Copyright by Jeffrey Donald Moe 2011

The Thesis Committee for Jeffrey Donald Moe Certifies that this is the approved version of the following thesis:

The Perfect Storm: Violence in Qasim Era Iraq, 1958-1963

APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE:

Supervisor: Yoav Di-Capua

Benjamin C. Brower

The Perfect Storm: Violence in Qasim Era Iraq, 1958-1963

by

Jeffrey Donald Moe, B.A.

Thesis

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

The University of Texas at Austin May 2011

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my advisers Yoav Di-Capua and Benjamin Brower for their help and patience over this last year. Additionally, I would like to thank all of my friends and family for their unending love and support in this endeavor.

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Abstract

The Perfect Storm: Violence in Qasim Era Iraq, 1958-1963

Jeffrey Donald Moe, M.A. The University of Texas at Austin, 2011

Supervisor: Yoav Di-Capua

This thesis explores new ideas for the foundations for state violence in Iraq by looking specifically at the outbreaks of spectacular violence during the Qasim Era (1958-1963). In order to frame the discussion, this study looks first at how the British established a model for state violence during the Monarchy period (1921- 1958), which eventually both validated and radicalized the opposition parties. The second chapter examines the violence of the everyday in Iraq, and how the spectacular violence of the Qasim Era finds historical context within everyday violence and ritual. In the final chapter, this thesis discusses how the radicalized violence of the opposition parties melded with the violence of the everyday to create spectacular acts of ritualized violence. After the coup d’état of 8 February 1963, the Ba’ath Party institutionalized this radical new brand of violence, creating a foundation for the state violence to come under Saddam Hussein. This violence was experienced only by the Iraqi Communists at first, but was later experienced by the whole nation.

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Table of Contents Introduction...... 1 Chapter I: Violence Begets Violence: The Hashemite Monarchy...... 14 The Necessity of Compensatory Violence ...... 16 The British Roots of Iraqi State Violence...... 19 Structural Violence as a Tool of Political Control...... 22 International and Regional Ideologies and their Effect on Iraq...... 24 The Role of the Monarchy’s Security Apparatus ...... 28 How Violence Validated and Radicalized the Opposition...... 30 Conclusion...... 34 Chapter II: The Violence of the Everyday...... 36 The Law-Preserving Violence of the Tribe...... 37 Domestic, Neighborhood, and Institutional Violence...... 43 Representations of Violence...... 46 Funeral Rites ...... 48 Conclusion...... 50 Chapter III: The Perfect Storm/ A Shadow of Things to Come ...... 52 The Moral Economy of Ritual Mutilation...... 54 The Everyday and the Complexities of Sectarian Violence...... 61 A New State Violence: The Rise of the Ba’ath Party...... 64 The Massacre of the Iraqi Communists ...... 66 The Ba’athi Torture Chamber: Projecting Power Through Rituals of Pain and Humiliation...... 68 Conclusion...... 74 Conclusion ...... 76 Bibliography ...... 79

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Introduction

As I sat and drank my Arabic style coffee in a small apartment in Austin,

Texas, a brilliant conversation opened up. In spite of the fact that I was not a native speaker of Arabic and Hassan was old, mostly deaf and partially blind, we managed to communicate through a variety of methods. His wife often acted as a messenger between us, shouting exactly what I had said in Arabic into his “good” ear. Somehow in his deafness he could still understand his wife’s voice. When all else failed, we communicated by writing Arabic on one of a stack of note cards that I had brought for just such a purpose. Hassan was a refugee from Iraq, and I had been working on his behalf going from doctor appointment to doctor appointment painfully interpreting for him with his limited hearing and my limited medical vocabulary. As we sipped the piping hot, sweet coffee, the conversation took a turn beyond the average when I told him that I was studying the history of Iraq from 1958 to 1963.

His dim, glaucoma glazed eyes lit up with excitement. “Let me tell you”, he said in an

Arabic that was muddled from his deaf condition, “I was there when Nuri al-Said was killed, on 14 July, he was dressed like a woman (for Nuri al-Said, the Prime

Minister under the Monarchy, had tried to evade detection after the revolution by wearing a woman’s traditional cloak, or abayah). They shot him and later dragged him through the streets, I saw it.” He went on to talk about all of the bloodshed that

1 he had witnessed as a twelve-year-old boy, and I could tell that seeing these violent acts had left a strong impression on him. But this experience was just the beginning.

Over the next fifty years he experienced the repression of Saddam Hussein, the Iran-

Iraq War (where he lost his hearing), the first Gulf War, the United Nations

Sanctions, and the Anglo-American invasion of 2003. It was in the midst of the

Sunni-Shi’i death squad massacres of 2005-2006 that he and his family finally decided to flee Iraq. Hassan will always leave a mark on my memory, and as I left his apartment, I pondered over how many other Iraqis had witnessed what he had seen and more.

I am an outsider to Iraq, but violence there has also touched my life. I deployed to Iraq in 2007 as a soldier and directly witnessed both the violence between Coalition Forces and insurgents and violence between Iraqi and Iraqi.

During the course of my stay, I read and heard first-hand reports about brutal and humiliating torture and execution techniques used by insurgent groups. Dreams about all of these things followed me home and plagued my sleep. I say these things not only so you know the origins of my interest in the subject, but also that you may know the subjectivity of which I am aware. Some Americans and Iraqis responded to these stories by saying, “Iraqis are just a violent people.” I have read similar accusations from academics in the orientalist tradition--including many Iraqis-- saying that the Iraqi culture and psyche are simply violent. I do not think that this is the case, but the role of violence in Iraqi history does merit further study.

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In his book Cruelty and Silence, Kanan Makiya1 describes in horrific detail scenes of war and brutality committed by the Iraqi Army against the Kuwaiti people during the First Gulf War in 1991. The scenes of desecration he paints of the homes and bodies of the Kuwaiti people are truly haunting.2 “Violence for the sake of violence, destruction for the sake of destruction, and killing for sake of killing, this country has been literally sodomized,” said one of Makiya’s Kuwaiti subjects.

However, what is equally haunting is the effect that this violence had on those that perpetrated it. Upon closer investigation, Makiya uncovered signs that indicate psychological trauma on those that performed these violent acts themselves. “Dear

Kuwaiti Sister: Please forgive us for what we have done,” were the words written on the back of a photograph found in a desecrated Kuwaiti home. This violence was not only killing or maiming, but also a violence of humiliation. (Makiya 1993, 31-56)

State violence in modern Iraq has not always operated like this example.

While there were modes of state violence earlier in Iraq’s modern history that were excessive in nature, state violence mutated into something of a different quality that was eventually personified by Saddam Hussein. So this begs the question: How and when did Iraqi state violence change into a means that could create such physical

1 Kanan Makiya, also writing under the penname of Samir al-Khalil, was the first to write about state violence in Saddam’s Iraq. He was widely scorned by academics both from the United States and Europe as well as from the Arab World. As more was revealed about the inner workings of Saddam’s Iraq, Makiya’s work was seen as credible. See the introduction of Kanan Makiya, Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1993) and also Samir al-Khalil, Republic of Fear (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989). 2 Kanan Makiya recounts the destruction of Kuwaiti homes during the 1990 invasion. See Kanan Makiya, Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1993). 3 and psychological devastation? At first glance, the obvious answer seems to be connected to the personality and brutality of Saddam Hussein himself. If this answer were true, then the progression of Saddam’s career would be a clear answer as to when the change in state violence occurred. However, I would like to offer an alternative answer to this question. Before Saddam came to power, life seemed to be moving in a positive direction for a many of post-1958 Arab Iraqis. Political freedoms increased. The standard of living was being raised. Yet unknown to many there were processes emerging in the background that gave foundations to the violence of the Saddam State.

To look for answers, I believe we must examine a watershed moment in Iraqi history: The Qasim Era (1958-63). The Qasim Era is named as such because it was the period when General ‘Abd al-Karim Qasim (1914-1963) ruled the Iraqi Republic after unseating the Monarchy in the Iraqi Revolution of 1958. I suggest that it was during this period that the first glimpses of the state violence of Saddam’s Iraq are found. With Iraqi authored books written on this era such as Al-‘Iraq: Bidayat al-

Nihayah (Iraq: The Beginning of the End) and Min Hiwar al-Mafahim ila Hiwar al-

Dam (From a Dialogue of Concepts to a Dialogue of Blood), it is obvious that this moment has created a deep impression on Iraqi thought.

From a wider perspective, this era was not only a watershed moment in the history of Iraq, but also in the Middle East and in the world as a whole. In addition to the Iraqi Revolution, this period heralded the rise and fall of the United Arab

4

Republic and the culmination of Algeria’s protracted struggle for independence from

France. Outside of the Middle East, this period saw the explosion of postcolonial revolutions and independence movements across the globe. Above all, this time passed under the shadow of the creation and incessant testing of greater and more powerful types of nuclear weapons.

In this regional and global context, Iraq embodied the greater ideological struggles of the time in a violent storm of internecine fighting unlike any of the other nation-states of the region. It is during this time that opposition groups, radicalized by the violence of the Monarchy, unleashed a spectacular violence on each other based on the violence and ritual of the everyday. This new brand of radicalized violence became institutionalized by the Ba’ath Party and laid a foundation for a new state violence. The Communists bore the brunt of this new breed of state violence first, but this change was eventually felt by all of Iraq.

The violence of this period is typically described as an understandable by- product of ideological struggles or of the essentially violent nature of Iraqis themselves. This is incomplete and incorrect in its treatment. While this may explain initial motive for violence, what is left untold in the current historiography is an explanation for the quality of violence during this period. There is a certain quality to the violence that goes beyond the simple elimination or silencing of political or communal enemies. In this study I will speak of spectacular violence.

This spectacular violence is one of higher brutality, or a higher quality. In the

5 spectacular, instead of mere elimination there is prolonged torture and humiliation; instead of leaving the body of the slain to rest, the body is mutilated and dismembered.

Why has this part of the history been left out of the literature? The options are as numerous as the possibilities. As early as 1970, Hanna Arendt indicates that violence was almost entirely absent from the social science literature. Her explanation was that in the field of political science, violence was just a given occurrence in the process of human politics. (Arendt 1970) In the historical literature, Iraqis have written a handful of works about the violence in Iraq, but there has been even less study of it by scholars in Europe, the United States and elsewhere. It appears that although violence is a large part of the human experience, studying or writing about it in certain contexts is taboo. Maybe the study of violence is considered a delegitimated or subjugated knowledge.3 Perhaps to some scholars there is an implied value judgment in seeking to study and understand violence in a culture outside of their own. Surely this is the case in postcolonial settings such as the Middle East, where power relationships in the study of the region have influenced viewpoints with the goal of exploitation. However, let us not let these errors of the past prevent us from trying to understand the humanity of this

3 In his introduction to his lectures entitled “Society Must Be Defended,” Michel Foucault speaks of certain knowledges that are “below the required level of erudition or scientificity.” These are knowledges known at the local level. See Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-76, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), pp.7-8 6 moment in Iraqi history, in both its beauty and its ugliness, as a greater part of the history of mankind.

So what are the main sources in the study of this era? Any study of modern

Iraqi society must begin with Hanna Batatu and Ali al-Wardi4. Hanna Batatu has done some of the most extensive research on the history of Modern Iraq. Drawing on Marxist theory, Batatu carefully tracks the development of the different social and class groups in Iraq that finally erupted into the coup/revolution of 1958. His work is still considered central to modern Iraqi history. His view of violence during the Qasim Era is largely left unexplored, except he does hint to the fact that the violence of the era could have been set in motion by the violence of the Monarchy in earlier years. He also suggests that the violence in Mosul and Kirkuk could be related to family and tribal feuds that occurred before 1959. (Batatu 1978, 993)

These are suggestions that are left largely untouched, and I would like to explore them further.

Ali al-Wardi, on the other hand, brings a psychosocial perspective to his study of Iraq. While disputed for his scientific (or lack of scientific) method, his

4 Ali al-Wardi, as noted above, is a controversial figure in Iraq studies. However, he has written volumes of work both about Iraqi custom, culture and history. Surprisingly, he is left completely out of Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett, “The Historiography of Modern Iraq,” The American Historical Review (University of Chicago Press) 96, no. 5 (1991): 1408-1421. However, other authors have included some of his work. He is most criticized for his lack of statistical data to back his observations, an accusation of which he was well aware, but he insisted that this could not be achieved during his time in Iraq. Personally, many Iraqis with which I have spoken agree that his work speaks accurately of Iraqi society. For the bulk of his work on Iraq see Ali al-Wardi, Understanding Iraq: Society, Culture, and Personality, trans. Fuad Baali (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008). And also Ali al-Wardi, Lamahat Ijtima'iyah min Tarikh al-'Iraq al-Hadith, vol. I-VI, VI vols. (Bayrut: Dar al- Rashd, 2005). 7 depth of knowledge about the society of modern Iraq cannot be ignored. In fact, not only do Iraqis hail him as the chief expert on Iraqi culture, but also many of his studies were done during the Qasim Era. His absence in much of the English language literature about Iraq is quite surprising.5 Ali Allawi, the former Oxford

Professor and Iraqi Minister of Finance claims in his book The Occupation of Iraq:

Winning the War, Losing the Peace, that Ali al-Wardi’s work is the most in-depth scholarship to date on Iraq. At the same time as praising al-Wardi, Allawi scolds the

American government for not researching al-Wardi’s work in the ramp-up to their

2003 invasion. (Allawi 2007, 12-16) Al-Wardi received his PhD in sociology from the University of Texas in 1950 and then became the leading scholar on Iraqi society while working at the University of Baghdad. His basic view, heavily influenced by

American and European interpretations of the famed medieval Arab historian Ibn

Khaldun6, was that the development of Iraqi society reflected the tension between the desert Bedouin and the riverine urban societies. This tension extended into modern times when Iraqis were raised with both their old tribal customs and the values of “modernity.” He calls this conflict in personality izdiwajiyah or a (social) double character. He defines it specifically as this:

5 While al-Wardi is included in some historians’ work, including Batatu, he is completely left out of Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett, “The Historiography of Modern Iraq,” The American Historical Review. 96, no. 5 (1991): 1408-1421. These two historians were considered to be among the highest authorities in the study of modern Iraq among American and European scholars. 6 According to Rifaat Ali Abou al-Haj, al-Wardi relied heavily on Western interpretations of Ibn Khaldun, who was a favorite of orientalist scholars and their attempt to understand the “Arab Mind.” See Rifaat Ali Abou-el-Haj, "The Social Uses of the Past: Recent Arab Historiography of Ottoman Rule," International Journal of Middle East Studies 14, no. 2 (May 1982): 185-201. The use od Khaldun is problematic, but he still maintains a strong presence in Iraqi historiography. 8

The double personality is one that causes the person to behave in a contradictory way

without them feeling the contradiction or recognizing it. It is established when the person

falls under the influence of two contradictory systems of values and concepts. (al-Wardi

2005, 313)

Al-Wardi goes on to say that those especially affected by this phenomenon are those that sit under religious preaching, for the values that are preached contradict the local tribal values that the person lives out in their daily life. (al-Wardi 2005, 313) In later times, as education became more secular, this double character would be manifested as a conflict between modern and tribal values, rather than between religious and tribal values as in earlier times. (al-Wardi 2008, 93)

I suggest that al-Wardi’s conclusions of an Iraqi double character reflect the internalization of a heavily colonial view of Iraqi society. As this study will discuss later on, it was in fact the British who acted with a double character toward the

Iraqis when they chose to promote democracy and rule of law and yet also used indiscriminate violence to preserve the new Iraqi state. Like other American and

European scholars of the time, it appears that the overall goal of al-Wardi’s work is to reduce the “Iraqi mind” down to some essential characteristics that explain an

Iraqi social behavior, including violence. It is al-Wardi’s view that the brutal acts of violence seen during and after the 1958 revolution are evidence of the Iraqi izdiwajiyah in that while Iraqis knew about “modern values” and espoused them, they still committed horrendous acts of violence and mutilation. Ascribing to a form of modernization theory, he believes that with time the Iraqi people can learn

9 democracy and rise above their tribal instincts. Is it still possible to treat al-Wardi as a source when his work is so problematic in the eyes of so many scholars? I believe that it is. We can do this by separating his observations from his conclusions and using these observations to give nuance to other historical records. The paucity of information on Iraq from Iraqi scholars forces us to do this. Besides, from reading other Iraqi scholars such as Allawi, it is clear that al-Wardi’s ideas have heavily penetrated Iraqi academic and political thinking, which is important in its own right.

One of the academics that show the influence of al-Wardi is Baqir Yasin.7 In his book Tarikh al-‘Anf al-Damawi fi al-‘Iraq (The History of Bloody Violence in Iraq),

Yasin does a thorough job of describing hundreds of acts of violence in Iraqi history, including many in the Qasim Period. He also refers directly to the izdiwajiyah of the

Iraqi personality, attempting to explain the phenomenon through the amount of violence inflicted on Iraqis. (Yasin 1999, 345, 348) His basic thesis asserts that the unfathomable acts of violence, pillaging, and looting perpetrated against the Iraqi people throughout both ancient and modern history left an indelible mark on the

Iraqi psyche, causing Iraqis to be an inherently violent people. (Yasin 1999, 25-6)

While detailed, Yasin’s work lacks a certain global perspective that leads him to conclude what I would call an Iraqi exceptionalism regarding violence. While there is indeed a wealth of accounts of violence in Iraq’s history, other regions have

7 Baqir Yasin was born in Basra in 1939 and later graduated from the University of Baghdad in 1962, which was right in the middle of the Qasim Era and in the prime of al-Wardi’s career at the university. He later joined the Ba’ath Party and was a part of the National Command in Damascus from the years 1970 to 1980. Now, he describes himself as an “independent Iraqi political opposition personality.” Baqir Yasin, Tarikh al-'Anf al-Damawi fi al-'Iraq (Bayrut: Dar al-Kanuz al-Adabiyah, 1999). 10 been filled with similarly horrifying events. I do not wish to discount the suffering of the people of Iraq; I wish to bring parity to accounts of violence from around the world. No region has been left untouched.

Al-Wardi’s idea of the Iraqi double character has penetrated into contemporary Arab historiography of Iraq as well. In his biographical work on Nuri al-Said, the Egyptian historian Muhsin Muhammad al-Mutawali al-‘Arabi has directly applied this concept when describing childhood abuse that he believes led to Nuri al-Said’s violent personality traits: “This (abuse) indeed led to Nuri al-Said’s double personality, (izdiwaj shakhsiyah) that double character (izdiwajiyah) that distinguishes a majority of the Iraqi people.” (al-Arabi 2005, 22) While childhood violence experienced in institutions may have played a part in the violence of the

Qasim Era and in Iraqi society, I would like to open up different avenues of exploring violence that do not rest on this idea of an Iraqi double character.

Aside from studies of violence itself, there is actually a good amount of Arabic source material detailing the events of this period. However, these sources seem to be roughly divided into two camps: the official state-sponsored literature and the dissident literature. The biographies of the era, such as those written by the official biographer Ahmad Fawzi, are too politically motivated in their historiography.

Instead, they take on a distinctive myth making tone, effectively vilifying General

Qasim while glorifying Abd al-Salaam Arif. However, what is noteworthy from these

11 biographies is their use of violence as either a vilifying or legitimizing agent. 8 The dissident literature, such as that of Fadil al-Azzawi9, seems to have more detail in its accounts, and by nature I think that people tend to place more trust in it. But a more neutral stance must be taken that seeks to find the middle ground between these poles, and there do not seem to be other historical accounts besides Batatu that fall in to a politically neutral area. This is where Ali al-Wardi can be valuable. While his methods and conclusions have been questioned, his political neutrality in the midst of this era of upheaval has not. His studies of Iraqi society can be useful in helping us gain perspective into the everyday violence of Iraq without political motive. For the purposes of this study, political leanings in the source material must be noted, but are not necessarily preventative in their use. Many of the violent events that are recorded appear to be the same from both sides, simply with different interpretations of motive and meaning. While some accounts include some acts that others do not, there seems to be little dispute over the acts themselves.

The structure of this study is not necessarily chronological, but conceptual.

We will begin with a macro view of the modern state of Iraq, focusing on the use of state violence during the Monarchy Period (1921-58). It is hoped that through this chapter that we can see how violence compensated for a lack of legitimacy during

8 For see the political tones of these books, see Ahmad Fawzi, 'Abd al-Karim Qasim wa Sa'aatuhu al-Akhirah (al-Karkh: Dar al- 'Arabiyah lil-Tab'aah, 1988). Ahmad Fawzi, 'Abd al-Salaam Mohammad 'Arif (Baghdad: al-Dar al-Arabiyah, 1989). Ahmad Fawzi, Qisat 'Abd al-Karim Qasim Kamilah (al-Qahirah: Dar al-Kitab al-'Arabi bi-Misr, 1963). 9 Fadil al-Azzawi was born in 1940 in Kirkuk, Iraq and rose to prominence as a poet and intellectual. He was imprisoned by the Ba’ath Party for three years for his political beliefs (communism) and later fled the country in 1977 to live in what was then East Germany. He is now an acclaimed writer and poet, as well as a direct witness to the period in question. 12 the monarchy period, which led to a validation and radicalization of opposition groups. In contrast, the second chapter will examine the micro view of the everyday.

While this era seems to hold story after story of spectacular violence, it is the aim of the second chapter to contextualize these spectacular acts of violence within the ordinary lives of the Iraqi people. This everyday violence can take the form of direct violence, institutional violence, or representations of violence and death. Many times, narrations of history gravitate toward the spectacular. Yet these spectacular acts such as revolutions, executions and mutilations are mostly presented as being disconnected from the everyday realities on the ground at the time; they are events that hang suspended and out of context and therefore seem senseless. Rather than explaining the spectacular violence of this era as punctuating crowd frenzy or Iraqi exceptionalism, we will try to see how the spectacular violence emerges in a spatial and historical context as a variation of the ordinary. Finally, in the third chapter, we will see how the everyday integrated into the spectacular violence of the era, and then how the Ba’athi state, led by those who were radicalized by state violence under the Monarchy, institutionalized this radical new brand of violence to force the submission of Iraqi Communists first, and then eventually the whole nation.

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Chapter I: Violence Begets Violence: The Hashemite Monarchy

“Only a tent pitched by your own hands will stand”

-Old Arabic Proverb

As of 6:30 AM on the morning of 14 July 1958, elements of the Iraqi Army stood poised to overthrow the Hashemite Monarchy. The Hashemite Monarchy was imported from the Hijaz (now a part of modern Saudi Arabia) and placed on the throne in 1921 by the British in order to rule the new constitutional monarchy of

Iraq. The Army, once the Monarchy’s main instrument of internal repression, had decided to sweep the Monarchy aside and implement its own vision of government based on the Free Officer model seen in the Egyptian Revolution of 1952. The United

National Front, made up of the various illegal opposition parties of Iraq, stood behind the Army and knew that the end of the Monarchy was coming within weeks.

On that morning the time had come. After a brief firefight and negotiation, the entire royal family surrendered and marched out onto the front lawn of the palace grounds, awaiting their fate. At around 8:00 AM, the political experiment of the constitutional monarchy ended.

The stage was set for the ensuing violence of the Qasim Era, and acts of spectacular violence were about to unfold. General Abd al-Karim Qasim would

14 ascend as the Premier of the newly minted Republic of Iraq. Colonel ‘Abd al-Salaam

‘Arif (1921-1966), chief of Qasim’s fellow free officers, would soon fall out of grace with Qasim and seek to enact his own visions for the revolution. People would be killed using radical methods. Bodies of the slain would be dragged through the streets and set on display.

Fadil al-Azzawi posits that the spectacular nature of the violence of the revolution was caused by the radicalization of the opposition under the state violence of the Monarchy. He goes on to argue that this radicalization in turn infused in the conscience of the people a “revolutionary zeal,” and how the only demonstration of this zeal was in the spectacular demonstrations of brutality against the bodies of their enemies. (al-'Azzawi 1997, 37-8) This idea holds merit, but is incomplete. I want to build on this idea further, and look at how top-down violence from the macro level served as a midwife of sorts for the extremely violent methods of the opposition groups. I will argue that the Hashemite Monarchy in Iraq, following the British example, used violence as an instrument in the place of legitimacy, and this violence in turn validated and radicalized the opposition.

For the 37 years of its existence, the Constitutional Monarchy in Iraq was a twisted paragon of the triumph of human technology. Lacking in any central unifying principle among the various communal groups of Iraq and finding itself ever more in the middle of competing regional and international ideologies, the

Monarchy eventually gained a delicate superiority over its people through its use of

15 weapons technology: namely, the tank and the warplane. Through a series of revolts, tribal warfare, and uprisings, first the British Army, then the Iraqi Army, steadily grew in its ability to control most of the southern and central Iraqi territory through a tenuous monopoly on violence. (al-Wardi 2008)

The Necessity of Compensatory Violence

So why was this state violence necessary? In the theory of social control, there are three intertwined strands that are needed to achieve political obedience.

The first is coercion, the second is self-interest, and the third is legitimacy10. The first strand is a question of violence—Do the authorities have sufficient force to impose their will on me? The second strand is a question of moral or material gain—

Can I benefit from obedience to the authorities more than from disobedience? The third strand deals with a question of normative behavior—Should I obey the authorities because it is right to do so? (Hurd 1999) These strands ran strong within the communal groups and later the oppositional political parties of Iraq, but the strands of legitimacy and self- interest were weak at the state level. To compensate for this weakness, especially after the death of the charismatic King Faisal (1883-

1933), the Iraqi state thickened the strand of violence, and this violence was

10 Legitimacy is the legal right to exercise social control. Its base word, legitimate, comes from the Latin word lex, which means law. So in terms specific to this study, legitimate has to do with the legal right of the Hashemite Monarchy to rule Iraq. Merriam-Webster, Legitimate-Definition and More from the Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary, http://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/legitimate?show=0&t=1303925772 (accessed April 27, 2011). 16 manifested as both direct and structural violence. These forms of violence, rather than achieving the goal of pacification, instead validated and radicalized the opposition while also providing a stone in the foundation of the state violence to come. We will first examine ideas of violence and why violence was necessary for the foundation and preservation of the state of Iraq. We will then look at how the

British and the Monarchy’s use of structural violence created extreme class disparities that gave significant motive for the violence of the Qasim Era. Lastly, we will examine the effect of the Monarchy’s use of direct violence on the opposition parties.

Hannah Arendt notes in her book On Violence that power and violence are separate but often confused. She posits that violence is instrumental in nature, and while it can command immediate obedience, it is not a complete source of power.

Legitimate power can use violence, but violence can never create legitimacy. In her estimation, power does not lie in the violence that a group commits (such as a revolution), but rather it is found in the initial gathering of the people of a movement, meaning that power and legitimacy are held in the ideas and commonality that bind a group together. (Arendt 1970, 52) In Iraqi historiography, historians may refer to this commonality as the Khaldunian idea of asabiyah, or group feeling. (Khaldun 2005)

Arendt further suggests that violence and power often act independently.

