MIDDLE EAST: One for the Seesaw

Torn between the conflicting demands of Iraq’s Arab nationalists and Communists, Iraqi Premier Abdul Karim Kassem is trying to keep a seesaw in balance all by himself. Last week, as the Arab world reacted to his Red-pleasing execution of a score of nationalist Iraqi officers and civilians (TIME, Sept. 28), it became clear that Kassem had stepped just a little too far to the Communist side of the fulcrum.

In Cairo, where Nasser’s propagandists worked day and night defaming Kassem, Moslem divines solemnly denounced the Iraqi Premier, and a procession of thousands of students and workers trooped behind a symbolic coffin mourning “the martyrs of Arabism who fell dead from bullets of treacherous, criminal Kassem.” In Jordan, where young King Hussein has been half-reconciled to Nasser by Kassem’s involvement with the Communists, the state radio broadcast an appeal to all Arabs to “protect Iraq from Communist gangs.” Even some erstwhile Kassem defenders turned hostile: in Lebanon a crowd of 3,000 battled police in a drive to overrun the Iraqi embassy, and Beirut’s Le Soir, long friendly to the Baghdad regime, fulminated, “Dipped in blood to the roots of their hair, will the masters of Baghdad never tire of assassinating people?”

More ominous yet was the news from Baghdad itself. The once-ubiquitous portraits of Kassem disappeared from many a shop window; on several occasions Baghdad police were obliged to fire over the heads of crowds staging anti-Kassem demonstrations. And rumors persisted that there was grave unrest in the Iraqi army, where there was bitter mourning for the senior officer executed, popular Brigadier Nadhem Tabakchali, former commander of Iraq’s 2nd Division.

Smelling the kind of trouble that often presages bloody revolt in Araby, ascetic Abdul Karim Kassem began to edge over to the other side of his seesaw. Without fanfare it was announced that Communists involved in last summer’s Kirkuk massacre of Iraqi nationalists had been put on trial in an anti-Communist military court; simultaneously hints went out that, if everyone behaved, there might be sweeping amnesties for some of the several hundred nationalists languishing in Iraq’s prisons. At week’s end, Kassem was still maintaining his equilibrium, but his grisly balancing act lacked some of its old assurance.