A History of the Iraqi Communist Party 1934-1963: Part 4
(Final part)
By "Comrade Mudarisov"
On the night of July 14th the Iraqi monarchy and the system of government that had been in place since 1923 was destroyed. The morning after jubilant crowds took to the streets to celebrate and to seek revenge on their old masters. The new leader of Iraq was Brigadier Abdul-Karim Qassem, chairman of the Iraqi Free Officers. This chapter will examine the role of the ICP during the years of the revolutionary regime. This role can be put into three clear phases of development: the first phase was the adoption of a new position, now that the monarchy had been overthrown the ICP needed to have a new strategy with the new regime. In addition to this the ICP realised the strength of Arab nationalism in this period, which pushed them further to find a new strategy. The second phase was the rise of the party, while the government appeared to be allied to them, or too weak to offer effective opposition. This phase included the nationalist revolts of Rashid ‘Ali al-Gailani and the Shawwaf attempted coup in Mosul in 1959. Both of these revolts ended in failure and merely served to increase the impetus of the communist movement in this period. This second phase ended in May 1959 when it became known that Qassem had rejected the communist claim for official recognition. Finally, the third phase was the confrontation between Qassem and the ICP, as well as the loss of support for the ICP on the streets following the Kirkuk massacre in 1959. The party, at this time, acknowledged its failure publicly, but it was never to reach the same level of support again. In fact this phase sees the retreat of communism in Iraq, and its decline. These three phases will be examined in this chapter in detail, in order to understand the role the party played in this period and to put it into context of Iraqi politics at the time. To begin with however, this study shall examine why the ICP initially supported the revolution and what it had to gain from this stance.
The revolutionary regime was regarded by the ICP as watani i.e. national. In simple terms this meant that they thought the regime was acceptable. There were many reasons for this, firstly Qassem’s regime was regarded as ‘anti imperialist’ in origin and committed to stay out of western defence systems, secondly, Qassem’s first weeks in power established his determination to stay independent of the UAR, which was a vital consideration of communist party policy in the Arab Middle East, since they felt that Nasser was very popular and could sway Iraqi opinion against them, and thirdly Qassem’s regime was the least of all evils if the possibility of communist government was expected. The ICP attitude towards the regime was based on the premise that it was a ‘revolution of all the anti-imperialist classes and anti-feudalist classes’ and that: ‘officers representing the national bourgeoisie’ had triggered the takeover. Thus, in communist doctrine and strategy during the 1920s and even after the twentieth congress of the communist party of the Soviet Union in 1956, the term ‘national bourgeoisie’ implies that in underdeveloped countries there could be an alliance between communists and the non-proletarian or even actively exploitative classes if their interests ran counter to those of imperialism. Furthermore, the ICP set out to establish a network of trade unions and front organisations. These included the General Federation of Trade Unions and the Students’, Economists’ and Teachers’ Unions. At opportune moments these could be mobilized to exert political and economic pressures on the government.
Now that we have established why the communists supported the revolution, we shall now turn our attentions to whether they played an active role in its execution. It is clear, according to Batatu, that officers close to Qassem kept the leading members of the National Unity Front fairly well posted on what was going on. Thus, the communist party centre placed all the party organisations on alert on the night of July 13-14, only giving the vaguest of reasons for taking this step. In addition, the party issued a general directive to all heads of the principal party committees, which foreshadowed the nationalist-communist conflict that was to come. It stated ‘the necessity of showing great vigilance towards various kinds of intrigues and conspiracies and towards the activities of the agents of imperialism…’ this was a clear reference to the Ba’ath and other nationalists in Iraq, since the ICP knew that the National Unity Front prior to the revolution had been a marriage of convenience. Furthermore, immediately after the revolution the ICP had urged Qassem to set up an official militia to protect the revolution right away. Qassem set up the People’s Resistance Forces (PRF) (al-Muqawama al-Sha‘biyya), but seemed to have understood the dangers of establishing such a force acting on its own initiative. Thus, he issued a decree forbidding any non-governmental agency to recruit or organise bodies of armed men. Qassem was not the only one aware of the dangers of armed militias to his regime. Kamil Chadirchi’s National Democratic Party (NDP) sharply criticised the establishment of the PRF and the ascendancy of the communists in Iraq. This brought the ICP into conflict with its only political rival, since the Ba‘ath and Istiqlal (an Iraqi nationalist party) had gone completely underground. Later, however, the NDP was to split into two factions; one that supported partnership with the communists and the other fiercely opposing it, thus making the ICP stronger than it had been.
