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ABSTRACT
Drawing on Iraqi print media published during the late 1980s and 1990s, this study contributes to the historiography of Baʿthist Iraq by offering a fresh reading into open sources that have long been used by scholars. It focuses on issues like democratization, freedom and the rule of law and how they were articulated in Iraqi print media. This discourse functioned as a strategic tool of communication to reproduce and stabilize the existing order. By moving beyond mechanisms of bureaucratic control, repression or cooptation, the study highlights a neglected element of the former regime's techniques of governance. The evidence presented in this study suggests that the Iraqi Ba'thist regime aimed to demobilize a target audience it suspected of harbouring oppositional feelings and pro-democracy ideas that went beyond what Saddam Hussein was willing to consider. It did so by installing, simulating or tolerating spaces of contestation that helped to ease the ‘cognitive dissonance’ Iraqis sensed between an official discourse of a people united in love for its leader, and the daily experience of brutal repression and deteriorating living conditions.
Acknowledgements
Among numerous colleagues whose comments and criticism have helped to improve this article, I would like specifically to thank Amatzia Baram, Souhail Belhadj, Noga Efrati, Laura Ruiz de Elvira, and Peter Sluglett.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Noga Efrati, Women in Iraq: Past Meets Present (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2012); Benjamin Isakhan, Democracy in Iraq: History, Politics, Discourse (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012); Orit Bashkin, The Other Iraq: Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); Muhsin al-Musawi, Reading Iraq: Culture and Power in Conflict (London: IB Tauris, 2006); Adeed Dawisha, ‘Democratic Attitudes and Practices in Iraq, 1921–1958’, Middle East Journal Vol.59, No.1 (2005), pp.11–30; Gareth Stansfield, ‘The Transition to Democracy in Iraq. Historical Legacies, Resurgent Identities and Reactionary Tendencies’, in Alex Danchev and John MacMillan (eds.), The Iraq War and Democratic Politics (London/New York: Routledge, 2005), pp.134–58; Eric Davis, ‘History Matters: Past as Prologue in Building Democracy in Iraq’, Orbis Vol.49, No.2 (2005), pp.229–44; Chibli Mallat, ‘Obstacles to Democratization in Iraq: A Reading of Post-revolutionary Iraqi History through the Gulf War’, in Ellis Goldberg, Reşat Kassaba and Joel Migdal (eds.), Rules and Rights in the Middle East: Democracy, Law, and Society (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1993), pp.224–47.
2. Joseph Sassoon, Anatomy of Authoritarianism in the Arab Republics (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Aaron Faust, The Baʿthification of Iraq: Saddam Hussein's Totalitarianism (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2015); Amatzia Baram, Saddam Husayn and Islam, 1968–2003. Baʿthi Iraq from Secularism to Faith (Washington, DC/Baltimore, MD: Woodrow Wilson Center Press/Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); Dina Rizk Khoury, Iraq in Wartime: Soldiering, Martyrdom, and Remembrance (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Sassoon, Saddam Hussein's Baʿth Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Kevin M. Woods, David D. Palkki and Mark E. Scott (eds.), The Saddam Tapes: The Inner Workings of a Tyrant's Regime, 1978–2001 (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Lawrence Rubin, ‘Research Note: Documenting Saddam Hussein's Iraq’, Contemporary Security Policy Vol.32, No.2 (2011), pp.458–66.
3. Noureddine Jebnoun, Mehrdad Kia and Mimi Kirk (eds.), Modern Middle East Authoritarianism: Roots, Ramifications, and Crisis (London/New York, NY: Routledge, 2014); Holger Albrecht (ed.), Contentious Politics in the Middle East: Political Opposition under Authoritarianism (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2010); Nicola Pratt, Democracy and Authoritarianism in the Arab World (Boulder, CO/London: Lynne Rienner, 2009); Ellen Lust-Okar and Saloua Zerhouni (eds.), Political Participation in the Middle East (Boulder, CO/London: Lynne Rienner, 2008); Pete W. Moore and Bassel F. Salloukh, ‘Struggles under Authoritarianism: Regimes, States, and Professional Associations in the Arab World’, International Journal of Middle East Studies Vol.39 (2007), pp.53–76; Marsha Pripstein Posusney and Michelle Penner-Angrist (eds.), Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Regimes and Resistances (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2005).
