Culture, History & Ideology in the Formation of Ba'thist Iraq, 1968-89
Amatzia Baram
St Antony’s/Macmillan Series
This book explores how, to complement severe repression and economic incentives, culture and the re-interpretation of history have been used by the Ba'th regime in its quest to impose its rule, back its foreign adventures and cement national unity among Iraq’s diverse ethnic and religious communities, and to strengthen the local Iraqi identity. The book describes how, to imbue its citizens with a sense of a common and unique past and a common and dazzling destiny, this regime has encouraged the Iraqi people to see themselves as the offspring and heirs of all the great peoples and civilizations of Mesopotamia, from Sumer to the Abbasid Golden Age. The book analyzes the way in which the regime’s historians set out to accomplish this task, and delineates the regime’s cultural policy, contrived to create a sense of five thousand years of historical continuity. This policy has ranged from organizing colourful festivals in ancient sites, through the incorporation of ancient Mesopotamian and other local-Iraqi themes in art, poetry and theatrical plays, to extravagant archeological reconstructions.
Amatzia Baram is Lecturer in the Department of the History of the Modem Middle East at Haifa University, Israel. He previously did research as a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center, the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, and as a Senior Associate Member at St Antony’s College, Oxford. He has published many articles in various academic magazines, studying the political, cultural and social history of Iraq under the rule of the Ba‘th party.
Contents
List of Plates / ix Preface / xii Acknowledgements / xvii
1 The Historical Setting / 1 Modern Iraq: A Divided Political Community / 1 The Genesis of the Ba‘th Party / 9 Early Years in Iraq / 11 Preparing for a New Start: Why a New Ideology? / 13
2 The Ba‘th in Power: The Political and Ideological Setting / 18 The Ba'th, the Shi‘a and the Kurds / 18 Iraq’s Arab Policy and Its Metamorphosis / 22 A Cultural Campaign to Overcome Ideological Constraints / 25
3 Folklore and Mesopotamian Culture / 30 The Revival of Local Folklore / 30 Folklore and the Mesopotamian Heritage / 38
4 A Passion for Archeology / 41
5 Mosul’s Spring Festivals: Mesopotamian Rites / 53
6 Mesopotamian Symbols in Official Iraq / 61
7 Art with Local and Mesopotamian Components / 69 Territorial Influences on Modern Iraqi Artists / 69 Territorial Influences in Pop-Art During the War / 78
8 Mesopotamian Inspiration in Theatre and Poetry / 83
9 The Changing Features of the Past: Re-writing History / 97 Ancient Mesopotamians and Contemporary Iraqis / 97 Mesopotamians and Arabs: A Dichotomy, 1968-77 / 99 Bridging the Gap / 101 Persians, Jews and Iraqis / 109
10 The Mesopotamian Myth, Pan-Arabism and Islam / 112
11 A New Vision of Arab Unity: From Integration to Confederation / 117
12 Iraq’s Opposition Groups and the Iraqi Entity / 123
Conclusion / 129
Notes / 144
Bibliography / 183
Index / 190
PREFACE
This book is about the metamorphosis of national ideology in Ba‘thist Iraq. By ‘ideology’ the reference is to a very broad sense of the term, closer to a ‘collection of political proposals, … somewhat intellectualistic’, 1 than to a comprehensive world view or an interpretation of history fully, systematically and rigorously thought out, presented and elaborated. Speeches by leading politicians, historiography and the writings of intellectuals in general, to the extent that they contain coherent and consistent ideas in regard to Iraq’s political community, are considered here as ideology, even if these ideas do not constitute a complete ‘politico-social program’. 2 Furthermore, for our purposes, even non-verbal statements such as a work of art, let alone a music festival or a massive monument in a central city square, are an integral, sometimes an essential part of a regime’s ideology, so long as their relevance to the regime’s thought (or to that of any other group under study) can be ascertained. Thus, for example, Jawad Salim’s colossal Monument of the Fourteenth of July, erected in 1961 at Baghdad’s Tahrir Square by the republican regime of General ‘Abd al-Karim Qasim (1958-63), was as much a political and ideological declaration of Iraqi independence of Western domination and separateness from the Arab world as it was a work of art. And while to Qasim culture was an auxiliary technique, under the Ba‘th it became a major tool. Indeed, when in the late 1960s they decided to launch their new national ideology, they chose to do this almost exclusively under a cultural guise (sec Chapter 2).