The Split Between Qassem and ‘Arif and the Polarisation of Iraqi Politics between Nationalists and Communists
After the revolution, Qassem’s deputy Abdul-Salam ‘Arif visited Damascus where he met President Nasser. ‘Arif was an Arab nationalist, whose views were publicly known to all. Qassem regarded his deputy’s beliefs at best ill advised and at worst simply disloyal. The growing division between the two men, which was about whether Iraq should join the union with the UAR, brought Qassem to the realisation that in order to counter ‘Arif he would have to ally himself with those who opposed Arab unity within Iraq, which basically meant leaning closer to the communists who opposed unity. In September 1958 ‘Arif was relieved of all his political positions and appointed Iraq’s ambassador in Bonn. However, he returned secretly to Baghdad in November and was promptly arrested and sentenced to death, though he was reprieved in February of 1959. ‘Arif’s fall was important for a number of reasons. Firstly, his disappearance from the political scene severely weakened the nationalist position in government as it led to the dismissal of a number of cabinet members who were regarded as nationalists and Ba’athists. Since Qassem’s victory over ‘Arif appeared to be so closely connected with the issue of Arab unity it affected most other prominent Arab nationalists in Iraq and led them to seek the overthrow of the regime with more determination in the years to come. After ‘Arif’s removal Qassem had no serious rival and could become ‘sole leader’, as he was to be known after October 1958. Finally, the commutation of the death sentence meant that ‘Arif’s survival gave Qassem’s opponents the ability to rally around him, and this is what took place in the later years of the revolution.
The next months saw a hardening of the positions of what now developed into two distinct sides, the communists and their sympathisers and the nationalists and theirs. One must not forget that despite the ICP’s support for Qassem, he still regarded them with suspicion, believing that if he publicly allied with them he would lose more support at home, and also isolate potential allies abroad. It was not until the end of January 1959 that the party was given official permission to publish their newspaper legally, the ‘Ittihad al-Sha‘ab’. In addition, Qassem could still not be persuaded by the ICP to appoint any communists to his cabinet or to any high executive position. Nevertheless, he did appoint communist sympathisers, such as Ibrahim Kubba and Naziha al-Dulaymi. With ‘Arif out of the way the nationalists turned to the veteran politician Rashid ‘Ali al-Gaylani (see Chapters One and Two of this study). Rashid ‘Ali was a prominent pan-Arabist and expected Qassem to offer him a place in the cabinet. When Qassem refused Rashid ‘Ali set about planning a coup. The plan, however, failed due to the lack of secrecy between organisers and Rashid ‘Ali was arrested and thrown in prison. This was to be a prelude to a more organised and far more serious revolt in Mosul in March 1959.
