Ex-Baathists skeptical about re-Baathification law

A day after the Iraqi Parliament passed legislation billed as the first significant political step forward in Iraq after months of deadlock, there were troubling questions–and troubling silences–about the measure's actual effects. The measure, known as the Justice and Accountability Law, is meant to open government jobs to former members of the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein–the bureaucrats, engineers, city workers, teachers, soldiers and police officers who made the government work until they were barred from office after the US invasion in 2003. But the legislation is at once confusing and controversial, a document riddled with loopholes and caveats to the point that some Sunni and Shiite officials say it could actually exclude more former Baathists than it lets back in, particularly in the crucial security ministries. Under that interpretation, the law would be directly at odds with the US campaign to draft Sunni Arabs into so-called Awakening militias with the aim of integrating them into the police and military forces. There has been mostly silence from US officials. The two highest-ranking US in Baghdad, Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Gen. David Petraeus, were with President Bush in Kuwait when the measure was passed. And a day afterward, officials were still putting off questions about it. According to a translated copy received by The New York Times, a whole new rung of former party members could be allowed back into government. Where the old de-Baathification law barred members of the top four of the party's seven levels, the new measure would bar three, theoretically allowing as many as 30,000 people back in. And a vast majority of the ones still excluded, who held top national- and regional-level jobs, would become eligible for pensions if they had not been implicated in crime or corruption. But interpretations of the measure's actual effects varied widely among Iraqi officials. In general, Shiite politicians hailed it as an olive branch to Sunni Arabs. But some Sunnis say it is at best an incremental improvement over the old system, and at worst even harsher. The most extreme interpretations of the measure's effects actually came from Shiite officials. Some of them hailed it because it would ban members of even the lowest party levels from the most important ministries: justice, interior, defense, finance and foreign. That would seem to preclude the government from keeping its promise to offer military and police jobs to the thousands of Sunni Arabs who have joined the Awakening groups.