This book is an attempt to follow and analyze the change in the Ba’th party’s perception and representation of Iraq as a political community. By resurrecting and imbuing with great national significance elements previously rejected, ignored or downplayed in Ba‘th ideology such as territory, race and local pre-Islamic and pre-Arab historical epochs, the Ba‘th regime of Iraq has sought to reshape the collective identification of its countrymen. In several cases, this reshaping took the form of re-enforcing and fully legitimizing an already existing identification that hitherto the party had looked upon unfavorably.
Iraqi localism - the identification of nationhood with the ancient territory between the Tigris and the Euphrates - was given equal status to and, occasionally, even priority over pan-Arabism, in direct contravention of former Ba‘th orthodoxies. In essence, the Ba‘th regime had relinquishedthe party’s traditional approach to the existing political entities of the Arab world wherein they were all equal, and equally illegitimate entities, arbitrarily created by Western imperialism and destined to disappear within an integrative pan-Arab union. Indeed, corollaries to the new idea were the notions that the Iraqi entity is ciemal and that by virtue of its illustrious particular history and centrality to the Arab cause, Iraq deserves to lead the Arab world. Thus, traditional Ba‘th egalitarian and integrationist pan-Arabism was gradually replaced by a clear-cut Iraqi-centered pan-Arab credo, that exposed occasional imperial tendencies.
To better understand the ideological trend under study it is necessary to understand the historical context within which it developed. Chapter 1 is therefore dedicated to the historical circumstances that gave birth to the pan-Arab ideology of the ruling Sunni-Arab elite in Baghdad under the monarchy and of the infant Ba'th party in Syria in the 1940s, but also to strong reservations vis-a-vis this ideology in large segments of Iraqi society. On the governmental level these reservations found expression for the first lime under the military government of General Bakr Sidqi and his Prime Minister, Hikmat Sulayman, in 1936-37, and more forcefully, both in Baghdad’s streets and on the highest political and military level under the rule of General ‘ Abd al-Karim Qasirn. Qasim and his regime were toppled by the Ba‘th in February 1963, but the social forces that drove him and his predecessors to distance themselves from integrative pan-Arabism did not disappear. Partly due to these forces the Ba‘lh regime of 1963 failed in its attempts (and, apparently, never tried in earnest) to unite with Egypt and Syria. Within a few months they lost power in Baghdad, to be replaced by another pan-Arab regime. The latter, too, was unable to bring about unification with any Arab country. The Ba‘th spent the next four and a half years in jail, exile and underground activity. During these years the party’s activists had time to reflect on the dismal results of the interplay between their egalitarian and integrationist pan-Arab ideology and the Iraqi (and all-Arab) political environment. Chapter 1 also deals with a few other developments that occurred in the mid-and-late 1960s which added weight to the party’s need to reassess its national ideology, if it wanted it to have any relevance to political reality. This reassessment did not bear fruits, however, before the party, having come to power for the second time in 1968, tried again to carry out radical pan-Arab policies. These policies, the dangers to which they exposed the second Ba‘th regime and, as a result, the party’s decision to change course and adopt Iraqi-centered policy and ideology, are the subject of the Chapter 2.
The new Iraqi-centered credo was seen by the regime as instrumental, in the first place, in dealing with the Kurdish and Shi‘i populations. To enforce its rule over Kurdish nationalists and Shi‘i traditionalists the central government, almost entirely Sunni-Arab, resorted, in the first place, to repression that was unprecedented in the history of modem Iraq. Yet to complement these measures it also tried positive social and economic incentives. Chapter 2 also briefly discusses both coercion and enticement. The regime, however, felt that one more dimension was indispensable in order to secure mass support or, at least, to prevent the Shi‘i and Kurdish masses from rendering their support to the opposition. In order to send a clear message to all citizens of Iraq, that Iraq comes first, before any pan-Arab cause, the Ba‘th decided, not surprisingly for an ideology-oriented party, that it was necessary to adopt a new cultural-ideological policy that would fortify the Iraqi identity and give Shi'is and Kurds a sense of true belonging to and equality within an integrated Iraqi political community. These policies, the central theme of the present book, arc examined in the following chapters.
