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the real power in the government as well as in the Baath Party (of which he is nominally Deputy Secretary General). Saddam proceeded to make the forging of closer ties with the USSR the principal aim of the regime's foreign policy—a policy which led to the conclusion in April 1972 of a 15-year Iraqi-Soviet friendship treaty, and which has also resulted in an increased flow of Soviet arms aid to Iraq, as well as growing Soviet involvement in the development of Iraq's important oil industry.

These developments in Iraqi-Soviet interstate relations eventually had important repercussions on the domestic status of the Iraqi Communists. With the conclusion of the friendship treaty, Baghdad grew in importance as a focus of Soviet-sponsored international front activities, and during 1972-73 there was a constant stream of visits to the Iraqi capital by Soviet-bloc and fellow-traveling European front groups. One of many examples of these activities was a seminar on the "uses of Arab oil against imperialism," staged in Baghdad in November 1972 jointly by the World Peace Council, the Afro-Asian People's Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) and the Iraqi National Council for Peace and Solidarity. This last body embraced Baathists, Communists, left-wing elements of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), and some mixed "progressive nationalists," including remnants of the old Iraqi Nasserite groups. It proved to be the forerunner of the later-created National Progressive Front, which brought the Iraqi Communists into junior partnership with the Baath.

Only a few months after the first anniversary of the Iraqi-Soviet friendship treaty, the careful preparatory work of Saddam-actively abetted by such. veteran Soviet Third World diplomatists as Boris Ponomarev bore fruit in the signing, in July 1973, of an agreement setting up the nucleus of the projected National Progressive Front. As conceived by Saddam, the Front was to link the Baath with the Communists and the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), representing the vast majority of Iraq's estimated three million Kurds, in a tripartite coalition aimed at permanently consolidating the power of the Baathist regime. The Baath and the Communists both signed the July 1973 agreement (the latter thereby gaining full legal status); however, in spite of urging by Moscow and some KDP leftists, the main leadership of the KDP, dominated by the aging General Mullah Mustapha Barzani, rejected the accord.

The KDP's refusal to join the National Progressive

Front was prompted by the total failure of negotiations, begun after the conclusion in March 1970 of a four-year truce agreement aimed at ending nine years of armed Kurdish rebellion against Baghdad, to produce any progress toward the Kurds' goal of a politically autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan. More important, however, were the political consequences of the refusal. On the one hand, it dealt a blow to the regime's hopes of consolidating its power by drawing the Kurds into a political coalition with the Baath and the Communists. On the other, it started a chain of events that involved the Communists in a conflict of their own with the main faction of the KDP and led to a damaging setback for Soviet efforts to play a mediatory role in furtherance of Moscow's political objectives in Iraq.

Amidst steadily worsening relations between the Kurds and the Iraqi Communists, many of whose leaders are themselves Kurds, fighting broke out in northern Iraq in November 1973 between Communist militia and Barzani's partisans, with the latter quickly gaining the upper hand. The Communists promptly accused Barzani's supporters and other "reactionary" leaders of the KDP, such as KDP Secretary General Habib Karim, of "slaughtering" Kurdish Communists, and the KDP in turn accused Saddam Hussein's Baathist government of arming the Communists to attack the Kurds. These developments culminated a year of unsettling events in Iraq, which had included frontier clashes with Iran, border troubles with Kuwait, and an abortive coup attempt in July by Baathist Chief of Security Nazem Kassar, in which Iraqi Defense Minister Hamed Chebab had been killed.

With a view to calming the increasingly unstable Iraqi political situation, Moscow dispatched Ponomarev at the head of a strong Soviet delegation which also included Rostislav Ulianovsky, deputy chief of the CPSU Central Committee's International Department-to Baghdad at the end of November 1973. The delegation met with both Baathist and KDP officials and apparently made a major effort to mediate the Kurdish problem. Ponomarev and Iraqi Foreign Minister Abd al-Baaki signed a "plan for cooperation and struggle in the Arab region" which the Soviet media hailed as having "great significance for all the liberation movements of the world," " but the delegation's apparent attempt to promote a rapprochement with the Kurds produced nothing more than a joint Communist

40

40 Quoted in Iraqi News Agency report, Nov. 30, 1973.

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KDP statement to the effect that it was a good thing that the armed clashes between Kurds and Communists in the north had ended." It appears that Ponomarev and Ulianovsky, before returning to Moscow, paid a secret visit to Barzani's headquarters in northern Iraq to deliver a message from Brezhnev criticizing the Kurdish leader's attitude toward the Iraqi Communists and the regime-again to no avail. Barzani's political adviser, Dr. Mahmoud Osman, told this writer in Kurdistan in March 1974, following the Kurds' resumption of all-out war against Baghdad, that the last visits by Soviet emissaries had been in December 1973 and that "none of these visits had led anywhere."