The Mosul Incident of March 1959
Following the abortive Rashid ‘Ali coup, those officers who were sympathetic or who knew about the coup attempted to stage their own revolt. The ICP’s paper the Ittihad al-Sha’ab announced that the Partisans of Peace would be staging a rally in the city of Mosul on March 6th. Abdul-Wahab Shawwaf, the commander of the Mosul garrison, paid two visits to Qassem in Baghdad to warn him of the consequences of allowing this rally to take place, however it duly went ahead. The rally itself passed off without incident but violent confrontations broke out between local nationalists and communists the next day. On 8th March at 7am Shawwaf announced his revolt over the radio; and although claiming to be acting alone he mentioned other officers who were sympathetic to him by name, such as Tabaqchali, the commander of the Kirkuk garrison. They stressed the need to end Qassem’s ‘mob dictatorship’ and restore the objectives of the 14th July Revolution from which the Baghdad government had allegedly deviated, although both were identified by Cairo Radio as staunch supporters of Arab unity. The next four days saw fighting between rival army units, in which eventually Shawwaf was killed. In addition, the assistance apparently promised by the UAR to the rebels did not appear to materialise. What aggravated the situation and increased tension in the city was the news that the popular Partisans of Peace leader, Kamil Qazanchi, who had defended Fahd at his trial in 1947 and who had led the demonstrations against the 1948 Portsmouth agreement, had been murdered in prison. This led the communists and their supporters to wage a campaign of indiscriminate revenge against suspected nationalists, in which over two hundred people were killed. This further widened and hardened the divisions between the two sides in the country. The defeat of the revolt brought the wrath of Nasser onto Qassem and the communists: ‘Those who persecuted Arab nationalists would meet the fate of Nuri as-Said.’
The consequences of this revolt were harsh and bitter for all sides. In the first place the confidence of the ICP leadership increased further after the foiling of the revolt. They began to call for the arming of the People’s Resistance and for communist representation in government. Secondly, Qassem began to initiate purges and dismissals of those he suspected of being disloyal, i.e. prominent nationalists and Ba‘athists in the ministries and the armed forces. At the same time the ICP gained the impression that by rallying ‘the people’, it could effectively check any attempted coup d’etat, reinforcing its belief that it could now play an active part in the direction of the Iraqi state. Furthermore the ICP backed People’s Resistance expanded from 11,000 members in August 1958 to about 25,000 in May 1959. Following the purges of nationalists from the army, the ICP were able to fill the void rapidly with ‘sympathetic’ officers. Two issues rose out of these consequences, firstly, with the amount of support it now had the ICP had the chance to seize power for itself. However, after heated arguments in the politburo it was decided not to embark on such an action. It claimed that while it may succeed in taking power, its original analysis of the essentially bourgeois character of the revolution was correct. In addition, the party’s opponents would be able to combine successfully against it; a civil war would follow in which the left would be defeated. The second issue to rise out of the Mosul revolt was Qassem’s constant refusal to give official recognition to the party. By doing so, he greatly limited the already narrow foundation upon which his political power had been based. The incident at Mosul and its consequences resulted in the Kirkuk incident of July 1959, in which the ICP was to lose much of its popular support.
The Kirkuk Incident of July 1959
At the end of June 1959 Qassem began to greatly restrict the role and operation of the People’s Resistance forces in order to weaken their military potential. Furthermore, many officers sympathetic with the ICP were either arrested or forcibly retired. This was done because Qassem felt threatened by the power shown by the communists at Mosul. Despite these blows, the party had no choice but to support him, presumably in the expectation that time and circumstances would eventually force Qassem to give due acknowledgement of his dependence on its support. What resulted, however, was eventually to put the ICP into a sharp decline. In Kirkuk, tensions between the Turcoman and Kurdish populations came to a head on the first anniversary of the revolution. The Kurds, who feared Arab nationalism and looked to the ICP as a counter weight to Pan-Arabism, killed roughly seventy Turcomans, who were traditionally religious conservatives and very anti-communist. The immediate cause of the conflict appeared to be the release of Turcoman detainees under an amnesty proclaimed by Qassem. Although this was not a pre-meditated attack by the Kurds or the ICP, it was seized upon by enemies of the ICP and by Qassem in particular since it gave him a chance to distance himself from the communists and to try to end his identification with them. Mass arrests took place in Baghdad of prominent communists and further restrictions were put on the activities of the People’s Resistance, and control of the Peasants’ Union was taken away from the communist controlled General Federation of Peasant Unions and given to provincial governors. This was the beginning of a sharp decline of communist influence in Iraq.