Take, for example, a foreign occupation. In an occupation, obedience is only

17 achieved through the coercive force of violence, and not from any sense of legitimate power. (Arendt 1970, 52) Power and violence can also stand in opposition. As an example, Arendt uses the picture of the confrontation between nonviolent Czechoslovakian citizens against Russian tanks. Though the citizens had legitimate power, the Russian occupiers had the implements of violence that could achieve domination in the absence of legitimate power. This example illustrates the relationship between technology and violence: technology multiplies the power and innovation of violence. In this sense, as technology develops, it is possible for fewer and fewer people to command obedience from a larger amount of people without any real power or legitimacy. (Arendt 1970, 53)

This idea of the separation of power and violence fits the Iraqi situation almost perfectly. The state of Iraq began as the product of a foreign occupation. The use of the word Iraq may predate the founding of the state, but the state itself was created by the British from three vastly different provinces of the late Ottoman

Empire, each one with different views of the role of government.11 As will be discussed further in the next chapter, true legitimacy and “group feeling” resided with the different local groups that made up Iraq, and not in the construct of the

11 For an in-depth view of the Ottoman administration of the Iraqi provinces, see Gokhan Cetinsaya, Ottoman Administration of Iraq, 1890-1908 (New York, New York: Routledge, 2006). Also see Sami Zubaida, “The Fragments Imagine the Nation: The Case of Iraq ,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 34, no. 2 (May 2002): 205-215. and Yitzhak Nakash, The Shi'is of Iraq (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). From Zubaida’s point of view, the Iraqi nation-state comes from the founding of the state of Iraq at the hands of the British, but there has never been a unified vision of the state by its inhabitants. The views of the state by the Sunnis varied vastly from that of the Shi’a and Kurds. Most prominent of this is the Shi’a, who either lived in tribal agricultural societies or in quasi-independent city-states that were ruled largely by a mix of clerics and urban notables. 18 state. While nationalist feeling did develop later in the Monarchy period, there were still different ideological groups that held more legitimacy in the eyes of the people than the Monarchy did. The necessary solution to this problem was a compensatory violence through both structural and direct means.

The British Roots of Iraqi State Violence

This repression through violence did not emerge in a vacuum. Before the monarchy took the reins of state security, Britain set the example by using direct violence to keep the fledgling monarchy in place. It was Britain’s violence that created the state of Iraq, and until Iraq’s independence in 1932; it was Britain’s violence that held it together.12 With territorial boundaries drawn arbitrarily in the regional interests of Britain and France, the borders were not congruent with the political and cultural realities on the ground. Britain therefore had to create a state where there was little desire or imagination for one. In the north, the Kurds desired an independent state based on ethno-linguistic commonalities. In the south, cities and tribes were well adjusted to operating as largely self-sufficient entities under the Ottoman Empire. While it is true that some wanted the British to stay out of self- interest, this was a small percentage of some of the landed class. Faisal, the first

12 I am taking the ideas of law-instating violence and law-preserving violence directly from Walter Benjamin. In his critique of violence, he describes two types of legal violence. The first, law-instating violence, is exemplified best by the Army. The Army conquers a territory and then founds the law. Law-preserving violence is best exemplified by the police, who enforce the law. The first creates through violence, the second preserves through threat of enforcement. See Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Items, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott, 277-300 (New York: Schocken Books, 1978). Also, it can be argued that 19 monarch of Iraq, was a skilled diplomat and worked well with the various communal groups.13 However, in spite of Faisal’s skill, the state was still held in place by the coercive apparatus of Britain, and held little legitimacy of its own.14

This became especially evident after the death of Faisal, whose charismatic personality played a large role in Iraq’s governance. His descendants did not rule with the same political aptitude, and the communal groups, the British, and the ruling elite all began to drift apart. (Tarbush 1982, 186)

Britain largely kept political control in Iraq through the violent policy of “air control,” or basically indiscriminate bombing. However, this British brand of law- preserving violence in Iraq had some serious implications for the future state of

Iraq. In her book Spies in Arabia, Priya Satia argues quite convincingly that certain cultural and spiritual trends of Edwardian England influenced those Britons who would eventually be charged to “create” Iraq to believe that they could understand the “Arab mind.” The understanding of this imagined “Arab mind” led the British to believe that they could use indiscriminate warfare to control the Iraqi people, especially the tribes. To the British, the loss of Iraqi women and children in bombing raids was deemed acceptable because in the opinion of the experts it was acceptable

13 There was an air of legitimacy to King Faisal I, and this is why he was chosen. He was a Sharif (a descendant of the prophet) and had rebelled against the Ottoman Empire in order to receive the British promise of a pan-Arab kingdom that he was planning to rule from Damascus. When he came to the throne in Iraq in 1921, it was clear that he had come to throne only by the permission of Great Britain. 14 According to Peter Sluglett, the monarchy knew very early that its existence depended on the coercive force of the British and not on the support of Iraq’s diverse community. For more on this topic see Peter Sluglett, Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country, 1914-1932 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 20 to the “Arab mind.” (Satia 2008, 249) Between the years of 1921 and 1932, the

Royal Air Force performed over 130 missions, dropping as many as ten tons worth of bombs at a time, sometimes destroying whole villages with incendiary munitions.

(Tarbush 1982, 17)

In her article “The Defense of Inhumanity, Air Control and the British Idea of

Arabia,” Satia describes the beginning of the strategy to control the native population. According to her, T.E. Lawrence was one of the main promoters of the use of air power for this specific purpose. He insisted that if the British made exemplary use of the Air Force against the population, then the mere threat of its use would eventually keep the people in line. (Satia 2006) In so doing, the British injected a foreign form of indiscriminate violence into the new state of Iraq using warplane technology. It is not a far leap from this model of British violence to

Saddam’s attack on Halabja in March of 1988, where he killed thousands of Kurds with air dropped chemical weapons.

So, what is seen here is an example of a practical British double character based on Britain’s intellectual assumptions about Iraqi psychology. So while promoting institutions of democracy and freedom, the British were simultaneously waging indiscriminate bombing campaigns to maintain control of the tribes and hold the Monarchy together. It logically follows that this violence transferred to the security apparatus of the Monarchy, as Iraq’s police and army were trained under

British advisement officially until its independence in 1932, yet the Iraqi

21 government continued to call on British assistance for quite some time. (Sluglett

2007)

Structural Violence as a Tool of Political Control

Direct violence such as bombing, while more observable, was not the only form of violence used to gain political control. Structural violence was yet another tool in the hands of the British and eventually the Monarchy with the aim of enforcing political obedience.15 Starting with the Tribal Disputes Regulation in 1916, the British and later the monarchy froze tribal structures in place, granting tribal sheikhs virtually unlimited authority in the lives of their tribesmen. (Sluglett 2007,

169) These actions promoted a form of structural violence that created rigid disparities in the distribution of land, wealth, and power. Central to this form of structural violence in Iraq is the idea of land tenure.16 This great inequality would

15 Structural violence is defined as ways in which a social system or institution deprives someone of their basic needs. Galtung makes the distinction between structural violence and direct violence clear: the former kills slowly and the latter kills quickly. There is also a matter of direct culpability: the structural violence may be anonymous while direct violence has a clear author. See Johan Galtung and Tord Hoivik, “Structural and Direct Violence: A Note on Operationalization,” Journal of Peace Research 8, no. 1 (1971): 73-76. See also Johan Galtung, “Cultural Violence,” Journal of Peace Research 27, no. 3 (August 1990): 291-305. The Problem with the wide definition is that it defines violence as deprivation or omission rather than a positive use of force. However, the idea that certain structures and institutions can either deprive people or create the preconditions for direct violence is critical to this discussion of Iraq. See also Paul Farmer, "An Anthropology of Structural Violence," Current Anthropology 45, no. 3 (2004): 305-25. 16 European ideas of land ownership and division penetrated the Iraqi provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th century and contributed to later class disparities in modern Iraq. In the 19th century, there was not the same understanding of land ownership in Iraq as in Europe. Central and southern Iraq were mostly populated by Bedouin tribes that wandered about freely over the Ottoman Empire’s provincial borders. In order to settle these tribes and therefore exact more taxes from them, the Ottoman government implemented the Land Reform Code of 1858. Though not applied until 1870, the enforcement of this 22 eventually lead to a massing of the poor in the cities and a growing hatred of the monarchy because in a bid to keep social control, the British and the Monarchy held hierarchies in place that kept peasants both indebted to their sheikhs and tied to the land. The British and then the Monarchy delegated the powers of social control to a small group of urban notables, tribal sheikhs, and eventually high-ranking officers in the military. In exchange for loyalty and control over their people, these notables were given access to the broad patronage of the state. This in turn created significant class disparities in Iraq, most noticeably between the landowners and the fellahin (peasants). This class disparity was a motivating factor in the violence of the

land code had the effect of settling many of the tribes and converting them from their nomadic pastoral lifestyle into an agrarian one. Many of the settled tribes not only converted lifestyles but also faiths. After their settlement, many of the tribesmen converted to Shi’ism as a result of their growing economic and social ties with the Shi’i shrine cities in central and southern Iraq. See Yitzhak Nakash, The Shi'is of Iraq (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).This land reform created a landed class out of the Tribal Sheikhs, and the advantages of this would become more and more apparent as more income was derived from the growing agricultural sector While lining the pockets of the tribal sheikhs, the settlement of the tribes also weakened their moral authority as warrior-leaders in the eyes of their tribes. Instead of being an autonomous and capable warrior, the tribal sheikh changed into a landowner who began to see his tribesmen as “sources of profit rather than efficient fighters.” Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett, “The Transformation of Land Tenure and Rural Social Structure in Central and Southern Iraq, c. 1870-1958 ,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 15, no. 4 (November 1983): 491-505. The need to still defend his lands while converting his tribes to a more profit driven agrarian society placed the sheikh in an unstable position and eroded his moral authority. This erosion of authority was halted with the British invasion of 1914 and the subsequent mandate/monarchy period. Needing to keep the tribesmen under control, the British and later King Faisal ensured that the urban notables and tribal sheikhs benefitted from the patronage of the state in exchange for keeping their people from revolting. With the help of the technology of British warplanes, the mandate government was able to keep the tribesmen in subservience. However, these tribesmen began to leave their land in droves as they found themselves in greater and greater debt to their tribal sheikhs. The Kingdom of Iraq needed to put this exodus to an end and so it created a law that officially tied the peasants to the land. Called the “Law Governing the Rights and Duties and Cultivators,” this law prevented peasants from leaving the land legally until their debt was paid off to the sheikh in full. Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett, “The Transformation of Land Tenure and Rural Social Structure in Central and Southern Iraq, c. 1870-1958 ,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 15, no. 4 (November 1983): 491-505. The stress of constant servitude to the sheikhs tied with worsening soil conditions forced the peasants to either remain tied to the land of their sheikh or to illegally escape. Many chose to escape and began congregating in the slums of Baghdad and Basra. 23

Qasim Era. Hanna Batatu suggests that it was these class differences that played a major role in the violence of 1959 in Mosul and Kirkuk. (Batatu 1978)

International and Regional Ideologies and their Effect on Iraq

Before continuing the discussion of the violence itself, there must be a brief discussion of the international and regional realities of the time in addition to the complex layering of communal, institutional, and ideological groups that made up

Iraq in the lead up to the 1958 revolution.17 The world that surrounded Iraq was rife with competing ideologies, and Iraq was not immune. The main international struggle was the Cold War, a competition of visions for how the world would be ordered. One pole, led by the United States, envisioned capitalism with a concomitant form of democracy spreading across the globe and opening global markets. The second pole was headed by the Soviet Union, which envisioned a universal socialist economy with its complementary political system. In the Middle

East, the 1950s saw the rise of a new brand of pan-Arab nationalism headed by

Gamal Abd al-Nasser, who held a position of “positive neutralism,” or non-alignment with either Cold War power. Nasser sought to bring together the Arab nations of the

Middle East into one non-aligned Arab union, led of course by Nasser himself.

17 In an estimate from 1947, the three main people groups that inhabited Iraq were the Shi’i Arabs (51.4%), the Sunni Arabs (19.7%) and the Kurds (19%). There were several smaller people groups that composed the rest: various sects of Christians (3.1%), the Jews (2.6%), the Turcomen (2%), and the Yazidi Kurds (.8%). Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). 24

The Hashemite Monarchy stood on the side of the United States and Britain.

The opposition groups of Iraq for the most part did not. The opposition was a complex group of overlapping ideological, social, economic, and sectarian identities.

To simplify these complexities, the opposition can be roughly divided into two ideological camps: The first would generally be described as pan-Arab nationalist,18 which had an Iraqi bent, but associated with the ideology of Nasser. Pan-Arab

Nationalism found most of its adherents among the Sunni elite, who, in addition to the civilian government, dominated the officer corps of the Army. The largest

18 Pan-Arabism finds its roots in the late Ottoman period, arising out of the chaos of social and political change in the 19th century Ottoman Empire. While Arab Nationalism was not initially separatist in nature, the British seized the opportunity of World War One to influence its direction. As a part of Great Britain’s Middle Eastern campaign, British officers successfully convinced Sharif Hussein, the Arab Suzerain of Ottoman Mecca and Medina, to declare a jihad and lead what has been called the “Arab Revolt” against the Ottoman Empire. In exchange for this revolt, Hussein was promised a pan-Arab state including what are now Syria, Jordan, Palestine, and Iraq. However, this promise would not be kept. For more about the political workings between the British and Sharif Hussein, see Hasan Kayali, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908-1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Unknown to the Sharif, Britain, France, and Russia had already divided up the Middle East as a part of their victory plan in the secretive Sykes-Picot Agreement. As a part of the plan, France would take the territories of Syria and Lebanon, Britain would take Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq, and Russia would take sections of Anatolia. However, after the 1917 revolution in Russia, the new Bolshevik government revealed this plan to the world, placing the agreement in jeopardy. With the close of World War One, the world stood at a crossroads as the age of empires came to a close. President Woodrow Wilson, speaking for the United States, advocated self-determination and an opening of previously closed colonial markets. Pulling against this new brand of self- determinism, Britain and France still desired to maintain influence in their colonial territories. This led to the birth of an ill- fated compromise: The mandate system. Under the auspices of the newly formed League of Nations, mandatory territories were formed, essentially dividing the Middle East among the colonial powers with the stated aim of developing these newly created territories into independent nation-states. When the Sharif’s son, Prince Faisal, tried to establish the promised kingdom in Damascus, he was expelled by the French in a relatively quick fashion. As a compromise, Britain installed Faisal onto the throne of the newly formed Iraq while placing his brother Prince Abdullah on the throne of Jordan. The Hashemite Monarchies of Iraq and Jordan would maintain a royalist form of pan-Arabism, but new forms would develop under Nasser, the Ba’ath Party, and others. 25 political representations of the pan-Arab nationalists were the Ba’ath Party19 and the Istiqlal Party20. The Sunni Elite, in a way, wanted a return to their privileged positions within the old power structure of the Sunni Ottoman Empire. The second is called Iraqi particularist, Iraqi nationalist, or Iraqist. On the Iraqist side, a good number of the Kurds, Shi’i Arabs, and other ethnic and religious minorities who were marginalized under the structural violence of the Ottomans, the British, and the Monarchy desired an independent Iraqi state. There were many Sunnis who were Iraqists, and Shi’is who were pan-Arabists, but the camps generally lined up along lines of sect and class. The Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) was the largest representation of Iraqists, followed by the National Democrats. The Free Officers, who would eventually enact the coup, drew their inspiration from Nasser. They

