Iraq's New Law on Ex-Baathists Could Bring Another Purge

When the de-Baathification commission started work in January 2004, it decided that Bremer's original order had gone too far, Lami said. He said the commission immediately allowed all ex-Baathists from the two lower levels to return to government, a group that included 102,000 people.

That left 38,000 ex-Baathists who were banned from government and whose status the commission would consider, Lami said. Most of them, about 32,000, belonged to the fourth level and held a rank of division member, or firqah, Lami said. The commission allowed all division members to apply to return to government and, over the four-year history of the commission, about half were reinstated, Chalabi and Lami said.

Only 170 applications from division members were rejected, Chalabi said.

But many Sunnis and Western diplomats question those statistics and accuse Chalabi, a secular Shiite, of treating fellow Shiites more favorably than Sunnis.

"They gave exceptions only for one side," said Khalaf al-Elayan, head of the Iraqi National Dialogue Council, a Sunni group that represents many ex-Baathists. "If you were a Shia Baathist, you could return. If you were a Sunni Baathist, you could not."

Western diplomats agreed. "Chalabi has implemented the law in an extremely partisan fashion," said one diplomat, who, like others interviewed, spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid offending Iraqi officials.

Awadi, the police commander and a Shiite, said he took up his post two years ago at the request of the Interior Ministry, which told him that he had been granted a waiver by the de-Baathification commission.

The commission says he was a division member, based on his confidential case file. Awadi said he was a lower-level member.

Chalabi said that his commission has applied the law equally to Sunni and Shiites and that the agency does not maintain statistics on the sect of applicants. "We saved the lives of many Sunnis by helping them to come back to government," he said.

Abu Saif, a Sunni ex-Baathist division member who spoke on condition that only his nickname be used, said he applied to the commission 15 months ago to return to his job as a brigadier general at the Defense Ministry. The 55-year-old resident of the capital's Dora district lost his job after Bremer's original order and has been unemployed for most of the years since.

Abu Saif said he has yet to receive any response from the commission. "I think they are filled with corruption and sectarianism," he said. He plans to reapply under the new law and hopes he can return to his $17,000-a-year job. Still, he is wary.

"I can't give my opinion about the law right now until the government implements it," he said. "We will wait. . . . We will see."