Although spokesmen for the left wing of the KDPnotably Dara Tewfik, editor of the Kurdish-language Baghdad newspaper Al-Takhi-continued to argue that the KDP ought to work out a modus vivendi with the Communists and that the heavy Kurdish membership of the Communist Party should support this idea, the renewal of full-scale hostilities between Kurdish and government forces removed all hopes for such maneuvers. By the end of 1974, the war had reached tragic proportions, imposing a heavy

41 Radio Peace and Progress broadcast from Moscow (in Arabic), Dec. 2, 1973.

drain on Iraqi manpower and oil revenues" and threatening an extension of border hostilities with Iran, which continued to supply the Kurds with arms, vehicles, food, medical supplies, and probably money. An all-out Iraqi offensive in September, in which the government forces used the latest Soviet equipment including mountain tanks and large troopcarrying helicopters, failed to cut the Kurds' lifelines to the Iranian border. The arrival of winter snows brought a stalemate in the fighting with Barzani's Pesh Merga forces controlling the frontier areas all the way from Khanaqin, on the Iranian border, to Zakho, near the Turkish and Syrian frontiers.

In the spring of 1975, however, an international maneuver drastically changed the situation. After some secret diplomatic preparations, Saddam Hussein and the Shah of Iran were brought together at the Algiers oil congress by President Houari Boumedienne of Algeria. There, on March 6, they concluded an agreement-formally ratified by the signing of a protocol by the two governments' foreign ministers in Teheran on March 17-whereby Iran agreed to stop all aid to the Kurds in return for Iraqi acceptance of the Iranian interpretation that the Shatt al-Arab river boundary between the two countries ran down the middle of the river bed. Deprived of their Iranian assistance, the Kurds were obliged to end their resistance. Barzani and some of his aides took refuge in Iran just before Iranian forces sealed the border against their former protégés on April 1. A few thousand Pesh Merga fighters and civilians accepted Iraqi offers of an amnesty and surrendered to the Iraqi forces. Many more Kurds chose the path of exile and made their way into Iran, suffering thousands of casualties from freezing, wounds, and disease on the way.

The collapse of the Kurdish revolt and the uneasy Iraqi détente with Iran brought about by the Algiers agreement of March seem to have caught both the Soviet Union and the Iraqi Communists by surprise: certainly, there was no early evidence that they had any part in it whatever. In any case, the total collapse of Soviet hopes of using the Kurds as a lever of influence in the politics of Iraq and the

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42 Iraqi government sources privately indicated to the author that they estimated the cost of the Kurdish war to the government in 1974 at about 1.5 billion US dollars-equivalent to nearly one-third of Iraq's total oil revenues for that year. Kurdish sources estimated government casualties at 8,000 killed and a much larger number wounded, placing their own losses at only one-fourth those of the government forces.

Persian Gulf oil region has made the Iraqi Communist | governmental relations that might affect the present

Party doubly important in Soviet political strategy

a fact which lends key weight, in Soviet calculations, to the role of Aziz Muhammad, the 50-year-old Kurdish-born Secretary General of the party. Muhammad was first elected Secretary General in 1964, during the period of Communist persecution in Iraq following the Baathist coup of 1963, when the party was reorganized around a nucleus of exiles in Eastern Europe. Following the first Baathist overtures for a reconciliation with the Communists, he returned from exile in early 1969 and was reelected Secretary General at the party's Second Congress, held in Iraq in September 1970. Muhammad, who travels and writes in the Communist world under the party name of Nazim Ali, led the Iraqi Communist delegations to the World Conference of Communist Parties in Moscow in 1969 and the 24th CPSU Congress in 1971, and he had his first meeting with Brezhnev in November 1973 following an extensive tour of Eastern Europe.

It has fallen to Muhammad to assert the firmly pro-Soviet stand of his party, as he did, for example, in a communiqué issued jointly with Bulgarian Communist leaders in Sofia in August 1974. With regard to the ongoing Sino-Soviet conflict, the communiqué declared:

The obstinate actions of the present Chinese leaders against the unity of action of the revolutionary forces, their anti-Sovietism, [and] their alliance with the forces of imperialism strike a serious blow at the work of peace and socialism. . . . The two parties expressed their will to struggle against all attempts to revise the proven principles of Marxismof MarxismLeninism."