19 The Ba’ath Party was founded by Michel Aflaq, Salah al-Din Bitar and Zaki al-Arsuzi in 1940s Syria. Started as a resistance movement to the French Mandate, Ba’athism grew as an anti-Marxist socialist movement that, like Nasserism, focused on the Arab identity as its main ideological pillar. In creating an identity for itself, the Ba’ath Party focused on creating an ideal Arab past of which it was seeking to revive. Its very structure spoke of the Ba’ath Party’s pan-Arab goals: a national command with different regional commands in each Arab state where the Ba’ath Party had a presence. Ba’athism was brought to Iraq by a few Syrian teachers and slowly grew as part of the National Front that stood in opposition to the monarchy along with the nationalists, the communists, the National Democrats, and the Istiqlal Party. The Ba’ath Party, however, drew very few adherents in Iraq until it fully gained its grip on power in 1968. For more on this subject see Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett, Iraq Since 1958: From Revolution to Dictatorship (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2001). 20 The Istiqlal, or Independence Party was a right-leaning organization that found its origins in the Muthanna Club, a group of conservative merchants and army officers who desired to promote Arab values and a pan-Arab message. This club was disbanded after the Rashid Ali Coup of 1941 and most of its leadership ended up in the Istiqlal Party. According to Uriel Dann, the party was very small and was largely based on the personalities of its three leaders: Muhammad Mahdi Kubba, Fa’iq al- Sammara’i, and Siddiq Shinshal. The Party took a more conservative view to pan-Arabism vis a vis the more reform minded Ba’ath Party and largely declined toward the time of the revolution due to its lack of appeal to the youth, who defected to both the Ba’ath Party and the leftist movements. The Muthanna Club Heritage for this party held a lot of weight among pan-Arab nationalists considering it had as its members the conspirators of the 1941 Rashid Ali Coup. See Uriel Dann, Iraq Under Qassem; A Political History, 1958-1963 (New York: Praeger, 1969). Members of the Istiqlal Party were a major part of the provisional government after the revolution. However, during the Qasim Era, the party faded away. 26 were supposed to remain politically neutral and attempted to remain so by enacting a rule that cut off all communication with civilians. This rule, however, did not hold and the Free Officers aligned themselves with different political camps, mainly the pan-Arab ones.

Despite their differences, both the pan-Arab and the Iraqist camps were united in their opposition to the monarchy and sought to overthrow it. However, as mentioned, they held competing visions for the post-revolutionary Iraq. Pan-Arab nationalists desired to bring Iraq into a union with other Arab states: namely Syria,

Jordan, Egypt, and Palestine. Iraqists envisioned Iraq as a solitary nation composed of its diverse ethnic and religious communities. Additionally, it can be argued that the state of Iraq was always in a state of war with the irredentist Kurds of the northern region. Both the Qasim regime and the Ba’ath regime following it were virtually in a constant state of armed conflict with the Kurds, and this conflict continued more or less regularly through the history of modern Iraq until the US invasion in 2003. 21

21 For more on the communal makeup of Iraq and how they function within the state construct see Sami Zubaida, “The Fragments Imagine the Nation: The Case of Iraq ,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 34, no. 2 (May 2002): 205-215. First and foremost, a constant in the history of modern Iraq and the Middle East has been the Kurdish independence movement. Though it has taken many forms, the Kurds of the region have sought a homeland for themselves since the end of World War One. Straddled across the borders of Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria, they are the largest linguistic people group in the Middle East without their own homeland. Starting with the death of King Faisal and especially into the 1940s, an ethnic nationalist movement began to gain momentum in Kurdistan. Since then, the issue of Kurdish independence or autonomy has been a core obstacle to the integration of modern Iraq. This topic is a complex one and too large for the scope of this study. However, in basic terms, there has always been a strong Kurdish independence or autonomy movement based on linguistic cultural nationalism. For more on the issue of Kurdish separatism, see chapter 14 of David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2004). 27

The Role of the Monarchy’s Security Apparatus

To meet the challenge of enforcing political obedience among these varied ethnic and ideological groups, the Monarchy developed a largely internally directed security apparatus: the police and army. The police, founded in 1920, began with

British and British Indian officers holding key posts. (Walker 2003, 32) As more and more immigrants moved from the Kut-al-Amarah area to Baghdad, the police became more representative of this demographic change, namely having been comprised of a number of tribal Shi’is. Since there was somewhat of a social separation between tribal and urban Iraqis, this may have made it easier for the

Monarchy to order the police to fire on crowds in the uprisings of 1948 and 1952.

(Batatu 1978, 135) At the behest of Nuri al-Said, the political police continued to expand, especially after the Wathbah of 1948. In 1958 it was reported, “there were as many as 20,000 secret police agents in Baghdad alone.” (Walker 2003, 37) Where we find the most detailed accounts of the police are in their own words. Batatu relied heavily on carefully kept police files in his archival research. From these files, we can see that police were heavily involved in both monitoring political activity and persecuting the political parties of the opposition.

While the police was the instrument for political repression in the day to day, the Army found its primary role in quelling the larger political problems of the newly formed state, namely putting down minority and tribal rebellions. The Army 28 was sent to fight in Palestine on a number of occasions, but with little success.

Rather, all of their military successes were found in suppressing internal strife. The development of the army as a mechanism of internal repression is evidenced by the use of the Iraqi Army as an “adjunct to the police” starting with the Assyrian Affair in

1933 through the Najaf Uprising of 1956.22 (Batatu 1978, 765) (al-Khalil 1989, 21)

However, the Army also vied for power with the Monarchy and violence or incentive had to be applied to the Army to keep it in line.

The Army had grown as a quasi-independent institution of the state with its own political designs for Iraq. In the wake of its victory in repressing the Assyrian revolt in 1933, the Army began to create strong feelings of national sentiment and became a central nationalizing symbol for Iraq. So in a way, the Army started a sense of nationalist feeling around the repression of an internal minority group. In a similar vein, the leadership of the Army was not representative of the population.

The officer corps of the Iraqi Army was made of almost entirely of Sunni Arabs.

Based on a random sample of 61 officers in the rank of commander and above that was done in 1936, it was found that 58 were Sunni, two were Christian, and one was

Shi’i. (Tarbush 1982) Not surprisingly, the Army found it difficult to fill its ranks at first, for it needed the cooperation of the marginalized ethnic and religious groups.

22 For a more detailed look at how the Iraqi Army became the main instrument for internal repression of various communal groups see Reeva Simon Spector, Iraq Between the Two World Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). And also Samir al-Khalil, Republic of Fear (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989). Pp 21-22 see also Samir al-Khalil, Republic of Fear (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989). 29

Many of the Shi’i tribes in the center and south of Iraq were resistant to join and fought hard against conscription.

In an attempt to further build a national identity from such a fragmented society, in the 20s and 30s the Education Ministry and the Army looked to the

German ideology of cultural nationalism accompanied by a form of militarism. The result was a militarized education system fused with tribal codes and an army that was based on these ideas.23 This state building effort also had the effect of creating more pro-German and anti-British sentiment within the society and the army, mainly due to Britain’s stance on the Palestine Question. From 1936 on, the Army was consistently vying for political power with the pro-British monarchic government.

How Violence Validated and Radicalized the Opposition

Orit Bashkin makes an astute observation about the violence in Iraq during the 40s and 50s, saying that the opposition responded to the violence of the

Monarchy in kind. When the Monarchy displayed a body of one of the opposition leaders in the city gates, the opposition would display a body of a dead policeman.

When the Monarchy shut down a newspaper or banned Communist literature, the opposition would burn pro-government newspapers. (Bashkin 2009, 118) This

23 Ideas about how the Iraqi education system adopted German ideas of indoctrination came from Aideed Dawisha, Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). See specifically Chapter 3. Also, the modernized education system produced a new social group of people known as the effendiyah. This group of professionals promoted Western thought and became adherents of the international and regional political ideologies. 30 would suggest that the opposition learned violence from monarchic state violence and responded. In addition to Fadil al-Azzawi’s argument about the radicalization of the opposition due to monarchy violence, I would like to explore this idea through a series of events in the 40s and 50s. Where at first the violence of the Monarchy was directed at different communal groups to preserve the state, later on it was needed to keep the opposition groups from growing to be powerful enough to threaten the

Monarchy. Therefore, the Monarchy applied more violence in an attempt to preserve itself. Where the Assyrian Affair and the repression of tribal uprisings in

1935/6 were attempts to project the central authority of the state over communal groups, there are later accounts of how the Hashemite monarchy used violent methods to repress the growing opposition. There are several incidents of note that

I suggest led to their validation and radicalization. First were the Rashid Ali Coup and the subsequent executions of the conspirators, which left a deep mark on the institutional memory of the Army and the pan-Arab nationalists. The second was the violent repression of the 1948 uprising that was held in protest against the

Portsmouth Treaty with Britain. (also called the wathbah) The third was the execution of the leaders of the ICP and subsequent display of their corpses. Lastly, there were the executions of Communist political prisoners in the prisons of

Baghdad and Kut in 1953.

As mentioned above, the military was both the greatest tool of the Monarchy and also the greatest thorn in its side. A monumental event in this adversarial

31 relationship was the Rashid Ali Coup of 1941. During the 1930s, the Army became very pro-German and anti-British. Therefore, well into World War Two, the Army saw a need to remove the pro-British government and replace it with one that was pro-German and more in line with their pan-Arab visions for the country. The military succeeded in deposing the Crown Prince Abdullah and ousting the premier,

Nuri al-Said. However, the conspirators did not kill the prince or Nuri. All seemed successful until Britain reinvaded Iraq in order to put the Monarchy back in place.

No quarter was given. The leaders of the coup were executed by hanging at the order of the Crown Prince Abdullah and Nuri al-Said. However, these executions did not have the desired effect. The army leadership, mostly comprised of pan-Arab nationalists, would remember this event and record it as a major motive for the violence of the 1958 revolution.

In 1948, the Hashemite monarchy attempted to renegotiate its security pact with Great Britain. The result was the Portsmouth treaty, signed on January 15th,

1948, which guaranteed certain concessions to the British that the opposition groups in Iraq did not want to give, for anti-British sentiment had continued to grow since the Rashid Ali Coup. The opposition press printed negative articles about the treaty, and as a result, many student protesters took to the streets. Fearing a loss of control, police brutality escalated throughout the protests. At the height of the protests the police ended up opening fire on the protesters, killing hundreds as they tried to cross over a bridge in Baghdad in order to connect with other protesters.

32

Many bodies were left in the streets. This bridge and the story associated with it would become a deep part of the nationalist movement’s narrative, and yet another example of violent repression by the Monarchy. (Yasin 1999, 305-8) It was during this time that bodies and bloody articles were carried in the streets to demonstrate police brutality. (Bashkin 2009)

The third and fourth events were perpetrated against the Iraqists, specifically the Communists. One was the execution of the leaders of the Communist party and the subsequent display of their bodies. In 1949, Fahd, the legendary leader and patriarch of the Iraqi Communist Party, and two other members of the

ICP Politburo were convicted of trumped up charges by a military court and were subsequently executed in three different public squares of the city. Their corpses were displayed for several hours. (Batatu 1978, 568) The display of their corpses was of course intended to send a message to the ICP or any others that might oppose the government. To others, it gave the Communists more legitimacy by surrounding them “with the halo of martyrdom.” (Batatu 1978, 569)

The other took place in two separate incidents of violence in 1953. Fadil al-

‘Azzawi describes the actions of the royal regime against its Communist prisoners:

In addition to the torture to which the strugglers of the revolutionary movements were

exposed… the royal regime did not hesitate to open fire on hunger striking prisoners, killing

them like what happened in the massacres in Baghdad and Kut in 1953. (al-'Azzawi 1997,

38)

33

In this case, the private mistreatment of the Communists in prison became very public. In addition to their torture, altercations between the guards and the

Communist prisoners led to the deaths of several prisoners under suspect circumstances. The killings in Kut produced many more casualties than those that happened in Baghdad.24 The public did not receive the foul treatment of these prisoners well, and the ICP gained more support from the public as a result, adding the air of martyrdom to their cause and most likely hardening the Communists in their convictions. It was at this time, Batatu suggests, that the ICP began radicalizing to the left in their ideology. (Batatu 1978, 672) Also, according to al-‘Azzawi, endurance of this violence became one of the main qualifications for leadership in the opposition and therefore created a need to display evidence of revolutionary zeal through the use of violence (al-'Azzawi 1997, 44) Indeed, there is strong evidence that the opposition not only learned violent methods from the Monarchy, but that radicalization of both ideology and violence did occur as a result.

Conclusion

We have seen that the newly established Monarchy needed to use violence in the absence of a true right to rule because Iraq was founded by Britain, an occupying foreign power. In its first years, Britain also held the state together with its law- preserving violence. At first, the Monarchy needed to use structural and direct

24 For more details on these incidents see Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). Pp 690-93. In here he describes the intended summary execution of 15 Jewish Communists and the ensuing massacre against other prisoners in Kut. 34 violence to keep its various communal groups together as a state. Later, the monarchy used violence to keep the opposition groups from becoming too powerful.

This did not have its desired effect. Instead of pacification, violence both validated and radicalized the opposition. It is in this framework of direct and structural violence that the pan-Arab nationalists, the Army and the Iraqists joined together to overthrow the Monarchy, and it was from this framework of direct and structural violence that the opposition groups turned on each other in a violent storm that the modern state of Iraq had not yet seen. Two days after the revolution, the Ba’ath

Party “identified the Iraqi Communist Party as the principle enemy of the revolution, over and above imperialism.” (Ismael 2008)

35

Chapter II: The Violence of the Everyday

While the top-down approach may offer some explanation for the spectacular violence of the Qasim Era, I believe that it is incomplete. In order to get a fuller picture of the quality of violence during this era, we must also look at the violence and ritual of the everyday, and how it flows into greater acts of violence.

