Baath Party official was gunned down two days ago near the traffic circle where Nasir spoke, as part of what Nasir said was an effort by "some people to pursue these Baathists until they are dead." The same day, a party official was shot dead outside a gas station several blocks from the traffic circle, according to residents, and the next day the principal of nearby Tenmya Elementary School was killed outside his home, also in daylight.
"We don't know what the Americans will do with them," Nasir said of the Baathists. "The Americans don't show us the ones they have captured on TV, so we don't really know anything. This worries us."
Residents here say the people doing the killing are working from Baath Party membership lists and security documents that include information about neighborhood informants. Much of this material has been filtering out of the abandoned ministries and security buildings in the weeks after the war, coming into the hands of a prisoners' rights group, political parties and U.S. officials.
Others have been among the Baath Party's legion of small tyrants, which is how students and teachers described Falah Dulaimi. He was the assistant dean of the Mustansirya University's college of sciences. Students shot him as he walked to his campus office on the morning of May 10.
Correspondent Anthony Shadid contributed to this report.
?2003 The Washington Post Company
作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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