The End of Communist Dominance and the Fall of Qassem
Qassem began to pursue a conciliatory policy towards the nationalists and to reinstate many of them into the armed forces and the civil service, while simultaneously cutting the ICP down to size. He felt that the ICP’s tactics had undermined his authority in the country. This gave rise to speculation abroad about the imminence of a communist takeover. However, it was too late, since too much blood had been spilt and the political polarisation had gone too far. Furthermore, Qassem outmanoeuvred the ICP in 1960, by legalising a fictitious ICP led by Daud al-Sayegh, which had no central committee and only a handful of members. Meanwhile, a debate had been taking place within the party about how far the ICP should ally with Qassem. The hardliners in the ICP had been right about Qassem after all and won over the ‘accomodationists’ in the internal party rivalries within the party. However, since the party no longer had a strong base of support as it did before, it had no other option but to continue supporting Qassem while attempting to convince him of the ‘folly’ of his ways, since any weakening of his position would simply play into the hands of his opponents. Thus, the ICP found itself in a dilemma of attempting to operate and organise a political party along lines that could only work properly in a functioning democratic system. In the absence of such a system it either had to go underground or work within the existing system. The al-Sayegh incident was also met with criticism from the USSR and China. While the Chinese broadcasts charged that it was ‘void of any sincerity’, Radio Prague branded it a ‘gang of traitors’. In the months that followed, however, the party lost more and more influence. Its newspaper was banned and it gradually lost control of the General Federation of Trade Unions and the Students’, Economists’ and Teachers’ Unions. By 1963, Qassem had become over-confident and began to take a series of erratic and reckless acts; he had not faced any threat to his power since 1961. His attempted annexation of Kuwait in 1961 alienated him from almost all Arab League support as well as domestic support. Qassem was killed in the coup of February 8th 1963 led by the nationalists in Iraq. His fall led directly to the massacre of many members of the ICP and finally broke them once and for all as a power in Iraq.
The first Ba‘athi coup of February 8th 1963 ushered in a period of terror and violence that Iraq had never seen before. Having executed Qassem, the Ba‘ath went on to physically eliminate their rivals. This was largely achieved through the agency of their irregular paramilitary force, the National Guard, whose number rose from about 5000 to about 34,000 between February and August. Although the ICP leadership had been aware for some time that a coup was being planned, it had not been able to defend itself since Qassem, prior to his death, had refused to rearm the PRF, believing the coup would fail. In the first few days of the coup rank and file party members were rounded up in their homes or shot if they went out onto the streets to ‘defend the revolution’ as party leaflets had urged them to do. Prominent communists such as the head of the air force, Jalal al-Awqati and the secretary general of the party Salam ‘Adil were brutally killed. Those members of the central committee who could not escape the country were killed, thus in about a week of fighting the central committee became virtually non-existent. Most families in Baghdad were affected, and both men and women were equally maltreated. The result of this repression aroused a great degree of loathing for the Ba‘ath that has persisted to this day among many Iraqis of that generation. Although individual leftists had been murdered sporadically over the previous years, the scale on which the killings took place in 1963 indicates a closely coordinated campaign (the numbers range from 500 dead to 4000). It is almost certain that those who carried out the killings were working from lists supplied to them. It has been alleged that many Ba‘ath leaders had links with American intelligence; this may be one possible source for the list of communists supplied to them. There were also allegations that the CIA established a radio station in Kuwait, which would announce names and addresses of suspected communists and sympathisers, thus making the Ba‘athist’s job easier. It must be added that this is the official ICP view. The events that took place in Iraq in this period solidified the Sino-Soviet split, where, in the open-letter dispute China criticised the USSR for not taking any action against the Ba’ath. One must note, however, that the USSR did not support a communist takeover in Iraq fearing that this would trigger western intervention. Thus, as we have seen the ICP was destroyed within weeks after the coup took place.
