Yeah, this is hardly surprising, but:
BAGHDAD In the end, after the secret investigations, the middle-of-the-night arrests, the obsequious genuflections to Saddam Hussein, a common passion drove these members of Iraq's Baath Party to excel at their special occupation. It was all about the money.Just as soon as any of them apprehended a malefactor and saw to his execution, or immediately after rounding up an army deserter, amputating his ears and arranging to have food rations denied his family, Baath Party functionaries filled out forms in triplicate and forwarded them to headquarters with a note asking: please send my bonus. That is one finding from a review of documents among 2.5 million pages of records taken from underground vaults beneath the Baath Party national headquarters here - much of the documentary record of the party's work over a decade or two.
The records show that party functionaries often regarded the party as if it were a rich uncle. In December 2000, Yousef Mahmoud wrote to Baath headquarters, saying, "I am passing through difficult times. I just got married and have lots of debts. Please send 250,000 dinar," or $125. A short time later, the records say, he got a check for $75. Kanan Makiya, a Brandeis University professor and author, said he stumbled upon these records last summer while trying to save a monument to the party's founder, Michel Aflaq, that was scheduled for demolition. A few years ago, the United States gave Makiya custody of another trove of Iraqi documents seized in Kuwait and northern Iraq after the Gulf war in 1991, and so he won permission from the occupation authorities to take custody of the new papers as well.
Makiya intends to share them with the public by opening a museum and archive that he is calling the Memory Foundation. The Americans plan to give him some of the financing for the project, and he is soliciting the rest.
The Baath Party was Saddam's political base, but it grew to be much more. The party was one element of a three-sided security apparatus that kept Iraqis cowed. The other two were the army and the Mukhabarat secret service.
If the files are to be believed, party members investigated ordinary citizens, and party apparatchiks won promotion based on the number of political enemies they arrested and punished. The former Communists of the Soviet bloc used similar systems of control, and delving into the issue of who was spying on whom has produced tensions in countries as records have been unearthed and made public. In Iraq, many people have aggressively tried to find records of the Saddam era. But their goal, generally, is to learn the fate of missing family members - not necessarily to implicate individual Baathists.
Keep reading. Very enlightening.
(Note: When I originally posted this, I somehow grabbed a lot more of the IHT story than I intended. Some of it twice. That and the line breaks got erased. Sorry.)
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