4. Samir al-Khalil (Kanan Makiya), Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989).
5. Amatzia Baram, Saddam Husayn and Islam, 1968–2003. Baʿthi Iraq from Secularism to Faith (Washington, DC/Baltimore, MD: Woodrow Wilson Center Press/Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); Faleh A. Jabar, ‘Shaykhs and Ideologues: Detribalization and Retribalization in Iraq, 1968–1998’, Middle East Report Vol.215 (Summer 2000), http://www.merip.org/mer/mer215/shaykhs-ideologues?ip_login_no_cache=bb214c3a9b35ac9e90188f32b4de1919 (accessed 21 Dec. 2016); Baram, ‘Neo-Tribalism in Iraq: Saddam Hussein's Tribal Policies 1991–96’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol.29 (1997), pp.1–31; Faleh A. Jabar and Hosham Dawod (eds.), Tribes and Power: Nationalism and Ethnicity in the Middle East (London: Saqi, 2002), pp.69–164.
6. Faleh A. Jabar, ‘Totalitarianism Revisited. With a Note on Iraq’, Orient-Institut Studies Vol.1 (2012); Rethinking Totalitarianism and its Arab Readings, http://www.perspectivia.net/content/publikationen/orient-institut-studies/1-2012/jabbar_totalitarianism (accessed 5 July 2016); Jens Hanssen, ‘Reading Hannah Arendt in the Middle East’, ibid., http://www.perspectivia.net/content/publikationen/orient-institut-studies/1-2012/hanssen_hannah-arendt (accessed 5 July 2016); Amatzia Baram, ‘The Future of Baʿthist Iraq: Power Structure, Challenges, and Prospects’, in R. B. Satloff (ed.), The Politics of Change in the Middle East (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993), pp.31–62.
7. Faust, The Baʿthification of Iraq, p.7 (see note 2).
8. Ibid, p.8. See also, Juan Linz, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000).
9. Sassoon, Saddam Hussein's Baʿth Party, p.276. See also his Anatomy of Authoritarianism, p.253 (see note 2).
10. Eric Davis, ‘The Historical Genesis of the Public Sphere in Iraq, 1900–1963: Implications for Building Democracy in Post-Baʿthist Iraq’, in Seteny Shami (ed.), Publics, Politics and Participation: Locating the Public Sphere in the Middle East and North Africa (New York, NY: Social Science Research Council, 2009), pp.385–427.
11. Ofra Bengio, ‘In the Eyes of the Beholder: Israel, Jews, and Zionism in the Iraqi Media’, in T. Parfitt and Y. Egorova (eds.), Jews, Muslims, and Mass Media: Mediating the ‘Other’ (London: Routledge, 2004), pp.109–119, quote p.109. For more details regarding the evolution of the Iraqi media landscape from the Republican to the Baʿthist era, see Isakhan, Democracy in Iraq, pp.101–5; Ahmed J. Bahiya, ‘Protest and the Media in Iraq: Introduction, the progress, the protest’, International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications, Vol.5, No.6 (2015), pp.1–5.
12. Ofra Bengio, Saddam's Word: Political Discourse in Iraq (New York, NY/Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997). Regarding Syria, see Aurora Sottimano, ‘Ideology and Discourse in the Era of Baʿthist Reforms: Towards an Analysis of Authoritarian Governmentality’, in Aurora Sottimano and Kjetil Selvik, Changing Regime Discourse and Reform in Syria (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2009), pp.3–40.
13. In this vein, see Eric Davis, Memories of State: Politics, History, and Collective Memory in Modern Iraq (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), p.275; Pierre Darle, Saddam Hussein Maître des mots: du langage de la tyrannie à la tyrannie du langage (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2003), pp.34/35. For comparable processes in Nazi Germany, see David Welch, ‘Nazi Propaganda and the Volksgemeinschaft: Constructing a People's Community’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol.39, No.2 (2004), pp.213–38.
14. This approach is explored more broadly in Achim Rohde, State-Society Relations in Baʿthist Iraq: Facing Dictatorship (London: Routledge, 2010). See also Rohde, ‘Totalitarianism Revisited: Framing the History of Baʿthist Iraq’, in J. Tejel, P. Sluglett, H. Bozarslan (eds.), The Modern History of Iraq. Historiographical and Political Challenges (Singapore a.o.: World Scientific, 2012), pp.163–79.
