Communists against the vile mullahs in US occupied Iraq

Battle


of the beards

Jun 12th 2003 | BAGHDAD
From The Economist print edition



Iraq's few Communists are among the brave to stand up to the ayatollahs



ARE Communists coming to America's rescue? While Iraq's other secular parties cosy up to the clerics, the Workers' Communist Party of Iraq (WCP) is struggling to halt Iraq's slide into an Islamic state. It holds coming-out parties for Baghdad girls who shed the veil, and, with reports of women being mugged, it has opened a refuge on the top floor of a Tigris-side bank repossessed by the proletariat. “Congratulations,” says Yanar Muhammad, a self-professed “ex-Muslim” and founder of the WCP's Women's Freedom in Iraq Organisation, as she hugs her latest recruit to the barehead brigade.

In the charred shell of the bank below, party cadres plot their return to Al-Thoura, Baghdad's sprawling Shia shantytown, once their heartland but now the bridgehead of an Islamic state. A comrade with a huge bush of facial hair proposes Molotov-cocktailing a mosque for each liquor store or cinema torched.

The battle of the beards dates back 45 years. In the 1958 regime-change that ousted the monarchy, Marx not the mullahs was Iraqi Shias' source of emulation. The ayatollahs fought back, but without great success. Now, the failure of America's regime-change to impose order—which a report by the International Crisis Group describes as “a reckless abdication of the occupying powers' obligation to protect the population”—has sent women scuttling beneath the safety of the veil, or to self-imposed purdah indoors. It has paved the way for vigilantes to enforce patriarchal codes. Girls are pulled out of school, men do the shopping, and wedding parties and cafés are shut down before dusk. Al-Thoura is as tightly veiled as the southern suburbs of Tehran.

Can the Communists' clarion call again strike a chord? Young people are fed up with being told which films they can and cannot watch. Women demand equal inheritance rights and the abolition of laws that sanction “honour” crimes and forbid them from leaving Iraq without a male guardian. In the Baghdad cafés frequented by artists and authors, there is talk of a backlash. “We don't want to replace one totalitarian system with another,” says an artist, with a whisky bottle stuffed down his jumper. “Iraqis just need some time to have fun.”

The Communists' political muscle is hard to assess. They stood no chance in one-party Baathist Iraq. In the northern haven, the Iraq Communist Party got no more than 2% of the vote in the 1992 parliamentary election, and since then the party has split into three.

Moreover, the ayatollahs have grown so influential in post-Saddam Iraq that even some secular leaders are beating a path to their doors for a blessing. Few politicians dare broach the issue of separating state from religion. And the artist in the café could not have paid for his whisky, had it not been for the rush of commissions for clerical portraits to fill the billboards formerly adorned by Saddam.