20 FEBRUARY 1959, Page 4

Left Turn in Iraq

By MICHAEL ADAMS MHE central point of dispute in Iraq has always I been the question of 'Arab policy,' that is to say, the question of whether Iraq should or should not move towards closer co-operation with the United Arab Republic. At the beginning of January, when Iraq's strongly leftist Minister of Economy, Ibrahim Kubbeh, was in Cairo for a meeting of the Economic Council of the Arab League (which, incidentally, Kubbeh seemed bent on' disrupting), it became known here that four of his fellow Ministers were ready with their resignations. But Kassem, in a major speech on Iraq's Army Day, toed the orthodox Arab line of 'solidarity' with the rest of the Arab world, and the restive Ministers apparently swallowed their doubts once more.

Before the end of January, with an open press war in progress between Cairo and Baghdad, the rift in the Iraqi Cabinet opened again. In essence, the dissatisfaction of a number of Ministers sprang again from their resentment at the way Kassem seemed to be keeping Iraq iso- lated from the Arab nationalist movement, with its centre in Cairo; but there were now two more specific complaints. There were the openly pro- Communist tendencies of the Kassem regime (in which Cabinet Ministers saw their authority being usurped by a clique of Left-wing intimates of the Prime Minister), and there was Colonel Aref.

Aref was in prison, and had already been tried in secret before Colonel Mandawi, but no public announcement had been made about his fate. On. January 31 a Cairo newspaper published what it claimed was the official record of Ares trial, and the next day Baghdad Radio began to broad- cast a tape-recording of the trial, offering no explanation of why the record had been kept secret for over a month. Several prominent Iraqis spoke up for Aref, and were heard to do so in the broadcast recordings. The press war grew more acrimonious, and the Cairo press ridiculed the charges against Aref and demanded his acquittal. When the verdict was announced, and Aref was sentenced to death (by Colonel Mandawi, who took this opportunity to eulogise Kassem in extravagant terms), Cairo was indignant—and the six Iraqi Ministers, who included the surviving members of the Baath (Socialist) and Isticilal (Right-wing) parties as well as four independent Ministers, some of whom had strongly upheld the innocence of Aref at his trial, immediately resigned, Aref, in fact, has become a symbol, and what- ever happens to him will be taken as an indication of the prospects for nationalism in Iraq. The Cairo Communists have demanded his head ever since he was first arrested. The nationalists, for all that they are bitterly critical of Aref, whose extremism has endangered all that they are fighting for, insist that he is a sincere patriot and one of the true heroes of the revolution. If he is executed, the act will be taken as a decisive victory for the pro-Communist faction which appears to control events in Baghdad.

So far the new Cabinet Ministers have given no indication of how their influence will be brought to bear on this tangled situation. In general they are reckoned as moderates, but their acceptance of office at this moment indicates that they endorse the verdict on Aref, and so stand the left of those who resigned in protest against it. Three of them are members of the National Democrat Party, led by the veteran Socialist Kamel Chaderchi whose party is now the only one represented in the Cabinet—and it appears to be the only one which still considers co-opera- tion with the Communists to be possible.

There is in Cairo a strong suspicion that the new Cabinet represents a further step to the left —perhaps as long a step as the Communists' masters in Moscow think it politic for them to take at this juncture. Two things might lay this Suspicion to rest: the cancellation of the death sentence on Aref, and the removal of the sinister Mandawi from his misused vantage-post.