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Purge of Baathists could cost thousands their jobs

Tarik al-Kubaisy, vice-president of the Iraqi Society of Psychiatrists, is a worried man. It's not just that the queue of patients suffering from severe stress disorders in Iraq's war-torn society is growing longer by the day.

Nor that a country of 25 million has fewer than 100 psychiatrists and many are planning to emigrate now that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's restrictions on foreign travel have gone.

The other concern for Kubaisy, who was awarded a London University doctorate after four years at the Maudsley hospital in the British capital, is that the Americans have taken away his job.

Like many young Iraqi professionals, he joined the Baath party several years before Saddam became its leader and turned Iraq into a one-party state. But under Order Number One, issued by Paul Bremer, Iraq's US administrator, -- the so-called "de-Baathification" decree -- Kubaisy's position as a professor in Baghdad university's college of medicine has ended.

When Baghdad University and Iraq's other colleges re-open next week, around 2,000 senior staff have been told to stay at home, Kubaisy estimates. Although they were Baath party members, none was connected to the former regime's security apparatus.

"It's collective punishment. It's conviction without any charge," Kubaisy said yesterday. "I'm becoming a bit paranoid, but I think the Americans intend to force Iraqi brains to go abroad".

Coalition officials argue that every Baathist has not been purged. Only those who held one of its top four ranks are barred from public service.

"The de-Baathification decree is the most popular thing we have done here," a senior coalition official said.

It was strongly promoted by Washington neo-conservatives like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and his friend, Ahmed Chalabi, a businessman convicted in Jordan of fraud who is now a member of Iraq's governing council.

"The problem is they didn't look at who were really leaders. They made the issue of rank too important and went down too low," said Husam al-Rawi, a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects and a professor in Baghdad University's architecture department.

"Instead of targeting a thousand or a few hundred people, they targeted 80,000," he said.

Rawi joined the Baath party as a 15-year-old in 1958 and was a section head, the third rank down. Kubaisy was even lower, a secretary of a branch.

He was never asked to spy on other faculty members, he insisted. "We weren't involved in policing. We had no association with the security organization. They had their own informers, who didn't have to be party members," he said.

Rawi joined the Baath party when it stood for socialism and opposition to religious extremists. "After Saddam Hussein took power, the party became a skeleton with no spirit." By then it was too late to get out.

The de-Baathification decree is also causing turmoil in government ministries, hospitals and other bodies considered part of the civil service. Anyone in the top three levels of management loses their job if he or she was a party member, regardless of rank.
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