Baathist records reveal repression

The bookkeepers of the police state were meticulous.

Payoffs to tribal leaders, quotas for cheering crowds on Saddam Hussain's birthday, long lists of "bonuses" paid out to party members on every state occasion, reports on suspicious families and pro-Iranian Shiite "traitors" in their midst - at the Mother of All Battles Branch of Iraq's ruling Baath Party, they wrote it all down.

Here at the chief party headquarters for Iraq's second city, near the party villas and the date palm groves and the decayed elegance of the Shatt Al Arab waterway, officials kept a hand in nearly every aspect of daily life. They tracked thousands of army deserters and demanded still more recruits, they kept copious files on every comrade in their ranks, and they passed on intelligence warnings about spies and saboteurs.

No detail was too small to escape the party's attention - from making sure women turned up at a military parade to determining the location of machine guns for defence of local party buildings. Even the rotten condition of the cheese offered to student recruits in a paramilitary group came under the party's purview.

When British forces seized Basra little more than a week ago and the guards disappeared from the sandbagged entrance to the Mother of All Battles Branch, these documents and thousands more were left scattered about the looted party compound in the shadow of a defaced portrait of Saddam. The documents, hundreds of pages of which were reviewed and translated in recent days, record the minutiae of party life in a dictatorship, details not previously available before the fall of Saddam's government.

Dozens of interviews in Basra over the last week - with Baath Party members and former members and ordinary residents affected by the party's decisions - help explain what this secretive bureaucracy meant to daily life: children were urged to inform on their parents, officials in the regime were arrested and tortured then sent back to work, ambitious students who joined the party never believed in it as anything more than a tool for advancement.

To those who benefited, and there were many among Basra's Sunni minority, Baathism meant power and security and hero worship of Saddam. Although top leaders of the party have been arrested or killed or simply ran away, much of the party hierarchy is still here in Basra, an unknown number still believing, as Ali Ahmad Majid Alghanim, a party member, said at his spacious family home the other day, that "Saddam Hussain is not finished, the Baath Party is not finished".

"Every family has three or four men in the Baath Party,'' he said as he sat across from his brother, Adnan Alghanim, who was a top party official in Basra. Asked where Saddam was now, he placed his hand over his chest.

"In my heart," he said.

Overall, the documents and interviews offer of a portrait of a regime that ruled with two main tools: fear and money. The fear was of a party that watched everyone, that ordered the arrests of those who opposed it, that used torture and more mundane forms of coercion like withholding jobs and higher education from those who refused to join the party. The money was for those who cooperated with the system, whether tribal leaders whose authority grew in recent years or educated technocrats who got perks and power.

"We were made to do it," said Yakthem Hussain, a police officer who just weeks ago was carrying out arrest orders for the Baath Party. "Every employee in Iraq, even students, was in the Baath Party. It was an order, but we didn't believe."

His fellow police officer and Baath Party member standing next to him had been arrested for refusing to obey an order, spent more than a year in jail, then returned to work on the force.

"Of course, we were all afraid," Hussain said. "The only safe people were those at the top of the Baath Party."

But the Mother of All Battles Branch, run in recent years by a member of the wealthy Sadoon tribe and overseen by Saddam's cousin, Ali Hassan Majid, the brutal general known as "Chemical Ali" for using chemical weapons against rebellious Kurds in 1988, was not the all-powerful place it might have seemed.

The documents left behind here also reveal in ways large and small the weaknesses of Saddam's regime. Army deserters were perhaps the single biggest preoccupation, alongside lack of adequate food and water for the troops, and failure to meet recruiting quotas.

Despite the slogan "One Arab Nation, One Eternal Message" at the top of the Baath correspondence, there is little ideological content in the papers - beyond official veneration of Saddam, who is referred to as "the comrade, our leader".

"Everyone knew things were wrong in the party," said Baadai Anasazi.

Once Anasazi was an insider, a party member for decades. As the former head of the statistics department of the Planning Ministry office here, he can recount in detail the methods of the Baath Party: the false statistics the party put out, the elaborate ranking system for payoffs to tribal sheikhs, the huge amount of time and effort wasted on demonstrations of support for Saddam.

Seventeen times a year "bonuses" were handed out to loyalists on a sliding scale: 5 million dinars (roughly $1,700 before the war) for important tribal leaders, 100,000 dinars for the head of a party section, he said. Party demonstrations were more important than work, "even for farmers in the field and workers in the factories".

Reports said millions had been recruited for paramilitary groups, "but you couldn't even find 10 of them in reality".

Anasazi had been that rare thing in Saddam's Iraq: a true believer since the 1950s in the Baath Party's original mix of pan-Arab nationalism and socialism. In 1998, he confronted Majid at a party meeting in front of more than 1,000 people over repression being carried out against the Marsh Arabs. Later, he said, he lost his job, quit the party, was arrested and spent six months in prison. His two sons were also arrested, and officials at his daughter's school tried to convince her to inform on her parents as a condition of finding work as a teacher after graduation.

"We lived in a state of terror," he said. "The party's principles were to ignore social and economic issues and to only pay attention to security. The job of a party member was only security and to love the president and to show support for the party."

Security was an obsession throughout the hierarchy. Even for bureaucrats who didn't deal directly with the mechanisms of terror, files available at the Mother of All Battles Branch dwell at great length on the threats, internal and external, perceived and real, faced by Saddam's party.

Several documents, headlined "Highly Confidential", "Person-al", and "Immediate," concern the danger posed by Iranian agents and suspected acts of sabotage in southern Iraq, which had been the front line during the 1980s war between Iran and Iraq.

Others dealt with activities by exiled Iraqi opposition groups, like the Iran-based Al Badr Brigade.

Money was also spent to keep up the regime's appearances. Saddam's birthday party, for example, was