Muhammad is personally identified with the national front policy in Iraq-a policy also actively pushed by Moscow, whose preference for Baathistled "national progressive fronts" in both Syria and Iraq seems to reflect a realistic recognition of the scant possibility of the local Communists' achieving political power for themselves alone. Thus, the failure to draw the KDP into the Iraqi National Progressive Front and the ensuing new war with the Kurds have dealt severe setbacks both to Muhammad's personal leadership and to Soviet policy in Iraq. Nevertheless, there have been no indications thus far of changes in Soviet policy and Soviet-Iraqi

43 Agence France Presse report from Sofia, Aug. 7, 1974.

favored position of the Iraqi Communists as junior partners of the Baath in the ruling coalition.

Even so, the partnership is hardly one that rests on a firm and lasting foundation. Kurdish observers contend that the Communists, now enjoying fully legal status for the first time in four decades, will not long be content with their minority status in the National Progressive Front, which has earned them only three out of 16 cabinet seats. These observers recall that Muhammad, even when he signed the July 1973 agreement establishing the Front, declared that "our ambitions, we the Communists, do not stop at the limits of this militant document, nor at the limit of coalition relations between our two parties."

11 44

For its part, too, the Baath remains extremely wary of the Communists' intentions. Indeed, this wariness was expressed at the very start of the two parties' uneasy honeymoon, when the Baathist newspaper Al Thawra-in a warning reminiscent of Egyptian fears of a leftist "vanguard party" within the ASU-stressed that "the rules of action within the Front, especially the role of each party, must be firmly respected in all fields and under all conditions." Noting that there had in the past been "secessionist" elements in the Communist party that opposed the Baath, the journal went on to say:

We hope that the Communist comrades will exert special, concentrated efforts to ensure that such elements do not bring their old outlooks and actions with them into the party, thereby forming an element of disturbance within the Front or helping to blow up the Front under some pretext. . . . The Communist comrades must avoid acting in a manner which would show them as having come to fill an existing vacuum, or to remove others from positions the Communists believe belong to them. In our opinion, the Communists must take extreme care to act as allies and friends who love their Baathist and other comrades."

One of the immediate consequences of the defeat of the Kurdish revolt has been a renewal of the old strains between the rival Baathist clans in power in Baghdad and Damascus, with Iraq renewing its charges originally dating back to 1962, when Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, with Soviet financial aid, all

44 For Muhammad's statement, see The Baghdad Observer, July 13, 1973.

45 Al Thawra (Baghdad), quoted by Iraqi News Agency, Aug. 2, 1973.

began work on power and irrigation dams on the Euphrates River-that Syria was withholding needed water from Iraq. The water shortage in Iraq following the completion of new stages of Syria's Tabqa Dam was genuine. So was the Soviet Union's embarrassment, because Moscow had sought for years, without success, to bring about Syrian-Iraqi-Turkish accords on sharing the water of the Euphrates. It appeared to many observers that Baghdad, freed of the terrible burden of the Kurdish war, might now turn its full fury against President Assad of Syria and the Syrian Baath.

This possibility has not been ignored in Syria. During the congress of the Syrian Baath in Damascus in early April, at least 200 Syrians including Marawan. Hamoui, head of the Syrian Arab News Agency, were arrested on suspicion of plotting in favor of Iraq. One of the volunteer peacemakers, as noted earlier, was Syrian Communist leader Khaled Bagdash, who went to Baghdad in mid-April, with Moscow's apparent blessing, to try to mediate the conflicts between the rival Baathist regimes.

It remains to be seen whether the Kurdish collapse and Iraq's renewed political conflict with Syria will weld the loose-seamed Baathist-Communist coalition in Baghdad any more tightly together. Growing Iraqi interest in Western offers of trade and technology, already evidenced by a sharp rise in trade with Western countries, is clearly a matter of some concern to Moscow, but whatever effects, if any, this may have on Soviet-Iraqi governmental relations and the internal political situation in Iraq still lie in the future.

The Case of Lebanon

In many ways, the experience of the Lebanese Communist Party-notwithstanding the fact that it operates with freedom in the only Arab parliamentary democracy left in the Middle East-mirrors many of the problems that the Communists have faced in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. However, the political fortunes of the party have been less affected than those of the Egyptian, Syrian, and Iraqi Communists by trends in Soviet international policy and in SovietLebanese governmental relations than they have by political currents in the Arab world generally and by purely internal political developments.

Founded in 1924 under the French post-World War I mandate, the party first went under the name of the Lebanese People's Party but was reconstituted

in 1930 as the Lebanese Communist Party, drawing its membership from both Lebanon and Syria. Both before and after Lebanon's acquisition of independence in 1943, the party was outlawed under most Lebanese regimes until August 1970. At that time, the intellectual guru of Lebanese leftists, Kamal Jumblatt-who, in a typically Lebanese paradox, is currently chief of the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) and at the same time one of the country's largest landowners-was Minister of Interior. He granted government recognition to the Lebanese Communist Party, making it the only legal Communist party organization, at that time, in any Arab country.