The violence of the Qasim Era is viewed in nearly all the accounts as spectacular in nature, puncturing the fabric of history with outrageous acts of ferocity. Bodies are torn apart and put on display. Masses of people are gunned down in the streets and murdered en masse in back rooms. Mass graves are created and filled. While overwhelming, these snap-shots fail to take into account that these acts are rooted in both local and national realities. This chapter seeks to demonstrate how the violence of the everyday flows into the spectacular, and as will be demonstrated in chapter three, the violence of the everyday will eventually be woven into the fabric of the state in a radicalized form. So we will now move into three aspects of this more ordinary violence, so to speak. The first area will be the law-preserving violence of Iraqi customary law, where the authority of tribal custom meets the lives of the everyday Iraqi. Secondly we will look at acts of violence in the home, the neighborhood, and the school. Thirdly, we will look at neighborhood portrayals of violence and how this may have contributed to the naturalization of violent acts of

36 dismemberment. Lastly, we will look at the ritual of the funeral rite, and how it reinforces the honor of martyrdom as well as providing a model for ritual violence performed during the Qasim Era.

The Law-Preserving Violence of the Tribe

As mentioned before, the local authority of the communal group held a great deal of influence over the everyday lives of the people of Iraq. Although the state did penetrate into the everyday lives of Iraqis through its control of urban notables and tribal sheikhs, the communal group still had enough autonomy to enforce local customary laws through violence. One of the main reasons that authority was strong at the local level is because since the fall of the Abbasid Caliphate in 1258, the territory that makes up modern Iraq lacked any strong central authority. Society therefore developed around local tribes and neighborhoods. Besides Baghdad,

Basra, and Mosul, many of the cities operated as largely independent city-states. The tribal sheikhs of the middle Euphrates and the south strongly resisted state control, and those sheikhs that did submit were given near unlimited authority by the

British Tribal Disputes Regulation of 1916 and its continuance under the Monarchy.

Some of the Sheikhs were fair in their treatment of their people, and others used this authority to exploit their people. (E. W. Fernea 1965) In the major Shi’i cities of

Karbala and an-Najaf, the urban populations were governed by a combination of

37 religious clerics (ulama), mafia type organizations, and other urban notables.25 The clerics also strongly resisted the control of the state. These conditions left Bedouin tribes, settled tribes and the small urban population largely self-governing. (al-

Wardi 2008)

In this context, let us return to the strands of social control that were mentioned regarding the Iraqi state: Coercion, self-interest, and legitimacy. Except instead of being applied to an analysis of the Iraqi state, they will be applied to the communal groups of Iraq. For most Iraqis this authority was expressed through the customary law (‘urf) of the tribe. This may seem problematic as some of the population of Iraq was not in a “tribe” per se, but al-Wardi insists that Bedouin codes and values are ubiquitous in Iraqi society. (al-Wardi 2008, 24) In his view, many of the neighborhoods (mahalat) of the cities functioned much in the same way as tribes. (al-Wardi 2005, 310-11)

For the most part, the communal groups of Iraq had all three strands functioning at the level of local authority, whether it was tribe, neighborhood, or some other manifestation. Local authority, applied by the family or a sheikh, held legitimacy in the eyes of many Iraqis, and it was also more or less in their self- interest to obey. These local authorities also exercised violence against their people in the interest of local law preservation, so coercion was present. In any

25 This idea is taken from Juan R.I. Cole and Moojan Momen, "Mafia, Mob, and Shiism in Iraq: The Rebellion of Ottoman Karbala 1824-1843," Past & Present, no. 112 (August 1986): 112-143. In this article, the authors indicate on p. 143 that the Shi’i cities of Najaf and Karbala were largely independent from any central authority well into the 20th century. 38 organization that is preserved through law, there is the threat of violence that preserves that law. So how was this strand of coercion (violence) woven into the everyday?

It weaved its way into the everyday through manifestations of the tribal law.

(‘urf) However, this strand of violence is not always obvious to the eyes. In fact, it is often hidden from view while in plain sight. This violence is one that has kept Iraqi society flowing, and the threat of it causes people to act in certain ways that conform to societal norms and values. In its most obvious form, it is manifested as direct violence against an individual or group. In its less obvious form, it is found hidden within social interactions, architecture, and spatial ordering. I will call this type of violence law-preserving violence. A term originally coined by Walter Benjamin to describe an aspect of legal state violence, (gewalt) law-preserving violence derives its power mostly through the threat of direct violence26. While law-founding violence creates the authority and instates the laws of this authority, law-preserving violence preserves the structure of society itself. In Iraq, as in other societies, if a person violates a law, they know that there is a threat of violence enforcing the practice of that law.

In Iraqi society of the mid-20th century, the ideas of ‘ird (dignity, honor) and asl (origin, meaning purity of the bloodline) were some themes in Iraqi ‘urf

26 Direct violence, as defined by CAJ Coady, is is a positive interpersonal use of force, usually inflicting physical injury. For more on definitions of violence, see C.A.J. Coady, Morality and Political Violence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 39

(customary law) and its accompanying law-preserving violence.27 Therefore, ‘ird and asl also played a role in shaping social relationships and behavioral patterns.

‘ird in Iraqi customary law is not always individualized, but sometimes communal.

(Stewart 2006) For example, while an individual can commit an act that is considered shameful, the shame of that act does not rest solely on the perpetrator.

Rather, shame is attributed to the whole family or group to whom that individual belongs. (Abu-Lughod 1987) Due to the patriarchal ordering of this society and the value of asl, much of the weight of ‘ird is held by the women of the communal group.

Therefore, the questionable behavior of women (and sometimes men) may affect the moral standing of the communal group by bringing their asl into question. This is not to say that every action an Iraqi makes is based on the idea of ‘ird or asl, it is just to say that customary law and the ordering of Bedouin society is based on these ideas.

However, all is not lost if an individual in the communal group commits a shameful act, for there are ways of restoring ‘ird to the community. Sometimes these

27 Ideas of honor and shame are covered thoroughly in the work of Ali al-Wardi and Layla Abu Lughod. The tradition of honor killing is covered in al-Wardi’s work in both Ali al-Wardi, Understanding Iraq: Society, Culture, and Personality, trans. Fuad Baali (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008).pp. 65-6 And Ali al-Wardi, Lamahat Ijtima'iyah min Tarikh al-'Iraq al-Hadith, Vol. V, VI vols. (Bayrut: Dar al-Rashd, 2005). Al-Wardi makes portrays honor killing as frequent in Iraq and attributes this phenomenon to the settlement of the tribes from a nomadic to an agriculture lifestyle and the societal change that the settlement brought. For further treatment on the tradition of honor killing also see Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1987). P66 and footnote 16 on page 286. Abu Lughod asserts that in Egyptian Bedouin society that honor killing is very rare, but it does occur. She asserts that what is more likely to happen is that the family will move away or marry off the offending female to avoid killing their daughter. For more on customary law among the Bedouin, see Frank H. Stewart, "Customary Law Among the Bedouin of the Middle East and North Africa," in Nomadic societies in the Middle East and North Africa: entering the 21st century , ed. Dawn Chatty (Leiden: Brill, 2006). 40 ways involve the shedding of blood. Sometimes these ways involve the payment of a compensatory fine. The application of this process takes many forms. To name a few: Intiqam (revenge) for homicide is one form of restoration. Except where in some places this brings an endless circle of violence, in customary law, this usually brings the killing to an end. (Stewart 2006) Monetary or violent compensation for loss of limb is another form. Lastly, the qatl al-sharaf 28 (honor killing) of women

(and sometimes men) is a way of restoring honor to the family. Ali al-Wardi notes in his work (which was originally published in 1965) the widespread nature of honor killing throughout Iraq. (al-Wardi 2008, 65-66) In order to avoid these forms of law- preserving violence, there is a less violent course of action known as Sulha. Sulha is a process by which tribal disputes are settled while minimizing shame brought to either party. (Abu-Lughod 1987)

Elizabeth Warnock Fernea gives a particular example of the law-preserving violence of honor killing in her ethnography of the village of al-Nahrah in southern

Iraq. In the story, she recounts what to her seems to be an innocent outing in the countryside with her friend Aziza, Aziza’s male cousin, and Laila, a young girl from the village. Laila, while excited to get out into the countryside, seems tense and frightened the whole trip. Later on, Mohammad, a friend of the Ferneas, warns her of the trip’s implications for Laila

Laila is in great danger, he said. If anyone—he paused and repeated —anyone were to know

that she went riding with a strange unmarried man without men from her family present,

28 More commonly known as ghasl al-a’ar, (cleansing of shame) 41

she could be killed. Her father would have to do it to save the honor of the other women of

the family. Do you understand? (E. W. Fernea 1965, 261)

Aziza’s cousin was a man of ill repute, and because there was no male member of

Laila’s family present to insure that nothing happened to her, the ‘ird and asl of the women of Laila’s family was brought into question.

It is important to note here that there were processes of violence that are both semiautonomous and delegated functions of the state that preserved the function and the patriarchal structure of society at a local level. This violence is a law-preserving violence, and serves an important function in the relations both within and between Iraqi communal groups. Iraqi culture developed without central authority and in an extremely harsh environment. This law-preserving violence dictates the power relationships within the tribal structure and between tribes (‘asha’ir) and tribal confederations. (qiba’il)

When many of the Bedouin tribes settled into a more sedentary lifestyle, they developed permanent or semi-permanent social spaces that served to preserve these values. Clothing, architecture, and even the layout of homes and villages both supported the values of ‘ird and posed a hidden reminder of the consequences that come with their violation. An important corollary of ‘ird that went into the design of these social spaces is the idea of modesty. Where ‘ird’s opposite is shame, modesty’s is exposure. Lila Abu-Lughod does excellent work describing how ideas of modesty and exposure weave their way into the everyday life of Bedouins. She describes how covering one’s self by dressing modestly and not drinking, eating, or performing any 42 other bodily functions in front of strangers or those considered to be superior is considered a fulfillment of the value of modesty. Above all these things, the avoidance of others of a higher position in the hierarchy is the best measure. (Abu-

Lughod 1987, 115-17) In support of these ideas of modesty, the architecture of homes and the spatial ordering of villages have developed to conform to and preserve these values of social interaction. In rural Iraq, and to an extent within urban Iraq, homes were built with this goal. All windows were turned inward toward the courtyard. (E. W. Fernea 2002, 123) (this of course had another function of defense) There were separate social spaces for men and women. In rural Iraq, the spatial ordering of the village and the market was also laid out to adhere to these standards of modesty. (E. W. Fernea 1965) From the architecture of personal space to the spatial ordering of the village, there was a daily reminder of the ‘ird of modesty and the humiliation of exposure.

Domestic, Neighborhood, and Institutional Violence

In addition to social relations and spaces that developed with customary law, there were also institutional forms of violence that wove their way into the daily lives of Iraqi people. This was violence within the school, the neighborhood, and the home. In nearly all of the biographical accounts of the major historical figures of the late Monarchic period or of the Qasim Era (to include Saddam Hussein, who would not rise to prominence until later) there is evidence of school violence, domestic violence, or peer-to-peer violence: Qasim was struck by peers at school and 43 antagonized by other kids in his neighborhood. (Fawzi 1963) Nuri al-Said suffered abuse in the home and in the school and in turn lashed out at other children in the street. (al-Arabi 2005, 21-22) Muhammad Fadil al- Jamali talked about stoning children from other quarters of the city with his friends. (E. W. Fernea 2002, 11)

Abdul Salaam ‘Arif was subjected to the horror and aftermath of an uprising against the Monarchy. (Fawzi 1989) Saddam Hussein was abused by his stepfather and other boys in his neighborhood and in turn was said to lash out at animals in brutal ways. (Karsh and Rautsi 1991, 9-10) Ali al-Wardi speaks in general terms of neighborhood violence between children, stating that if a child does not join the other children of the neighborhood in their violent activities “he is insulted, beaten, or may even be sodomized.” (al-Wardi 2008, 93) Childhood abuse is widely known to have negative effects on the abused well into adulthood, and it has clearly been a factor in the lives of many of Iraq’s political leaders of the time and likely also among the wider population.

Within the educational institutions of Iraq, violence against students for purposes of behavior correction seemed fairly common, regardless of whether the school was parochial or secular. Mohammad Fadil Jamali, a former member of the

Hashemite government who was sentenced to death and later pardoned by the

Qasim regime, tells one particularly gripping account of school violence. In a brief memoir of his childhood, he recounts a story of harsh corporal punishment in his religious school experience, specifically:

44

The Sheikh, the one teacher, sat on a high bench with a bundle of sticks before him and a

falakah, a rope attached to the two ends of a stick for binding a guilty pupil after making him

lie down in order to strike his bare feet with as many strokes as the Sheikh deemed worthy.

A dungeon room with ankle shackles was ready for pupils guilty of a great misdemeanor (E.