Almost immediately following its rise to power in 1968 the second Ba‘th regime embarked on a campaign contrived to create a secular culture that would be both uniquely Iraqi and desegregative, i.e., common to Kurds, Shi‘i and Sunni Arabs. As will be shown in Chapters 7 and 8, while in the 1970s and 1980s this campaign was fully orchestrated and sponsored by the Ba'th regime, an extremely rich and uniquely single- minded totalitarian regime that left little room for spontaneity, in fact it rested on earlier beginnings, initiated voluntarily by groups of young Iraqi artists and a few poets in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Not all aspects of Iraqi culture under the Ba'th are discussed here. This book focuses on the regime’s effort in one area: the creation of the cultural-historical foundations upon which a new secular national doctrine that would replace the traditional doctrine of the Ba‘th party could be established.
The cultural campaign started initially in a three-pronged thrust. One direction was a major boost to Iraqi folklore; music, folk-tales and poetry in local dialects, folk dances, arts and crafts, were recovered, recreated and occasionally invented by a plethora of government-sponsored institutions. In doing so the regime was confronted with two problems: one was the great diversity of Iraq’s society. Developing the folklore of the various communities could accentuate this diversity instead of playing it down. The other difficulty was that the promotion of uniquely-Iraqi folklore could be construed as isolationism. The way in which the Ba‘th cultural commissars treated these and other issues is discussed in Chapter 3.
The second direction, examined in Chapter 4, was an extensive and expensive campaign of archaeological excavations and reconstructions and the establishment of archeological museums in all parts of the country. This campaign received extensive coverage in the media which explicitly or by insinuation created the connection between the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia and the modern Iraqi people.
Chapter 5 is dedicated to the third direction of the new cultural policy -the introduction of a modem version of the ancient Mesopotamian spring rite. To create a vertical fusion between the Iraqi Man and his soil, but also to reinforce the horizontal tonds between Arabs and Kurds, Muslims and Christians, the regime initiated a colorful Spring Festival in Mosul, followed by similar state-sponsored events in other parts of Iraq.
Other facets of the cultural ideological campaign took a few years to manifest themselves. One was the gradual introduction of ancient Mesopotamian and Medieval-Islamic names to the administrative map of Iraq and the various institutions of the state, with the result that by the end of the 1970s long-vanished names like Babylon, Nineveh, Tammuz, Ishtar, Gilgamesh, Qadisiyya and al-Anbar, became by necessity household names in Ba‘thi Iraq. This subject is treated in Chapter 6. Since 1968-69 Iraqi artists, poets, novelists and play writes have been encouraged to derive their inspiration from the civilizations and cultures that flourished in Mesopotamia-Iraq from remote antiquity to the modem age. The results are delineated and analyzed, with the help of illustrations, in Chapters 7 and 8.
From its first days the new policy ran into a major difficulty; even though during the first few years it had been carefully limited to the cultural sphere (as different from that of political ideology per se), a stress on the Iraqi identity was an unmistakable departure from party orthodoxy. To retain a sense, or at least a semblance of ideological continuity, party ideology shifted the emphasis to a deeper plain, that of pan-Arabism in general. As long as the regime remained broadly within pan-Arab parameters, a different approach from that of party orthodoxy to the question of how this ideal should be realized could have been and, indeed, was presented as a continuation of, rather than a departure from the party’s intellectual tradition (sec Chapter 11). A continued stress on Arabism and pan-Arabism, however, was incompatible with the new emphasis on Iraq’s pre-Islamic and, more importantly, pre-Arab history. The way in which the regime’s politicians, ideologues and historians attempted to resolve this contradiction is analyzed in Chapters 9 and 10.
A return to pagan pre-Islamic cultures also threatened to exacerbate the already tense relations between the regime and the more traditional circles in Iraq, in particular the Shi‘i clergy. This issue is discussed briefly in Chapter 10 and in the Conclusion. The broader issue of Islam and the state in Ba'thist Iraq, however, deserves a far more thorough study which is outside the scope of the present book.