15. Faust, The Baʿthification of Iraq, p.58 (see note 2).
16. Saddam Hussein named pragmatic considerations as a reason for the regime's turn away from the Baʿth party's original amalgamative pan-Arabism towards an Iraq centred Arab nationalism. See his On History, Heritage and Religion (Baghdad: Translation and Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1981). Populist tactics have been identitifed as underlying the regime's turn towards social conservatism at the expense of its former cautious reformism regarding gender relations. See Rohde, ‘War and Gender in Baʿthist Iraq’, in Moha Ennaji and Fatima Sadiqi (eds.), Gender and Violence in the Middle East (London/New York, NY: Routledge, 2011), pp.97–114. Opportunistic considerations have also been named as a motivation for the regime's turn towards religious policies since the late 1980s. See Rohde, ‘Change and Continuity in Arab Iraqi Education: Sunni and Shiʿi Discourses in Iraqi Textbooks Before and After 2003’, Comparative Education Review, Vol.57, No.4 (2013), pp.711–734; Baram, Saddam Husayn and Islam.
17. Sassoon, Saddam Hussein's Baʿth Party, p.124 (see note 2).
18. Salam Kawakibi, Les Médias Privés en Syrie', Maghreb Machrek, Vol.203 (2010), pp.59–71, here p.64.
19. Paul Chan (ed.), On Democracy by Saddam Hussein (Badlands Unlimited/Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art: Brooklyn and Athens, 2012).
20. Marc Le Vine, ‘Chaos, Globalization, and the Public Sphere: Political Struggle in Iraq and Palestine’, Middle East Journal, Vol.60, No.3 (2006), pp.467–92, here p.489, considers a ‘gray zone’ between authoritarianism and democracy as the space in which politics can be contested’ in most countries in the contemporary Middle East.
21. A research paper entitled ‘Specifications Concerning the Issue of Democracy during the War’ submitted to the special committee was published in Afaq ʿArabiyya, Vol.13, No.7 (1988), pp.22–5. On the necessity of emergency laws in extraordinary circumstances such as wars, see al-Thawra (Th), 14 April 1988.
22. See a series of articles on ‘the Baʿth revolution, freedom and human rights’ in Th, 10, 11 December 1988.
23. Bengio, Saddam's Word, pp.62–64; Isakhan, Democracy in Iraq, pp.110–11.
24. Th, 5 June 1989.
25. Ilario Salucci, A People's History of Iraq: Workers Movements and the Left, 1924–2004 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005), pp.66–68.
26. Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), p.250.
27. Alif Ba, 7 December 1989. In a similar interview he declared democracy as ‘a right and not a gift’, Alif Ba, 7 February 1990.
28. Th, 17 July 1990. The Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) was the highest decision making body in the formal hierarchy of power in Baʿthist Iraq, equivalent to politburos in Warsaw block countries.
29. Ibid. Similar to the tactics of other anciens régimes of the MENA region, this initiative of the Iraqi Baʿthist regime served to prevent any possible increase in power of the elected parliament. See Daniel Brumberg, ‘Democratization in the Arab World? The Trap of Liberalized Autocracy’, Journal of Democracy, Vol.13, No.4 (2002), pp.56–68.
30. Mallat, ‘Obstacles to Democratization in Iraq’, p.239 (see note 1).
31. Th, 13 May 1990.
32. Faust, The Baʿthification of Iraq, p.65 (see note 2).
33. Bengio, Saddam's Word, p.68 (see note 12).
34. Stephen J. King, ‘Sustaining Authoritarianism in the Middle East and North Africa’, Political Science Quarterly, Vol.122, No.3 (2007), pp.433–59, quote p.436. For economic pressures during the interwar years, see Kiren Aziz Chaudry, ‘On the Way to Market: Economic Liberalisation and Iraq's Invasion of Kuwait’, Middle East Report, Vol.21, No.3 (May–June 1991), pp.14–23.
35. Hassan al-ʿAlawi, Dawlat al-Munadhama al-Sirriya (Jeddah: Shirkat al-Medina lil-Tibaʿa wa-l-Nashr, 1990), pp.127–28.
36. Saʿd al-Bazzaz, Al-Janaralat Akhir man Yaʿlam (Amman: Al-Ahliyya lil Nashr wa al-Tawziʿ, 1996), pp.198–99, quoted by F. Gregory Gause III, ‘Iraq's Decision to go to War, 1980 and 1990’, Middle East Journal, Vol.56, No.1 (2002), pp.47–70, here pp.58–9.
37. Davis, Memories of State, p.255 (see note 13).
38. Baram, Saddam Husayn and Islam, p.210, inaccurately states that after the invasion of Kuwait ‘talk of democratization died with barely a whimper’ (see note 2).