W. Fernea 2002, 12)

After being caught in the offense of spitting on another student he says

(The sheikh) came to me with the stick in his hands and applied it to my bare feet and legs

quite mercilessly until my feet began bleeding. (E. W. Fernea 2002, 12)

This was not an isolated incident. In his biography of Nuri al-Said the “strong man” of the Hashemite government, Muhsen Muhammad Mutawalli al-Arabi tried to explain the later political actions of al-Said by blaming physical and emotional abuse in both the home and religious school for his later political behavior. He writes that

The education in the Kutab (religious school) affected the personality of Nuri. In addition to

the means of corporal punishment, this is attributed to the methodology of the Kutab, which

poisoned the personality with severe (psychological) repression. Nuri vented this repression

when he returned to play in the streets with his relatives and fought with them-as we

mentioned before. (al-Arabi 2005, 21-22)

While this example may be insufficient to explain the later behavior of al-Said in his political roles, it does give further evidence of violence within the educational system.29

29 It is noteworthy here that al-Arabi appears to be heavily influenced by the work of al-Wardi here. In his exploration of Nuri al-Said’s childhood, al-Arabi tries to reduce Nuri al-Said’s later behavior to a psychology acquired by childhood abuse. While we can reject or question the conclusions of the author, we can still observe the acts themselves for the purposes of this study. 45

This use of violence in the educational system of Iraq was not restricted to

Iraqi teachers or to religious institutions. In her account of her year in the educational system in Iraq in 1957, Maysoon Pachachi tells of her experience, saying

I felt I was in the wrong place, a foreigner again and, furthermore, I hated our Scottish

teacher. He hit the boys if they acted up, and had an unhealthy habit of putting us girls on his

lap and fondling our knees. (E. W. Fernea 2002, 272)

As mentioned above, it can be seen from many different biographical accounts that violence was a part of the childhood experience in Iraq. Unfortunately, there is no known statistical data to support this observation, only its common presence throughout the literature from and about the era. Al-Wardi also speaks in general terms of violence in schools. (al-Wardi 2008, 93) But this is revealing, and should not be disregarded. These acts of violence, though different in scope from violence in the street, may have also had a normalizing affect on violence. As it will be discussed later, one of the methods used in the schoolhouse also made its way into the torture chamber. The falakah, while not new as an instrument of punishment, (It is recorded as being used by the Mamluk dynasty in Iraq) would have been a familiar sight to political prisoners entering the torture chamber.

Representations of Violence

Besides law preserving violence and various types of institutional violence, there were also regular representations of violent acts. As a part of the yearly

Muharram ritual in Iraq, Shi’i communities across the country (thought to be at least

46

51% of the population in 1957) held reenactments of the Battle of Karbala (tamathil m’arkat karbala) that originally occurred in the year 680. Fernea tells the story of one of these tamathil that took place in Afak, a village just to the east of ad-

Diwaniyah in the summer of 1957:

Between rounds of the battle, when the center of the arena was almost empty,

small boys would run in to retrieve from the rising clouds of dust objects which,

I was told, were papier-mâché arms and legs carried by the horsemen and thrown

up into the air to give the mock battle an air of reality. As time passed, the performance

took on, for me at least, a surreal quality as the papier-mâché limbs flew

through the air and the horses galloped to and fro in the rising dust… (E. W. Fernea 2005, 135)

These reenactments retierate to the Shi’i population year after year the violent display of a battle that took place over 1200 years before. From the root mathala, tamthil (pl. tamathil) means a portrayal or a dramatic performance. It can also mean to sculpt. Tamthil is an act of creativity. Additionally, tamthil betrays some violent undertones-- the word also can mean exemplary punishment or mutilation. The word example in English can have similar meanings, depending on the context.

Nonetheless, this specific representation is an exposure to acts of dismemberment and death and can also have a normalizing effect on these acts and reinforce the honor accorded to martyrdom, a validating agent for the opposition parties.

47

Funeral Rites

The next portrayal is of a funeral rite. The purpose of including this rite is twofold. The first is to give another demonstration of the honor accorded to martyrdom. The second is to give a representation of the funeral rite, a ritual that takes place in the everyday life of Iraqis many times throughout the year. In the following chapter, it will be demonstrated that some of the posthumous violence performed against corpses during the Qasim Era is based on a reversal of this rite.

While there are local variations on the Islamic burial rite, they generally follow a certain pattern: the body is washed, shrouded, carried in a procession, prayed over, and then buried with his or her face turned toward Mecca. (Tritton 2011) While

Sunnis are buried locally, many Shi’is in Iraq and from other countries are taken and buried in the holy burial grounds in Najaf, Karbala, Kazimayn, or Sammara. While this next example is only a partial representation of a funeral rite, other actual funeral rites follow a similar pattern.

The funeral of al-Husayn was replayed in intense drama every year, and in this example, a straw representation of the the slain Imam played the central role in a tragic and emotional reenactment. Here is a brief section of her account of the burial ceremony (dufna) performed the next day in the village of Ad-Daghgharah, just north of Ad-Diwaniyah and about 80 miles south of Baghdad:

They, in turn, were the advance guard for the funeral bier, on which a headless body

lay draped in black velvet. “It’s not real,” my friend whispered. “It’s made of straw.”

48

But the straw form had a macabre realism about it, for (my friend said), the

butcher had supplied the freshly slaughtered neck of a cow for the occasion and

this protruded, still bloody, from the black velvet. (Ibid 136)

If this had been the actual body of someone slain as a martyr in combat, the body would not have been washed. However, the procession would still be roughly the same. The body would be elevated on a bier, and a procession would follow it around town until it reached the place of burial. While not directly violent, this portrayal of the funeral rite has a reiterative quality that reinforces the honor accorded to martyrdom among the Shi’i population. It also reinforces the roots of betrayal and coming redemption at the heart of the Shi’i faith. Nakash has indicated that this betrayal may be a reason that many of the lower classes were attracted to the Shi’i faith, (Nakash 1995, 44) and in turn the lower class status of many Iraqi

Shi’is may also be the reason that many of them were attracted to the Communist party.

This portrayal was specific to the Shi’is of Iraq. However, actual funeral rites in Iraq followed a similar pattern across the Islamic sects, and their reiteration in the ordinary lives of Iraqis left a kind of blueprint for the chosen form of violence against corpses during the Qasim Era. 30 It is important to note here that the equivalent of these portrayals can be found in other cultural contexts as well. One

30 For more on Islamic funeral rites, see A.S. Tritton, ḎJ̲anāza (or Ḏj̲ināza, Ar.)., ed. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. Van Donzel and W.P. Heinrichs, Brill Online, 2011, http://www.brillonline.nl.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/subscriber/uid=1851/entry?entry=islam_SIM-1985 (accessed April 27, 2011). 49 example is the reenactment of the torture and crucifixion of the Christ in addition to other religious rites. In fact some of the violence of the European Reformation mimicked these ritualized acts. Protestants and Catholics alike were killed and mutilated with humiliating methods that deliberately mimicked religious rituals.31

Conclusion

We have examined the ideas of law preserving violence in the local communal groups and have examined how these concepts that guide customary law weaved their way into everyday life. Secondly, we have viewed how institutional violence is found in the biographies and personal accounts of many of the major characters of the events of the Qasim Era. Thirdly, we have looked at an example of the portrayal of a violent battle among the Shi’i population of Iraq and how it can serve to reiterate ideas of violence, death and martyrdom in the regular life of many

Iraqis. Lastly, we have looked at a portrayal of an Iraqi funeral rite and how not only this specific portrayal reinforced the honor of martyrdom, but also how real funeral rites that occurred in the everyday life of Iraq set a model for the violence inflicted on corpses during the Qasim Era. It is in the next chapter that we will see how the

“macro” of top-down state violence weaved together with the “micro” of everyday

31 During the reformation, many people were killed and mutilated in ritualized ways that were often based on the passion play or some excerpt from the liturgy. For examples see Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Rites of Violence: Religious Riots in 16th Century France,” Past and Present 59 (May 1973): 51-91. For another example of brutal crowd violence during a time of political upheaval see Alain Corbin, The Village of Cannibals: Rage and Murder in France, 1870, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). 50 violence into the spectacular violence of the revolution and eventually the foundations of violence for the Saddam State.

51

Chapter III: The Perfect Storm/ A Shadow of Things to Come

Now that we have seen the macro violence of the state and the micro violence of the everyday, let us now return to the Royal Palace at around 8 o’clock on the morning of July 14th, 1958. After a short firefight and some limited negotiations, the royal family was eventually convinced to surrender and descended from the royal palace unarmed. After a brief moment of tension, what happened next was a stepping point into the next five years:

And he (al-Saba’) turned the submachine gun in their direction and fired on them, turning

from the left to the right, and they fell as a group, one on top of the other in a human mass of

flesh and blood. The first bullets hit the Holy Quran that Queen Nafisah was holding, and the

pages flapped in the air like wings and some of the machine guns were spattered with

blood...and then al-Saba' approached and stood over the bodies stretched out before him and

fired the machine gun anew toward the king and the prince, and his escort said to him,

"why?" He answered, "to make sure!" A fearful silence fell, unbroken but for light moans

rising from the corpses, and blood exploded everywhere, clothing Abd al-Sattar al-Saba' and

his escort (al-Layla al-Akhirah, 2002, 103)

This account is written by a dissident party, insuring that it is known that a Quran was desecrated in the killing. The sources differ as to if the executions were secretly ordered by ‘Arif or if they were a simple nervous mistake made by the officer on the ground, but it is fairly well known that the killings were not officially planned by the

52

Free Officers as a group. Initial reports offered by the conspirators said that the royal guard opened fire on a crowd from the palace, and when the army conspirators returned fire, they accidentally hit the royal family. (Time Magazine

1958) This has proven to be false.

While this act of violence and the removal of the Monarchy actually opened up more political freedoms for most Iraqis in the short term, I suggest this violent act was also a harbinger of change in Iraqi state violence. Under the Monarchy, violence compensated for a lack of legitimacy, but there was still a political dialog and a process of negotiation. The shots fired into the bodies of the royal family marked the beginning of a new transition: when politics became violence. The use of violence became the right to rule. It was at this time that the macro of state violence under the monarchy combined with the micro of the everyday to create the spectacular acts of violence during the revolution, which subsequently transformed into a new foundation of state violence. It was the Communists who would first bear the brunt of this new brand of state violence, soon to be followed by everybody else.

While the separation between the government and the military had been shaky but clear before, the takeover of the government by the military and the subsequent escalation in violence against internal political enemies melded an instrument of violence with the realm of the political. As discussed, the military had been trained primarily as an instrument of internal repression, and its only military

53 successes were against Iraq’s own people. The military had been trained to eliminate the internal foes of the state.

The revolution also released two groups (both of which had large numbers in the army) with opposing visions for Iraq—Arab nationalists and the Communists— to struggle over their fate. This chain of violence was first manifested in the violence of the crowd, and then it became institutionalized in the violence of organized state- sponsored death squads and the Ba’athi torture chamber. First, we will explore the outbursts of crowd violence in Baghdad, Mosul, and Kirkuk between 1958 and 1959.

Then, we will turn to the violence of the Ba’athi death squads and torture chambers to see how the Ba’ath regime created an Iraqi totalitarian state founded on the murder and the humiliation of its internal enemies.

The Moral Economy of Ritual Mutilation

As noted above, the actual regicide was committed by an army officer, Abdul

Sattar Saba’ al-‘Ibusi. What happened to the bodies of the royal family following the assassination is not as clear. According to one account, the crowds overtook the car carrying the bodies of the royal family and removed the body of the Crown Prince

‘Abd Ilah. The body was then taken and hanged from the gate of the ministry of defense. (al-Zubaydi 1979, 211) Another account is the same as the previous, except it adds the fact that the body was hacked to pieces and dragged around various parts of the capital. (Yasin 1999, 311) However, another account states that when the bodies were removed from the Palace grounds, ‘Abd al-Salaam ‘Arif ordered that 54 the body of the Crown Prince Abdullah be released to the crowds, after which the body was mutilated. (al-Laylah al-Akhirah, 2002,105)32 Fadil al-‘Azzawi states that

‘Abd al-Salaam ‘Arif called the people to attack the palace and Crown Prince ‘Abd

Ilah even after he knew that he was dead, after which the poor looted the palace, seized ‘Abd Ilah’s body and dragged it through the streets, tying what remained of his corpse to the electrical poles outside the Ministry of Defense. (al-'Azzawi 1997,

37) While the designation of responsibility for the release of the body to the crowds appears to be based on the political beliefs of the historians, the actions taken by the crowd after the release or theft of the body are not contradictory and it can be concluded that the body was dragged, mutilated, hacked to pieces, and placed on display outside the Ministry of Defense. Baqir Yasin adds that the body was later taken down, burned, and then thrown into the Tigris River. (Yasin 1999, 311)

Many would say that these acts of violence are senseless and animalistic.

However, Anton Blok argues quite persuasively that violence is rarely senseless, and is almost always a meaningful act. In his essay The Enigma of Senseless Violence, Blok posits that violence is only senseless to the perceiver because they do not have all the underlying facts. He also blames modern journalism for portraying violence in a way that appears to be senseless. As a tool, he suggests that two categories for evaluating social action are extremely helpful in understanding violence. The first

32 These differing accounts demonstrate the differing political motivations of the authors. The first was published by the official state press in Iraq in 1979. The second was published in Lebanon by an unknown author in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s ouster. This presents a problem, in motivations and the portrayal of actors, but the facts of the violent means do not differ much. al-Laylah al-Akhirah: Majzarat Qasr al-Rahab 55 category is the question of instrumentality, which in the case of violence seeks a specific end using violent means, such as the elimination of an enemy. The second category is a question of expression, which seeks to communicate a message through violence, often through ritual. (Blok 2000, 28) Based on this model, I argue that the killing and mutilation of ‘Abd Ilah is a form of ritualized violence that is both instrumental and expressive in nature.

This ritual performed here is an intentional humiliation through the reversal of customary Iraqi funeral rites. As mentioned previously, in normal rites, the body is ceremonially washed, shrouded, and carried on a funeral bier through the streets.

People come out of their homes and businesses to pay their respects to the departed. The body is then prayed over and placed in the ground with his or her head facing Mecca. The reversal of this ritual is what is seen here in the treatment of the body of ‘Abd Ilah.33 . Instead of being modestly covered with a shroud, he was stripped naked and cut to pieces. Instead of being carried in honor on his funeral bier, he was dragged through the streets. Instead of being buried, he was elevated for all to see and then burned and thrown in the river. The burning of the corpse is

33 The idea of the intentional reversal of Iraqi burial rites comes from the work of Dawn Perlmutter in Dawn Perlmutter, "Mujahideen Desecration: Beheadings, Mutilation & Muslim Iconoclasm," Anthropoetics- The Journal of Generative Anthropology, Fall/Winter 2006/2007, http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1202/muja07.htm (accessed April 27, 2011). Though the scholarship of this article seems a bit shallow, the idea of the reversal of burial rites holds merit and is given further treatment in this study. For a more detailed description of Islamic burial rites, see also A.S. Tritton, ḎJ̲anāza (or Ḏj̲ināza, Ar.)., ed. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. Van Donzel and W.P. Heinrichs, Brill Online, 2011, http://www.brillonline.nl.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/subscriber/uid=1851/entry?entry=islam_SIM-1985 (accessed April 27, 2011). 56 another affront to funeral rites, as it is expressly forbidden in Islamic ritual to cremate the body of the dead. (Perlmutter 2006/2007)

The method of the ritual has been determined, but what are the meanings found within it? There are two Arabic words that are used in describing the handling of the body of the crown prince in this situation. The first word, sahal, means to scrape off or to smooth, but is apparently connoted in Iraqi dialect as meaning to drag a corpse through the streets with the purpose of humiliating a conquered foe. (Wong 2007) The second is also an interesting word in this context: tamthil. (al-Layla al-Akhirah, 2002, 105) Except rather than before, where tamthil was a portrayal, in this case it clearly means mutilation. Or does it? As discussed before, tamthil is performative and therefore assumes an audience. So, who was the audience for this specific display of ritual violence?

