[R-P] [Inglés] Parece que los baathistas son como los peronistas: incorregibles

[Nestor Gorojovsky]

[Si lo que dice en esta nota que nos remite Bob Weiss es cierto, 
entonces lo que hemos visto hasta hoy en Iraq es nada comparado con 
lo que vamos a empezar a ver...  Villa Manuelita, a lo que parece, 
resurge con una fuerza inesperada por los yanquis.  Si no lo hace en 
Rosario, lo hace en Fallujah]

------- Forwarded message follows -------

Subject:        	Saddam's Baath Party is back in business
Date sent:      	Tue, 7 Sep 2004 16:41:41 -0400


Knight Ridder Washington Bureau – USA – 7 de Septiembre de 2004
Posted on Mon, Sep. 06, 2004
Saddam's Baath Party is back in business

By Hannah Allam

Knight Ridder Newspapers

BAGHDAD, Iraq - By day, Iraqis loyal to Saddam's Hussein's much-
feared
Baath Party recite their oath in clandestine meetings, solicit
donations from former members and talk politics over sugary tea at a
Baghdad cafe known as simply "The Party." By night, cells of these
same men stage attacks on American and Iraqi forces, host soirees for
Saddam's birthday and other former regime holidays, and debrief
informants still dressed in suits and ties from their jobs in the 
new,
U.S.-backed Iraqi government. Even with Saddam under lock and key, 
the
Baath Party is back in business. The pan-Arab socialist movement is
going strong with sophisticated computer technology, high-level
infiltration of the new government and plenty of recruits in 
thousands
of disenchanted, impoverished Sunni Muslim Iraqis, according to
interviews with current and former members, Iraqi government 
officials
and groups trying to root out former Baathists. The political party
has morphed into a catchall resistance movement that poses a serious
challenge to interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, a
Baathist-turned-opposition leader. Allawi has acknowledged he's
holding talks with members of the former regime in hopes of gaining a
handle on the violence and political disarray. But he's up against a
force with deep pockets, allies in neighboring countries and an 
excuse
to fight as long as 135,000 American troops remain on Iraqi soil.
"There are two governments in Iraq," said Mithal al Alusi, director
general of the Supreme National Commission for De-Baathification, a
group overseen by Iraqi politician and former Pentagon favorite Ahmad
Chalabi. "(The Baathists) are like thieves, stealing the power of the
new government. Their work is organized and strong." Ostensibly 
banned
since Saddam's ouster, the Baath Party has rebuilt itself by sending
top members of the former regime to safe houses in Jordan and Syria,
Iraqi government officials said. The foot soldiers - mainly from the
vast ranks of mid-level members - remain in Iraq, where they've
started Web sites and formed independent cells and communicate 
outside
the radar of U.S. forces through a word-of-mouth network known in
Baathist parlance as "the thread." No one can say with certainty how
big the latest Baathist incarnation is. The secrecy of the
organization is evident even on one of its main Web sites, where a
pop-up feature tells users how to erase the Web address from the
computer's memory. In the Saddam stronghold north and west of the
capital, a sprawling area known as the Sunni Triangle, Baathists
freely distribute price lists to unemployed young men. Burning a U.S.
Humvee or detonating a homemade bomb can earn them a few hundred
dollars. Killing an American soldiers brings at least $1,000. A
political science professor at Baghdad University who's a former
Baathist and has been involved in negotiations between the party and
the U.S.-led coalition said, "The Americans came to Iraq with a foggy
picture of what is going on, including their ideas about the
Baathists." The U.S. military and the U.S. State department declined
to comment on the Baathist resurgence. The 52-year-old professor, who
did not want his name used, said his American colleagues mistakenly
believed that Saddam's capture in December was the end of the 
Baathist
movement in Iraq. Instead, he continued, that's just when party
members in Iraq started reconciling with powerful Baathists in
Damascus, Syria, and Amman, Jordan. The result was the return to Iraq
of a handful of prominent exiled Iraqi members, who created a 
shadowy,
neo-Baathist organization called "Al Islah," Arabic for "The Reform."
The group held a conference in London in early spring, according to
news accounts of the private meeting and sources familiar with the
participants. "This conference ... stressed one thing: that there is
no difference between the Baath Party and the resistance," the
professor said. "They are equal." Within a year after the fall of the
former regime, the Baath Party was restructured as an umbrella
organization for opposition groups that run the gamut from
anti-occupation nationalists to Islamic extremists, said Sabah 
Kadhim,
spokesman for the Iraqi Interior Ministry. Kadhim said there is no
doubt that Baathists remain active in Iraq, numbering in "the
thousands." The Iraqi government is struggling to track their
activities, he said, because of the U.S.-led dismantling of the old
intelligence apparatus and the fact that former Baathists are much
better trained and organized than the Allawi government's fledgling
agents. "(The Baathists) have their weapons and they have their money
and they are still in Iraq," Kadhim said. "Some of them are highly
capable and they resent the fact that they are no longer in charge."
The most brazen announcement of the Baathist resurgence came April 7,
the 57th anniversary of the party. A statement posted on the Internet
lamented that the holiday would be celebrated under occupation. It
also made clear members' plans to take back western Iraq's Anbar
province, home of the flashpoint Sunni towns of Fallujah and Ramadi.
"The Baath Party and resistance are to implement a series of military
operations against the U.S. Marines newly situated in western Iraq,"
the announcement read. The same week, the hostility between Fallujah
fighters and U.S.-led forces erupted into a full-scale uprising and a
bloody, monthlong siege on the city by the Marines. By the time it 
was
over, the Marines had effectively ceded control of Fallujah to a
loosely connected band of Islamic extremists and former Baathists. 
The
entire province is now a no-go zone for foreigners, particularly
Americans. Neo-Baathists describe the Fallujah ending as a victory,
and they're using the model to recruit new members or woo former
Baathists back into the fold. Several former members who've now
distanced themselves from the party told Knight Ridder they've
received late-night visits from their former comrades, asking for
donations or reminding them of the privileges they enjoyed under
Saddam. Qusai, a middle-aged former Baathist who did not want his 
full
name published, said he was approached by a former comrade at a
marketplace in Ameriyah, a Saddam-friendly neighborhood in Baghdad.
The man asked him to rejoin the party, Qusai recalled, and told him
members had "already started to get reorganized." "I asked him, `Are
you kidding?"' Qusai said, recalling that he was "sweating with 
fear."
The man clearly wasn't kidding. That meeting was in February, and the
incident so disturbed Qusai that he instructed his family to tell
other former Baathists who came calling that he was out of town on
business. Still not comfortable that he was out of reach for the
party, Qusai eventually gave up his home and now lives in another
district of the capital. "It meant only one thing for me: troubles
ahead," Qusai said. "I had to make a difficult decision to evade the
situation." De-Baathification officials arranged a meeting last week
between Knight Ridder and a young man who is still active in the 
Baath
Party. The man, most likely an informant for the de-Baathification
commission, still carried his old identification card marking him as 
a
member of Saddam's dreaded intelligence force, the Mukhabarat. He
confirmed what government and military officials said: Baathists are 
a
highly structured political and armed resistance force. But he
emphasized that returning to the party was a one-way route. He told
the story of a man from a powerful cell of fighters north of the
capital who regretted his decision and tried to leave. "He couldn't
take the pressure and he fled," said the Baathist, who would not
reveal his name. "We found his body in the Tigris River." 

Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
nestorgoro en fibertel.com.ar

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"Sí, una sola debe ser la patria de los sudamericanos".
Simón Bolívar al gobierno secesionista y disgregador de 
Buenos Aires, 1822
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