My father and Albaath party

When I was 12, we were living in a railway station in the south of Iraq near Al Nazria. My father was the manager of the station at this time, and had always been a communist. There was a man working in the maintenance section, his job was to visit the stations in the area to check the equipment used to do maintenance. He took extra pay, money for hours that he worked at the different stations; also he was member of Albaath party.

One day he visited our station where my father worked and he asked my father to give him extra money as if he had worked more hours than he had because he was a dishonest man, but my father refused and would only pay him the money he had earned because he was an honest man!

Some days after the incident the police came and arrested my father and put him in prison on a charge that he had spoken out badly against the president of the republic who was Ahmed Albaker, at that time, and also against Hisb Albaath. Then they send him to Althawra court in Baghdad for trial, where he was given a 4year sentence. There was only one witness at the trial, the man who my father had refused to give extra money too, for work he had not done.

It was a disaster for my family because we didn’t have another breadwinner in the family only him and he was now in jail. So I started to work when I was 14 years old to support my family. This completely changed the life of everyone in the family but especially for me and I grew to hate the Albaath party and thought that they were a bad government for Iraq. This is just one example of life under the control of Saddam and the Albaath in 35 years there are many other stories very like mine.

I want to tell you one thing about the Albaath party; it was not bad as an ideology and a way of working for the Arabic nation. It’s rousing slogans and targets talked of the best for Arabic people, but the control of one man (Saddam) made Albaath just a system to control people by using cruel extreme force, and an absence of democracy and justice.

Albaath party is supposed to stand for rebuilding the Arabic homeland as a united nation with its old glory and prosperity, which it had before colonialism. If they had done this then they would have been very good for us.

The Arabs have built in the past good civilizations using structure based on the tenants of Islam, in Iraq, Egypt and in Al Andloss (Spain now) and they had good governments providing justice and made these lands prosper and grow more cultured. At that time the Arabs had achieved marvelous things in science and mathematics and had a wonderful philosophy.

It’s true that Albaath called for unity, democracy and freedom but with Saddam these words mean some thing very different, In reality it meant people united in mass graves or in jails.

I just want to say that the Albaath party, which was established in Syria, in 1947 by Michel Aflaq was one thing and the baath party, which took the power in Iraq at 1968, is another thing entirely.