MIDDLE EAST: Out of the Woodwork

The day before the organized stoning of the U.S.’s William Rountree in Baghdad (see box), the Communist hierarchy in the Middle East met in Damascus, capital of Nasser’s northern province of Syria. Arab Communists have become increasingly open in their defiance of Nasser. But they took a prudent step: they divided their Syrian and Lebanese apparatus, so that if either is broken up, the other will survive. The general party line laid down in Damascus last week is understood to have been decided at a conference in Tirana, Albania last October. It is to exploit their opportunity in Iraq by launching a propaganda drive for a confederation of Arab states, as opposed to a Nasser-led united Arab nation. Their best bet is now Iraq. They have two Communist parties at work there. One calls itself Shorsh, and works among the 1,000,000 Kurds in Iraq. It is led by the fabled Mullah Mustafa el Barzani. who returned from Russia last October to take command of the party’s 2,000 members, and of the so-called Kurdish “army of liberation.” pledged to carve a national home for 5,000,000 Kurds out of Turkish, Iranian and Iraqi territory.

Jail Training. The other Communist Party in Iraq works among the Arab majority and does very well. It put on last week’s violent welcome for Rountree. Its membership is estimated at 7,000, including 5,000 released from Iraqi jails after last July’s revolution. (Nuri as-Said’s jails proved a fine recruiting and indoctrinating center.) Key figure in this organization is a shadowy, fiftyish figure known chiefly by the front name Abdul Aziz Sherif. Fleeing Iraq when the old regime tried to arrest him in 1950, he visited Moscow, Bucharest and then Sofia, where the top Middle East Communist, Turkey’s Nazim Heikmet, operates. Sherif returned to Iraq last July. Since the Communist Party is nominally illegal in Iraq, Sherif heads a three-man politburo which calls itself the “Iraqi High Committee.” The overall Communist boss inside the Arab world is Syria’s Khaled Bakdash, whom Nasser let back into Syria last October as one payoff for his arms aid from Moscow.

Burning Question. In the five months since the Iraqi coup, the Communists have shown themselves the most tightly knit, best disciplined political outfit to emerge in Iraq’s political chaos. They have infiltrated the police. To a lesser extent, they have penetrated the higher echelons of government and the army. At least one ranking official, Economics Minister Ibrahim Kubah, talks like a Communist (he calls Red China the “focus of intellectual and spiritual enlightenment in our contemporary world”). The Communists control propaganda, dictating the tone of all Baghdad newspapers. They also control the streets, as last week’s events in Baghdad showed. Pictures of Khrushchev have now begun to appear in windows beside those of Kassem.

The Communists show themselves to Kassem as Iraqi patriots who believe that Nasser wants to end Iraq’s independence. Kassem, a politically unsophisticated soldier, is not generally regarded as Communist—although, as British Journalist Michael Adams points out, it could be risky to underestimate Kassem’s powers of dissimulation, since he fooled the wary Nuri asSaid for all those years.

Special Silences. And what of Nasser? He had the Russian bear by the tail. Last week in Damascus, top Communist Bakdash openly defied President Nasser’s ban on party agitation. “Give us back our democratic freedoms,” he demanded in the newspaper Al Akhbar: “. . . the right of the popular masses and other national forces to organize themselves politically in full freedom.” Communist students clashed with Syrian nationalists in Damascus and Aleppo.

At long last, Nasser—the man who invited the Communists into the Middle East in the first place—seemed to have become disturbed by the Communist threat to his ambitions. He is still pathologically hostile to the West, and finds it hard to turn around because his pride is involved. But Nasser supporters now sidle up to American journalists to identify government ministers in Iraq as “Communists.” Western specialists regard Nasser himself as deeply but, in the long run, not irretrievably committed to the Communists. In the short run, they think his hands are tied. A Russian mission in Cairo is keeping him dangling over how much responsibility they are willing to assume in building the Aswan High Dam. Some 20 shiploads of Soviet—bloc machinery and equipment vital to his industrialization plan are due in a few weeks. He dares only hint at his peril.

“Oh my brothers,” cried Cairo’s Voice of the Arabs last week, “on the right there is imperialism, and on your left is also imperialism. You don’t want to replace one camp with any other except the camp of Arabism.” And Radio Damascus chimed in “The left may have become more dangerous.”