All accounts say that the body of the Crown Prince was strung up in the same place that Colonel Salah al-Din al-Sabbagh was executed in the year 1945, which was at the gates of the Ministry of Defense. (al-Zubaydi 1979, 211) (al-'Azzawi 1997) Al-

Sabbagh was an Arab nationalist and the leader of the “Golden Square” officers who supported the pro-German Rashid Ali Coup in 1941. After the failure of the coup, he was eventually extradited back to Iraq and executed. He was considered a martyr of the pan-Arab nationalist movement. (al-Zubaydi 1979, 211) This suggests that the audience was possibly the enemies of the pan-Arab nationalists, or anyone who would serve a foreign power over the interests of Iraq.

57

What is the message of this ritual? First of all, the type of abuse applied to the body of the Crown Prince was higher in degree than the treatment given to the bodies of the pan-Arab nationalists of the Rashid Ali Coup and the leaders of the

Communist party. So while there was a message similar to that of the projection of power by the state, there is also an extra degree in quality of violence applied to the body. As mentioned before, some may want to explain this as the animalistic actions of a bloodthirsty crowd. This assertion denies what E.P. Thompson has coined as a

“moral economy of the crowd.” Speaking about the bread riots in eighteenth century

England, Thompson demonstrates that the crowd really did have a calculus of reason in its otherwise seemingly senseless acts of violence. (Thompson 1971) Is there a moral economy for this Iraqi crowd? I believe that there is. Were there anger, rage, and celebration? Yes, I believe there were. However there is an accompanying moral economy.

Most simply, the initial killing was an instrumental elimination of someone who was proven to come back and kill his enemies. The following mutilation and display of the corpse draws meanings from different sources. First, this is an expression of the “revolutionary zeal” which is demonstrated in acts of violence and was fed by the radicalization of the opposition. Second, this act is a ritualized version of the everyday law-preserving violence behind modesty and exposure. It is a form of honor killing. These meanings are expressed through the reversal and deliberate desecration of Iraqi funeral rites. Though embedded in an Iraqi context,

58 these acts of mutilation and desecration are not without international historical precedent, as the remains of rulers that have come to represent tyrannical regimes and dark epochs have been mutilated in times past.34

This is where the everyday turns into the spectacular. The mutilation, dismemberment, and display of the Crown Prince’s body were a radicalized display of customary law-preserving violence behind ‘ird, a value that is reiterated in the relationships of everyday life. There is a calculus. There is a message. There is an economy. The sahal and tamthil of the body of the Crown Prince is meant to send a message of god-like, mythic violence that brings justice and humiliates even after death. 35

There are similar accounts of violence to corpses in the Mosul and Kirkuk uprisings in March and July of 195936. In the days immediately following a failed coup attempt by Arab Nationalist military officers called the Shawwaf Rebellion, there was an outbreak in violence that in many ways seemed as spectacular as the violence in Baghdad that occurred previously. Like before, this violence also has meaning. This was clearly a time when the fledgling Iraqi Republic struggled to gain

34 I draw this conclusion from the work of Anton Blok in the following work: Anton Blok, "The Enigma of Senseless Violence," in Meanings of Violence: A Cross-Cultural Perspective, ed. Goran Aijmer and John Abbink (Oxford: Berg, 2000). 35 Michel Foucault asserts that public execution and mutilation are acts that intended to restore injured sovereignty. When the offender breaks the law, injured sovereignty must be restored through overwhelming, god-like violence. This particular situation sees the roles reversed, with the crowd ritually humiliating the victim to restore injured honor. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p.48 36 For the most up to date research on the incidents in Mosul and Kirkuk, see 'Abd al-Fatah 'Ali al-Butani, al-'Iraq: Darasah fi al-Tatawrat al-Siyasiyah al-Dakhiliyah, 14 Tamuz 1958- 8 Shabat 1963 (Damashq: Dar al-Zaman, 2008), especially appendices 2 and 3. 59 its Weberian monopoly of the use of force. (Weber 1964) In a speech given in front of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Baghdad on July 20, 1959, Qasim says in reference to the Communists’ actions in Kirkuk

There are those who say that there must be no liberty or freedom for the enemies of the

people. I tell them that the enemies of the people are known only to the lawful authorities.

They cannot be known to individuals scattered here and there. I personally will protect all

the people. I defend the people and the army stands ready to pounce on the enemies of the

people. (Press 1959, 1)

While outwardly trying to promote ethnic and sectarian tolerance by his choice of venue, this is a curious statement against the Communist action, seeing that Batatu argues quite persuasively that Qasim had encouraged if not outright ordered the action of the People’s Militia in Mosul in order to stifle the coup attempt. (Batatu

1978, 879-80) According to one source, Qasim ordered the communists “to annihilate all who show resistance or carry arms against the government.” (al-

Butani 2008, 216) However, there could have also been a misinterpretation in the gray area between the orders and the interpretation of the orders. The violence was quite brutal

The Communists, supported by the armed Kurdish peasants that descended from the

mountains (along with) soldiers loyal to Abd al-Karim Qasim, attacked the nationalists and

the Ba’athists and abused them in monstrous ways after the collapse of their movement.

They dragged their bodies with ropes in the streets and hanged them on meat hooks and

electrical poles (al-'Azzawi 1997, 59)

60

Here again, we see the ritualized reversal of traditional burial rites with the intent to humiliate. Except here, the circumstances are different from the sahal and tamthil of

‘Abd Ilah. This time the ritual was applied to enemies, not rulers, though much of the violence may have been performed against people of higher socioeconomic status.

This fact makes the motives more complex.

The Everyday and the Complexities of Sectarian Violence

Many would describe this violence as sectarian, but the situation was not that simple; it appears that there were complex layers of motive for violence. In the

Mosul uprising, the Communist party, made up mainly of Kurds but also joined by small groups of Christians and others, sought to enforce its own version of justice on the pan-Arab nationalists. One man could act as a Communist against Ba’athists while also as a Kurd against Sunni Arab interests, or as a neighbor against a neighbor or as a tribe member against a member of an enemy tribe. In the Kirkuk uprising of July 1959, Kurds were largely thought to act on Kurdish grievances against Turcoman landholders under the guise of a Communist uprising. (Batatu

1978) In this case, it appears that many long-standing personal and economic grievances were expressed in the killing, mutilation and display of corpses. (al-

Butani 2008, 217)

Veena Das’ study of violence during the Sikh riots in India bears many resemblances to the violence in Mosul, and this study could benefit from a comparison. In attempting to contextualize the riots that took place in the wake of 61

Indira Gandhi’s assassination at the hand of her Sikh bodyguards in 1984, Das found that what had occurred was not a simple primordial violence between two communal groups as commonly portrayed, but rather a calculated violence that had multiple layers of motive. In her study, she thought it curious that violence was assumed to be directed against all Sikhs, yet many Sikh neighborhoods and homes were left untouched. What she discovered is that most of the violence was performed by Hindus of the untouchable caste and was directed at the Sikh households that had accumulated some wealth from working in the Arab gulf countries, which they apparently flaunted. So, what we see is not really a primordial sectarian conflict at all. While rooted in history around the assassination of Indira

Ghandi, the riots took on multiple levels of intent through discourses of ethnicity, class, and caste. 37

Most interesting among her observations was how the local police began creating their own law to facilitate the killing of the Sikhs. In her account, a Hindu policeman used his position as a law enforcement officer to repress resistance from

Sikhs while they were burning the Sikh men alive for their “complicity” in the assassination of Indira Ghandi. In the confusion, state law was misappropriated to an entirely different scheme that seemed to fit into the “moral economy” of the

Hindu crowd. However, a “normal” state of law returned later, and police raided

Hindu homes to retrieve and return looted merchandise to the violated Sikhs.

37 For more see Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Especially Chapter Eight, “The Force of the Local.” 62

How does this compare to the violent outbursts in 1959 Mosul and Kirkuk?

As Batatu has noted, the conflict in Mosul was not a simple matter of Communists against pan-Arab nationalists or Kurds against Arabs, or even haves against have- nots. This violence was a multi-layered in motive. This direct violence was an expression in a specific historical moment of a structural violence that had been reiterated in the lives of the people for years and was triggered by unstable political conditions of the time. Urban notables and tribal sheikhs were held in place and enriched by the patronage of the state while the lower classes became more disenfranchised from the system. Like the untouchables of Das’ study, the lower classes of Mosul and Kirkuk were reminded of the disparity every day, and in the instability of the coup attempt they acted on it. In these limited days of fighting, peasants rose up against landholders, landholders fired on people indiscriminately,

Communists rose up against Ba’athists, and the whole region around Mosul descended into violence for three bloody days.

Additionally, just like the police officer in Das’ narrative, the Communists also appropriated the role of the state and modified it in order to execute their ideas of justice on their enemies. To carry out their mission of eradicating the coup conspirators, the Communist People’s Militia overtook the police station of Mosul and utilized this official place to hold the trials and perform the executions of their prisoners. Overall it appears to be just as nuanced as the Das narrative of the Sikh riots, but unfortunately there was no one like Veena Das on the ground to bring an

63 ethnographer’s eye to the situation. This violence must have also led to a further radicalization of Ba’ath Party members, who investigated these incidents in depth after their 1963 takeover, providing much of the documentation on which Batatu based his work.38

A New State Violence: The Rise of the Ba’ath Party

While public executions in Iraq—either by a crowd or by the state—did not end with these episodes, a transformation was occurring in state violence. When the

Ba’athists took the reins of power, the Ba’ath Party actually institutionalized this new radicalized brand of violence that emerged during the Qasim Era. As mentioned before, days of dialog were disappearing. As a result of the spectacular violence perpetrated by the Communists in Mosul and Kirkuk in 1959, public opinion began to turn against them. (Ismael 2008) Arab nationalists in the Army were hunted down by Qasim’s regime and arrested and tortured in reprisal for the Mosul coup attempt, which only served to validate and radicalize them. (Katibi 2006) Qasim had even turned against the Communists, and executed a short purge of the Iraqi

Communist Party from July to August, arresting and executing hundreds of members in addition to banning Communist influenced organizations. (al-Butani

2008) But this blip in history was nothing compared to what was coming to the

Communists three and a half years later.

38 If you look into the footnotes of Batatu’s account of the Mosul violence, in The Old Social Classes, you will find that much of his information is taken from Ba’ath Party interrogations in an investigation of the incident. 64

When the Ba’ath Party took power from Qasim in a coup on 8 February 1963, they took a two-pronged approach to create a projection of Ba’athi state power. The first prong was the mass killing of Communists both in the streets and behind closed doors. The second prong was exercised in the torture chambers. It was in the streets and in basements that the Ba’athists would take the lives of their political enemies.

It was in the torture chamber that they would take their dignity in a painful and humiliating fashion.

In much the same spirit as the eradication of the royal family, the Ba’ath

Party was not going to allow room for any revenge from its political enemies. This move was taken from lessons learned from previous coups d’état by other groups, but especially the Rashid Ali Coup. Qasim was immediately executed and his corpse was displayed on national television. Furthermore, in the Ba’athi calculus, if the

Communists-- especially after the power and violence they demonstrated in 1959-- were to survive, then they would come back and most certainly enact revenge.

However, lest we think of the Communists as merely victims, they continually demonstrated that they could be just as brutal as the Ba’athists, like when they mutilated the corpses of three Ba’athi armor officers and left them at the gates of the ministry of defense. (Said 1999, 196)

65

The Massacre of the Iraqi Communists

Since the Army could not be completely trusted due to Communist infiltration, the Ba’ath, much like the Communists before, had to raise up their own militia to carry out their genocidal plans. Widely believed to have been assisted by the American Central Intelligence Agency, the Ba’athi “National Guard” Militia went on a killing spree of massive proportions. The Ba’athists immediately removed any legal protection from the Communists:

In view of the desperate attempts of the agent-communists… the commanders of the military

units, the police, and the nationalist guard are authorized to annihilate anyone that disturbs

the peace. The loyal sons of the people are called to cooperate with the authorities by

informing against these criminals and exterminating them. 39

This is a precarious legal and ethical situation that led to the killing of many. Iraqi

Communists were either arrested or gunned down where they stood. Over 1,500 of them were killed in the initial fighting of 8-10 February 1963,40 but many more were killed later, whether in the streets, in the torture chamber, or simply

“disappeared.”