Finally, to place the new Ba‘thi approach to Iraq’s national identity within a wider, all-Iraqi context, Chapter 12 compares it with the approach of the most important opposition groupings in Iraq and suggests that in the 1980s the Ba‘th is no exception. In preparing this volume, being an Israeli citizen I have been unable to visit Iraq. To compensate for this deficiency I have relied on Iraqi sources which, except for school text books that could not be found anywhere outside Iraq, are amply available in libraries; the Ba‘th regime that sought to make use of artists, poets and historians in order to spread its political message to the masses spared no effort in giving them wide publicity, making sure that their production would reach the widest audience possible, far byond the confines of art exhibitions and limited intellectual circles. It has to be made very clear, however, that due to the nature of the Ba‘th regime even people who visited Iraq under its rule found it extremely difficult to discuss with people their attitude towards the Ba‘th ideology, let alone conduct a field study. This book, therefore, limits itself to the study of the regime’s practice in introducing its new secular national ideology, and does not attempt to investigate the degree of its popularity. In the Conclusion, however, an attempt is made to evaluate its long-term chances of success.
Amatzia Baram
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my thanks to the institutions and people without whose material assistance and moral support this book could not have been written: to The Harry S. Truman Institute on Mount Scopus; to the Jewish-Arab Center at Haifa University; to Mr Stanley M. Bogen of New York and Mr Irving Young of London who helped me with grants; to the following institutions that provided tne with fellowships between 1987 and 1990: to The Institute of Advanced Studies at die Hebrew University in Jerusalem and to Professor Lmanucl Si van who was kind enough to invite me to participate in the Seminar on Political Radicalism there; to the Woodrow Wilson Center at die Smidisonian Institution in Washington, D.C.; and to St Antony’s College at Oxford University.
Many colleagues have helped me widi valuable advice, encouragement and intellectual stimulation. Professor Robert McCormick Adams, the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the late Professor Gabriel Baer of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Professor Shaul Bakhash of George Mason University; Dr Charles Blitzcr, of the Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington D.C.; Professor Israel Gcrshoni of the Hebrew University; Dr Sylvia Haim-Kcdouric of London; Dr Derek Hopwood and Mr Albert Hourani of Oxford University; Professor James Jankowski of the University of Colorado; Professor Elic Kedouric of the London School of Economics; Professor Bernard Lewis, Director of the Anncnberg Research Institute, Philadelphia; Dr Robert Litwak of die Woodrow Wilson Center, the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Professor Moshc Ma‘oz of the Hebrew University; Dr Phebc Marr of the National Defense University, Washington, D.C.; Professor Emanuel Marx of Tel-Aviv University; Dr Barry Rubin, of the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Studies; Dr Julie Mcisami-Scotl of Oxford University; Professor Shmuel Moreh of the Hebrew University; Dr Roger Owen and Dr Julian Raby of Oxford University; Professor Aaron Shaffer and Professor Emanuel Sivan of the Hebrew University, Professor Sasson Somckh of Tel-Aviv University; Mrs Rosemary Thorp of Oxford University; Mr Samuel F. Wells Jr., Deputy Director of the Woodrow Wilson Center, the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. I am deeply grateful to all of them for dteir counsel and support. The views presented in dtis volume and any factual mistakes, however, are exclusively my own responsibility.
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Amatzia Baram
Culture, History & Ideology in the Formation of Ba'thist Iraq, 1968-89
St Antony’s/Macmillan Series
St Antony’s/Macmillan Series Culture, History and Ideology in the Formation of Ba'thist Iraq, 1968-89 Amatzia Bar am Lecturer in the Department of the History of the Middle East Haifa University, Israel
M / Macmillan in association with St Antony's College Oxford
General Editors: Archie Brown (1978-1985) and Rosemary Thorp (1985- ), both Fellows of St Antony’s College, Oxford
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First published 1991
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Printed in the United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Baram, Amatzia Culture, history and ideology in the formation of Ba'thist Iraq, 1968-89. I. Iraq, political events, 1960- I. Title. II. St Antony’s College 956.704 ISBN 0-333-54845-0
In memory of my young brother, Gabriel, who died aged only 18 in his burning Patton tank on the eastern bank of the Suez Canal on Yom Kippur, 6 October 1973. May this book contribute to a better understanding between Arabs and Jews.
The jacket-design reproduces the emblem of the Babylon International Festival, featuring the profiles of Nebuchadnezzar and Saddam Husayn.
