Baáthist teachers prepare to go back to the classroom

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1207415,00.html

Disquiet as 10,000 staff are reinstated in a rethink of the US aim to 'extirpate Saddam's party'

Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Saturday May 1, 2004
The Guardian

Five months after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime a letter from the education ministry arrived at Abdul Karim Ma'ashan's school ordering him home. Mr Ma'ashan, 48, the headteacher and Arabic history teacher at a secondary school in western Baghdad, and four other teachers were told they had lost their jobs because of their high-level Ba'ath party affiliations.
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Now the US administration in Baghdad has announced a rethink of its criticised de-Ba'athification policy, and in a first step 10,000 teachers are to be allowed back to work.
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"Iraq lost a lot of expertise not only in education but also in medicine. None of them did any crimes that the law can accuse them of. Why were we Ba'athists? Because this is how the ministry worked."


.... an ever-worsening insurgency from the Sunni community that made up the larger part of the Ba'ath party, there has been a radical change of heart. Officials now recognise that the only way to strike at the heart of the resistance is to allow many of these Ba'athists back to their jobs, however unpalatable that may be for millions of other Iraqis, and to give more political representation to the Sunnis.

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In these offices there is no room left for doubt about the party's legacy. A poster on one wall states simply: "Nazis = Ba'ath."

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Mr Alusi is blunt. He refers again and again to the "fascist Ba'athist Nazi experiment".
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He is deeply uncomfortable with the policy change.
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The decision to re-employ so many Ba'athists, he argues, may be seen as an appeasement of the insurgency, and he suggests there are more than 71,000 teachers looking for work who have no Ba'ath background and would make better teachers. "The Ba'athists were here for 35 years, they are many in number, they have many weapons," he said. "One night they left and now they want to return."

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