39 Quoted in Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 982. 40 Numbers of Communist dead differ depending on the source. Official Iraqi security records dramatically undercut the amount at 340 while Communist records were overstated at about 5,000. Batatu indicates that a well-placed foreign source placed the number killed at about 1,500. See Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). p.985 66

In a particularly moving story, Fadil al-Azzawi narrates the last moments of

Faysal al-Hajaj, a leader in the Communist student movement at the University:

That night (the executioners) came to him and called for him, He wanted to change his

clothes. They prevented him from even putting on his shoes, claiming that the matter would

not last long. They crammed him into a military truck with 27 of his comrades. It was

nighttime. At dawn, the truck stopped along with the jeeps that were accompanying it, and

the young shackled prisoners came down from (the truck) and they found themselves in a

deserted place. Suddenly the executioners showed their weapons and opened fire on them

with their Russian machine guns, hunting them down one after the other and throwing their

bodies into one big hole that they prepared beforehand and they heaped dirt on it. They

were mass-murdered and buried in the al-Haswah region that wasn’t far from al-Hillah (al-

'Azzawi 1997, 30)

There are other accounts of mass killings like this one, in one account told by Talib

Shabib, a ruling member of the Ba’ath Party, a group of Communists who had turned double agents for the Ba’ath Party were executed en masse at the order of the

Ba’athi Minister of Defense, Salih Mahdi ‘Amash:

And he went to Qasr al-Nihayah, the internment camp Abu Ghrayb and other internment

camps and requested the delivery of around twenty Communist detainees, among them

being eighteen of the loyal double agents and ordered their execution. (Said 1999, 177)

But Shabib continues the account, revealing a lack of central control over the actions of Ba’ath Party leaders and members: “And after the executions were implemented he went to the Revolutionary Command Council and requested a resolution authorizing their killing.” (Said 1999, 177) According to Shabib, most of the authorizations for executions performed by the Ba’ath Party in 1963 were 67 performed in this ex-post facto fashion. (Said 1999, 178) Batatu also asserts that summary executions of Communists were common. (Batatu 1978, 987) Of the executions that were officially announced, many were condemned to death for the violence in Mosul and Kirkuk in 1959. (Batatu 1978, 989) Additionally, if the

Ba’athists didn’t kill Communists in the prisons, the National Guard gunned down many of them in the streets. (Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett 2001, 86) (al-'Azzawi

1997, 64) Though not all Ba’athists were murdering people or agreed to their murder, this shows that enough of the leadership was radicalized to perform executions that were not even “legally” sanctioned by the regime. The political had been radicalized to the point that it was perceived as necessary to eliminate political adversaries rather than to negotiate.41

The Ba’athi Torture Chamber: Projecting Power Through Rituals of Pain and Humiliation

Now that we have seen the Ba’ath Party’s mass elimination of political enemies, let us now look into the techniques the Party used when they didn’t kill their victims, or didn’t kill them quickly. At the height of their brief reign in 1963, the Ba’ath had imprisoned over 10,000 communists, and most of them were surely subjected to torture. (Batatu 1978, 988) The torture chamber is the venue where the Ba’athists exploited the violence of the everyday in order to display their power

41 Said also notes that a possible motive for ‘Amash’s executions was to end secret negotiations between the Communists and the Ba’ath leadership, thus ending any political dialog. See 'Ali Karim Said, 'Iraq 8 Shubat 1963: Min Hiwar al-Mafahim Ila Hiwar al-Dam: Muraja'at fi dhakirat Talib Shabib (Bayrut: Dar al-Kunuz al-Adabiyiah, 1999). P. 177, footnote 1. 68 in the everyday lives of their political enemies. The integration of the everyday into the state violence of torture was not done overnight. It began in the torture chambers of the Monarchy. Here we will see how the institutional violence of the everyday was used in the torture chamber by the royal regime. Speaking of the violent methods of the Ba’ath party and where they learned how to torture, Fadil al-

‘Azzawi asserts the following:

This barbaric behavior that violates the sanctity of human life truly found its roots in the

barbarism that was practiced by the royal regime itself. In addition to the torture to which

the strugglers of the revolutionary movements were exposed, (especially the Communists)

which included pulling fingernails and flogging (the feet). (al-'Azzawi 1997, 38)

This example serves to demonstrate that the opposition-- including the Communists and the Ba’ath Party-- was radicalized by the Monarchy’s violence. Additionally, it demonstrates that one of the methods used in the torture chamber was the same method used to discipline children in schools when they were disobedient. The political leaders did not learn their techniques in a vacuum. They had to learn it somewhere and twist it into a tool of state power. However, the Ba’ath Party did not end with these atrocious acts, they escalated them to the next level.

The Ba’ath Party escalated the level of violence in the torture chamber by systematically humiliating their victims. Much like the sahal and tamthil of Abd Ilah and the others, the Ba’athists took the law-preserving violence of the everyday and turned it into violent rituals of humiliation. I will take it a step further and say that the Ba’athi torturers needed to create rituals in order to be able to perform this kind

69 of violence. Herbert Kelman asserts the torturer is able to perform these acts not because he has a violent psyche or nature, but because he undergoes a distinct socio-political process. In his essay The Social Context of Torture, he asserts that there are three processes that allow a torturer to perform such acts: authorization, routinization, and dehumanization.42 The first not only deals with obedience to authority, but a belief that the torturer is serving a transcendent cause. As Fadil al-

‘Azzawi suggests about the Ba’athists, “The executioners do not become executioners unless they believe that their whips are driving the mules that pull the cart of history.” (al-'Azzawi 1997) The second, routinization, requires that the torturer’s practices become rituals. There is a professionalization of method that is developed that gives more distance to the torturer. The last, dehumanization, tries to create more distance by requiring that the torturer place the victim outside their

“moral community.” Radical political ideologies perform this task very well. Instead of being referred to by name, the victims are referred to as thugs, saboteurs,

Communists, terrorists, etc., giving further distance between the torturer and the victim. (Kelman 1995, 28-32) As noted above, the Iraqi Communists were placed outside of the community by a decree issued by the Government leadership, stripping them of identity within the moral community of Iraq.

42 I realize that the treatment of this subject is entirely too brief. For more on the political use of torture see Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) and also The Politics of Pain: Torturers and Their Masters, ed. Ronald D. Crelinsten and Alex P. Schmid, 19-34 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995). 70

So how is the Ba’athi torture chamber different in its quality of violence? In the world in general, physical acts of shaming and embarrassment in the torture chamber are fairly pervasive. One only needs to read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag

Archipelago series or Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain to get a picture of the ubiquity of these acts. However, there is a specific quality in the Ba’athi torture chamber that rises above other accounts with respect to their humiliation and methods. There appears to be a raised quality of creativity in brutality. I suggest that through examining specific humiliating cultural violations in conjunction with these methods of extreme pain, we can see how the Ba’ath Party created a language of violent and humiliating power when the language of words came to an end.

Elaine Scarry has written one of the better-known works on the political use of physical pain. In her book The Body in Pain, she describes how the state torturer creates the fiction of power:

The physical pain (of torture) is so incontestably real that it seems to confer its quality of

“incontestable reality” on that power that has brought it to being. It is, of course, precisely

because the reality of that power is so highly contestable, the regime so unstable, that

torture is being used. (Scarry 1985, 27)

Scarry goes on to discuss how the torturer uses ordinary everyday items to torture the victim and destroy their perception of reality. Their reality is then reconstructed around the power of the torturer and subsequently the state. A refrigerator becomes a bludgeon. A bed becomes a place of pain rather than a place of rest. A “safe house” becomes the location of ultimate danger. (Scarry 1985)

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While pain was definitely a part of both the Monarchist and the Ba’athi torture scheme, I suggest that there is an added element in the Ba’athi torture scheme that creates a reality of power: humiliation. Utter humiliation, whether experienced by a survivor of torture or by the witness of a dishonorable death, becomes so incontestably real to the Iraqi political prisoner that the power of the

Iraqi state becomes incontestable. There is something to these acts of torture that makes them more psychologically painful then the sheer horror of the acts themselves. The following excerpt recounts one of many stories of torture under the

Ba’athi torturers:

Naked, (the torturer) hit him on his penis time after time with the stick in his hand after he

found out that he had a fiancé waiting for him on the outside. He was threatening him,

laughing, “You will not be able to enjoy making love to your wife! You will have to decide:

defend your principles or preserve you beautiful penis for your waiting girlfriend!”…in the

corner of the cell, the young victim was crying, “What will I tell my girlfriend?

The torturer let out a laugh of consolation: “After two or three days your penis will return to

its health. Don’t be paranoid.” (al-'Azzawi 1997, 26)

The goal of this torture was obviously complete humiliation by taking the most sensitive parts of the man, his genitals, and beating them senselessly. The torturer then discounts the man’s physical and psychological pain by blaming any pain felt by the victim on the victim’s own paranoia. This is obviously a violation of common human decency that stands on its own, but I believe to understand the degree of suffering involved, we must place it into its cultural context. This not only humiliates the victim in an incredibly shaming act, but it also challenges his perceptions and 72 self-control, another shaming act in itself. 43 Another brutal and humiliating method of torture used by the Ba’athists followed a similar fashion: forcing the prisoner to sit on a spike, essentially being internally wounded or killed in an excruciatingly painful, sexually violating, and humiliating way. (Karsh and Rautsi 1991, 4) (Batatu

1978, 990)

Women and children were not spared this treatment either, as Tareq Ismael quotes from a report:

People’s legs were chopped off, piece-by-piece, …children’s eyes were bound with ropes

until their eyelashes were pushed into their eyeballs, women were beaten and sexually

violated, and children were tortured in front of their parents. The torturers used tin snips to

cut the hands, legs, and face muscles slowly…Scores of victims were crowded into small

rooms; [they were] forced to stand on one leg for a number of hours, and water from sewers

was thrown on the wounds of the tortured. Others were left without water and food for days

and [their] wounds [predictably] became infected…other victims, both men and women,

were hung upside down on ceiling fans for days,…and others were burned with hot metal

objects, their bones broken with iron bars or their eyes blinded by cigarette butts or fingers.

Nails were pulled off and electric cattle prods [were] used to inflict pain. (Ismael 2008, 108)

It seems that many of these acts are ritualized. They involve processes that require machines, creativity, and the escalation of pain. It is tempting to view this violence as completely random, animalistic, and meaningless, but this is not correct. This violence is calculated to project the power of the state.

43 According to Lila Abu Lughod, weeping and lack of self-control by a man are signs of weakness, and bring dishonor on him. See Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1987). p. 90 and also Ali al-Wardi, Understanding Iraq: Society, Culture, and Personality, trans. Fuad Baali (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008). p. 21 73

How is this projection of power given deeper meaning in the Iraqi context?

Dismemberment, sexual violation and blinding are not only horrifying on their own, but they are all offenses that are considered either shaming or worthy of recompense in Iraqi customary law. If the honor of the woman is taken through sexual violation, then action must be taken because the violation inures the value of asl. (purity of lineage) When a limb is removed honor must be restored through a limb taken or by money paid. When an eye is blinded, recompense must be made.

The state exploited the law preserving violence of the everyday to steal the people’s honor. However, when the state inflicts shame, how can dignity be regained? It cannot. It is taken for good and the state projects its power over its enemies through humiliating pain.

Conclusion

At the opening of the revolution and the execution of the royal family, the process began that would transform the politics in Iraq from a politics of talk to a politics of violence. Radicalized by the violence of the Monarchy, opposition groups with different visions for the future of Iraq unleashed a wave of violence on one another that would not have a reprieve until many of the Communists were wiped out in 1963. Much of this violence was both instrumental and expressive. It was instrumental in the fact that it eliminated enemies and it was expressive in the fact that it took the violence of the everyday and twisted it into an extreme ritual of 74 humiliation. When the Ba’ath Party institutionalized this radicalized brand of violence, it was used to project power through rituals of both pain and humiliation.

It is here during the Qasim Era when we see the macro violence of the state and the micro violence of the everyday combine into a foundation of state violence where the state took the everyday and exploited it against its own people. From this place in Iraqi history, it is not difficult to see how this new breed of Iraqi state violence continued and grew under Saddam. It is not a far leap from what we see in the Ba’athi torture chambers of 1963 to the humiliating violence perpetrated against the Kuwaiti people in 1991.

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Conclusion

In this era of extremes, it is tempting to focus on the violence of the spectacular. Yet this spectacular is rooted in space and time, in the context of Iraqi history and culture. It is not a primordial or animalistic violence, but one that is calculated and has meaning that is learned and expressed in a variety of ways. It is performed through meaningful yet radicalized rituals that are taken from the ordinary everyday lives of the Iraqi people. This violence did not necessarily spring from an Iraqi “double character” as al-Wardi asserts, nor from an exceptionally violent Iraqi psyche, but rather from the perfect storm of a combination of factors.

In chapter one, we saw the macro of the Monarchy and how violence, learned from the British, compensated for true legitimacy in the Monarchy, and how this top-down state violence validated and radicalized the opposition groups. In the second chapter, we saw the micro of the everyday, and how the violence in the everyday was manifested in the law-preserving violence of the tribe, in institutional violence, through portrayals of violence, and through funeral rites. Finally, we saw how the macro of the radicalized violence of the opposition and the micro violence of the everyday wove together to create the spectacular violence of the Qasim Era that later became institutionalized by the Ba’ath Party, laying the foundation for the state violence to come under Saddam. This new brand of state violence mercilessly

76 eliminated its foes and projected its power through humiliation in the torture chamber.

This terror would temporarily end in November of 1963. Upon removing the

Ba’ath leadership in yet another coup d’état, Muhammad ‘Abd al-Salaam ‘Arif addressed the nation:

The attacks on the people's freedoms carried out by the . . . bloodthirsty members of the

National Guard, their violation of things sacred, their disregard of the law, the injuries they

have done to the State and the people, and finally their armed rebellion on November 13,

1963, has led to an intolerable situation which is fraught with grave dangers to the future of

this people which is an integral part of the Arab nation. We have endured all we could. . . .

But as our patience increased, the non-National Guard's acts of terrorism also increased. The

Army has answered the call of the people to rid them of this terror. 44

However, the Ba’ath would return with this same brand of violence, yet in a more institutionalized form. The creation of a new Ba’athi political security organization in 1964 under the supervision of Saddam Hussein would grow into one of the most feared institutions in the country after the Ba’ath Party returned to power in 1968.

(al-Khalil 1989, 5)

Within this framework, it is not so difficult to see the transition to the state violence we see under Saddam. The physically and psychologically devastating violence of the Saddam State found a ready foundation in the violence of the Qasim

Era. In a strange way, the radicalized form of state violence found under Saddam does not veer far from the violence that Saddam experienced in his childhood. His

44 Quoted in Samir al-Khalil, Republic of Fear (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989), p.30 77 stepfather and his peers humiliated him, and he humiliated many of the people of

Iraq and Kuwait through his brand of violent and shaming repression. Sadly enough, it is in the person of Saddam Hussein that we see that the trauma of abuse weaves between the personal and the state, the micro and the macro, the everyday and the spectacular.

78

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