Conclusion
The influence of the ICP can be put into three phases of development. The first phase is between 1934 and 1945, when the ICP had little or no influence at all. The second phase, 1945-1957, sees the party’s influence increase gradually and their willingness to work with other parties, and finally, the third phase, 1958-1963, sees the communists’ influence rise rapidly and then decline substantially. Within all these phases there are common factors that affect the ICP. These are: incompetent leadership, the constant toeing of Moscow’s line and inexperience in the political field.
The period 1934-1945 saw the ICP deal with the Bakr Sidqi coup, the Rashid ‘Ali coup as well as repression from the Iraqi government. As this study has shown the ICP had little influence over the two major events in this period (the coups). In addition, the party was known to hardly anyone except to some intellectuals. The rise of Fahd as secretary general of the party sees an attempt at changing this by creating a better party administration, however, the party remained weak, since this period sees nationalism, inspired by the axis powers and hatred for the British, as the main ideology gripping Iraq. The party also managed to recruit many students into its ranks. This however, is not so significant in terms of influence, since roughly 85 percent of the population were illiterate and lived in rural areas.
The period 1945-1957 sees a slight increase in the influence of the ICP. Fahd’s administrative changes brought about a better party organisation. Communism, in general, also gains more prestige following the USSR’s victory over Germany in the Second World War. There is also the use of front tactics, since the ICP was outlawed at the time. With the policy changes in the USSR following the abandonment of the Comintern, the ICP began to work with other parties in Iraq. This was seen during the 1948 protests against the Portsmouth Treaty. While the ICP gained much support out of the wathba, they promptly lost it due to their position in the Palestinian crisis. Two factors emerge from this change in fortune. Firstly, the ICP blindly followed Moscow’s line disregarding internal Iraqi factors, thus losing the support gained at the wathba. Secondly, the following of Moscow’s line can be put down to an inexperienced leadership who were unable to determine ICP policy themselves. Furthermore, during the wathba the ICP relied heavily on other parties’ (such as the Independents) mobilising protestors, thus showing how little influence the ICP actually had. When the ICP attempted at protesting independently of other parties they failed (i.e. the Baghdad Pact uprising). The 1950s can be characterised as a period of incompetent leadership since the party was unable to exert any pressure on the government, and instead had to rely on forming a National Unity Front. Also, the splits that occurred within the party damaged it greatly since the Kurdish and Arab branches became rivals thus showing how the party administration was near to collapse.
The period 1958-1963 ushered in a time when ICP influence reached its peak. Following the Revolution of 1958 the ICP allied itself with Qassem. With the subsequent split between Qassem and ‘Arif, the ICP was to gain considerable power since it was one of the main anti-Arab unity forces. Once again the incompetence of the ICP leadership is evident in this period. With the establishment of the PRF the ICP had the opportunity to increase their influence. They did this at Mosul, however they became over-confident and the Kirkuk massacre that followed showed that the party leadership was unable to control the membership of its front organisations. In addition, party membership rose to such an extent (circa. 25,000 ) that Salam ‘Adil issued a decree that closed the ICP’s doors to anymore members. The party’s inability to deal with enthusiastic new members drove it to adventurism. The party also became mistrustful and intolerant of other parties including its one time ally the NDP. Thus, the ICP in the period 1958-1963 created more enemies for itself rather than consolidating the influence it had gained after Mosul. In consequence, the main theme that is consistent with the ICP since its early days is the incompetence of its leadership. It was unable to break its conspiratorial mindset and become an open party. The incompetence of the leadership can also be attributed to its inexperience in politics. Many of the central committee were either those who had been in the underground with Fahd and were unable to adapt to being a party out in the open, or young men with no experience of politics at all. All these factors combined resulted in the party being destroyed in 1963 ending its period of influence, which it never reached again.
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