The party's principal leaders, most of them oldtimers, are Nicola Shawi, the Secretary General; Georges Hawi, generally regarded as the No. 2 party leader; and three other key figures-Youssef alHelou, Muhammed al-Aris, and Artine Madoyan. AlHelou edits the party weekly, Al-Akhbar; al-Aris is the most influential Communist in Lebanon's trade union federation, a restive element in a society built to some extent on laissez-faire capitalism and a liveand-let-live balance among the country's multifarious Muslim and Christian sects; and Madoyan was once leader of the small Armenian Communist faction in Lebanon before its merger into the Communist Party.

For the most part, at least until the last few years, the Lebanese Communists have had no major quarrels with Soviet policies. Shawi and Hawi attended the 24th CPSU Congress in Moscow in March-April 1971, praised the Soviet-Egyptian friendship treaty of May of that year, and took a clearly pro-Soviet stand in Moscow's ongoing ideological conflict with Peking. The Lebanese party, like the Syrian and Egyptian Communists, also shared Moscow's coolness toward the projected tripartite Arab federation of Egypt, Syria, and Libya in 1971, and later, during and after the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war, most Lebanese Communists were critical of Egyptian President Sadat's moves away from Moscow toward rapprochement with Washington and of the Egyptian idea-often expressed by Muhammed Hassanein Heikal, former editor of Al-Ahram, and other Egyptian spokesmen-of "neutralizing" the United States.

Since about 1971, however, the chief-and perhaps only-impact of Soviet Mideast policy on Lebanese communism has been to promote a splintering of the party ranks into "left isolationist" and "right deviationist" factions, with the former accusing the latter of "placing Arab reaction within the ranks of

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the progressive forces," and the "rightists" charging the "leftists" with "adventurism."" One of the first significant anti-Moscow groups to appear on the scene in 1971 was the "League of Lebanese Socialists," which actually was mainly the political wing of the Palestinian guerrilla group calling itself the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP) and headed by Nayef Hawatme, one of the most politically articulate and active of the Palestinian leaders. The appearance of this group was followed soon afterward by the emergence of another splinter, the Organization of Communist Action in Lebanon (OCAL), a Maoist group hostile to Moscow. Later still came the Arab Communist Organization, a more radical Maoist-terrorist group which was responsible for a number of attacks on American installations and property in Lebanon and Syria during 1973-74.

These "left deviationist" tendencies in Lebanese Communist ranks spurred the orthodox party leadership to try to rally local and international support. At the end of 1972, a seminar on "the relationship between the USSR and the Arab Liberation Movement" was hosted by the Lebanese party in Beirut and was attended by a sizable Soviet delegation, by Baathists from Lebanon and Iraq, by representatives of the Iraqi and Syrian Communist Parties, by assorted Nasserites and socialists, and by delegates from the Eritrean Liberation Front. Despite this effort, another pro-Chinese group calling itself the Union of Marxist-Leninist Cells in Lebanon and led by a party old-timer, Jamil Shatila, broke away from the party for a brief period in early 1973. However, its members soon returned to the orthodox party fold after Shatila, according to a Moscow Radio broadcast on April 9, publicly announced the dissolution of the union and charged the Chinese with having tried to sow dissension in Communist ranks not only in Lebanon but also in the Sudan."" Starting in the period 1970-72, as the prospect of Sino-American rapprochement loomed and as the United States restored diplomatic relations first with the Sudan and then with Egypt, the Soviet Union sought to bolster its own Middle East position vis-à-vis the Chinese by working toward improved relations with such radical Arab states as Algeria and South Yemen. The orthodox Lebanese Communists appeared to approve of these efforts, probably

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46 Al Nida (Beirut), June 20, 1971.

47 Moscow Radio broadcast of April 9, 1973, in USSR and Third World, Vol. 3, No. 4, p. 254.

Nicola Shawi, Secretary General of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Lebanon.

-Camera Press via Pictorial Parade.

because they shared, to some extent, Soviet fears of growing Chinese influence in the Palestinian movement and with radical-Marxist Arab regimes such as that in South Yemen.

From time to time, Moscow found it necessary to address sharp rebukes to pro-Egyptian elements among the Lebanese Communists-such as those around the magazine Sawt al-Urubah (The Voice of Arabism)-for accusing the USSR and the United States of wanting to freeze the "no war, no peace" situation in the Middle East. At the same time, the USSR showed its partiality toward the orthodox party leadership: for example, in July 1973, following the inauguration of the Euphrates Dam in neighboring Syria, a Soviet delegation visited Beirut and awarded the People's Friendship Order to Shawi.

Generally speaking, the orthodox Lebanese Communists have, with some reluctance, accepted Moscow's policy in favor of a peaceful Arab-Israeli politi

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