New York Sun January 28, 2005 Allawi Runs With Alleged Baathists BY ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the Sun
WASHINGTON - As Iraqis prepare to head to the polls Sunday some of the candidates on the ballot may be disqualified from holding office due to their prior connections to Saddam Hussein's government. On January 11, the deputy of Iraq's Debaathification Commission, Jawad al-Maliki, submitted the names of 15 people running on Prime Minister Allawi's 221-person slate that he said cannot run for office because they were barred under the lustration procedures of the transitional administrative law. Mr.al-Maliki is a member of the Dawa Party, which has fielded candidates as part of the United Iraqi Alliance, a slate comprised largely of religious and secular Shiite leaders that is expected to win the most seats this Sunday. The campaign leading up to the national assembly election has been marred by terrorist violence. Yesterday, Al Qaeda affiliate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi released a video showing the beheading of Mr. Allawi's secretary, Salem Jaafar al-Kanani. "We did not get these names until very late," a senior official with the Debaathification Commission told The New York Sun. "But Allawi's list has many senior Baathists. We checked the names." The official, who asked that his identity not be disclosed due to recent threats, said the commission has received no response so far from the higher independent commission for elections in Iraq other than a signed form from the suspected candidates pledging they were not senior members of the Baath party, Saddam Hussein's regime, or engaging in espionage activities on behalf of Iraq's old intelligence services. All candidates in Sunday's election must sign such a form. The candidates mentioned in the letter from Mr. al-Maliki include Nizar al Hazairan, the 10th name on Mr. Allawi's al-Iraqiyya list. According to the commission, Mr. al-Hazairan was a top-ranking Baath party member and a member of Iraq's Parliament under Saddam's rule. He was also a top sheik of the Azza tribe in the Diyala province, an area rife with insurgent violence. The seventh person on the Allawi list, Rasim al-Awwadi, was also mentioned in the letter as having been an informer for the Iraqi intelligence service while he was in exile in Jordan. Ministers close to Mr. Allawi have been accused in recent weeks of covering up their Baathist ties. For example, the commission has looked at the case of Adnan al-Jenabi, a minister without portfolio in the interim government who is the fifth name on Mr. Allawi's list and manager of the slate's political campaign. According to officials familiar with the investigation, Mr. al-Jenabi was chairman of the oil and energy committee of Saddam's Parliament in the late 1990s, the height of the U.N. oil-for-food scandal. The leader of the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmad Chalabi, has accused Iraq's defense minister, Hazem Shaalan, of being a Baathist agent as recently as 2003. For publicizing these charges, Mr. Shaalan threatened to arrest Mr. Chalabi and send him to Jordan to face charges leveled by a military court for his role in the collapse of the Petra Bank. Mr. Chalabi is the nominal head of the Debaathification Commission. Mr. al-Jenabi's cousin, Saad al-Jenabi, was also mentioned by the commission as having been an informer for the Iraqi intelligence services while living in exile in America as recently as 1998. Saad al-Jenabi tops his own slate of candidates for the national assembly. The Debaathification Commission researches former regime officials based on old government files uncovered in the first weeks and months of the war by Iraqi militias including Mr. Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress and Peshmerga militias loyal to the two major Kurdish parties. Last year the Iraq Memory Foundation, the organization run by human rights activist Kanan Makiya, agreed to share documents it has found and is now analyzing. The commission does not, however, have access to the trove of documents found by the American military in Operation Iraqi Freedom, which are to this day in the custody of the American embassy in Baghdad. The Debaathification Commission was created to formalize a process of appeals to the coalition provisional authority's original debaathification order. That order said that any member of the old Baath party senior enough to have had to inform on his neighbor would be barred from the new government. The panel has come under criticism by some who have said it would be easy to forge incriminating proof against the political opponents of those doing the vetting. Last spring, a former CIA analyst and noted author, Kenneth Pollack, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he suspected Mr. Chalabi was forging documents and recommended the American military demand that the Iraqi leader hand over those documents he had stored away. A former deputy defense minister of Poland, Radek Sikorski, told the Sun yesterday his experience in the Polish transitional government tells him it is very difficult to forge intelligence documents. "The way the security services work is that everything was written down and the files are in multiple locations," Mr. Sikorski said. "It is very hard to invent files from scratch. This is a different issue from whether the offices were writing down the truth as they saw it." A former senior American adviser to the coalition provisional authority told the Sun this week that he did not suspect the names generated by the commission in his tenure were based on phony documents. "There were times that I thought the documents did not tell the whole story. A lot of times a name will appear in an intelligence file and it does not mean anything." Upon taking power Mr. Allawi tried to disband the commission because he said it was too aggressive and at the time was courting former Baath party members in the hopes of persuading them to leave the insurgency. Also complicating the matter was that its first director, Mithal al-Alusi, was wanted by Interpol for his role in taking over the Iraqi embassy in Berlin in 2002. Over the summer, Iraq's Shura Council ruled that Mr. Allawi could not disband the panel. Nevertheless, Mr. Allawi distributed credentials for only 50 of the commission's 250 employees, making it impossible for four fifths of the commission to get to work inside the heavily guarded green zone in Iraq, where the commission's headquarters is located. "Because there are not proper vetting processes, Mr. Allawi identified the problem as too many people being thrown out of jobs," the director of Middle East and North Africa program for the International Center for Transitional Justice, Hanny Megally, who is also a former regional director for Human Rights Watch, said in an interview yesterday. Mr. Megally worked in the 1990s on analyzing the Iraqi state documents that proved Saddam's culpability in the 1988 gassing of Halabja and the Anfal campaign against the Kurds. In reaction to the perceived excesses of debaathification, Mr. Allawi tried to create a new system that in Mr. Megally's view set the bar too high for who could be purged from the new government. "The interim government said, 'unless there is clear evidence of past involvement in abuses or corruption then they should be allowed back.' In the last six months you have a system where people are being brought back in reaction to debaathification." The rebaathification of Mr. Allawi's government may explain a devastating Human Rights Watch report released this week that found Iraqi jails were shocking prisoners on their earlobes and genitals, suspending them from ceilings, and kicking and slapping prisoners while they were undergoing under interrogation. A spokesman for Mr. Chalabi said that he expects the new government that will be selected by the assembly elected this June would rigorously pursue debaathification in general. "The commission will continue its work. Debaathification is one of the most critical issues for the majority of Iraqis," Entifadh Qanbar said yesterday.