39. Babil, 24 March 1992.
40. Babil, 21 Jan.; 19 March 1992.
41. Babil, 22 Jan. 1992.
42. Babil, 27 Jan. 1992.
43. Th, 14 Aug., 11 Sep. 1991.
44. For a report on that congress, see Th, 11 Oct. 1991. For quotes from Saddam Hussein's speech on that occasion, see Th, 25 May 1994.
45. Th, 22 June 1994.
46. Babil, 25 November 1993.
47. The articles attributed to Saddam Hussein were published in Th, 3–14 April 1991. See Davis, Memories of State, pp.242–248.
48. Th, 7 April 1991.
49. Th, 25 November 1991.
50. Th, 25 August 1991.
51. Th, 3 September 1991. See also a reiteration of Saddam Hussein's religious policies as rooted in Arab tradition and on the dangers of Shuʿubiyya, Th, 3 November 1991.
52. Th, 4 July 1991.
53. Th, 11 Sep. 1991; 2 Aug. 1992.
54. Th, 6 Sep. (‘Comrade Hassan ʿAli heads a meeting of the National Progressive Front’), 25 Nov. 1991 (‘Socialist democracy – Idea and Organisation’). For a series of articles on the history of the Iraqi Communist Party, its patriotic credentials in the 1958 revolution and the National Front government of the 1970s (without mentioning the massacres of Communists at the hands of Baʿthist militias in 1963 and the repression of the 1970s), see Alif Ba, 5, 12, 26 January 2000.
55. On Mazhar ʿArif, see Bengio, ‘Iraq’, Middle East Contemporary Survey [MECS], Vol.16 (1992), p.462. On Yusuf Hamdan's ‘Iraqi Communist Party’, see Salucci, A People's History of Iraq, p.103.
56. For articles reflecting the party's face-lifting efforts, see Th, 26 July, 28 Aug. 2000.
57. Babil, 12 April 1993.
58. Babil, 21 Feb. 1994; 15, 16, 18 June 1996; 9 May 1998; 2 March 2000.
59. Babil, 22 Jan. 2000. Faust, The Baʿthification of Iraq, p.179 n.39, mentions one party document detailing the case of a party member who in 1996 ‘had the gall to write “no” on his ballot card for the plebiscite on Hussein’.
60. Riyad ʿAziz Hadi, ‘Al-Dimuqratiyya wa al-Tanmiyya', Afaq ʿArabiyya, Vol.18, No.9 (1993), pp.4–7, quote p.7. On Hadi, see also Davis, Memories of State, pp.221–22. His article echoes a protest letter sent to Saddam Hussein by former Iraqi ambassador to the US and the UN, Nizar Hamdoon, in 1995 in which he criticized the dictator and called on him to initiate democratic reforms. Saddam Hussein ‘accused Nizar of disloyalty and attacked many of his assertions, yet distributed Nizar's missive for discussion among the Iraqi leadership’. Woods/Palkki/Stout (eds.), The Saddam Tapes, p.327.
61. ‘Ala al-Lami, Nusus Mudada: Difaʿan ʿan al-ʿIraq (Baghdad: Jamʿiyya Baghdad al-Mushaʿiyya: 2000), particularly pp.189–95, 231–38, 261–66. For a detailed account of the Iraqi opposition in exile, see Isakhan, Democracy in Iraq, pp.112–17.
62. For an official version regarding the function of these councils, see Khaled A.M. Al-Ani ed., Encyclopaedia of Modern Iraq (Baghdad: Arab Encyclopaedia House, 1977), Vol.2, pp.462/63.
63. Faust, The Baʿthification of Iraq, p.65, 106.
64. Alif Ba, 2 February 1994. Their lack of authority was also mentioned in Th, 25 May 1995.
65. Alif Ba, 2 February 1994.
66. Th, 5, 9 June 1996. See also Th, 12 Jan.uary; 22 November 1996 (‘The citizens and the state services have one common goal’).
67. For summary reports of the work carried out by the Popular Committees in various districts, see Th, 22 August, 2 September 1991; Babil, 6, 9, 25 November 1993; Alif Ba, 2 February 1994; 15 May 1995; 20 March 1996; Th, 7 June, 12 July 1999. For refuse collection organised by neighbourhood committees, see Alif Ba, 21 June, 9 August 2000. For maintenance works on streets, see Th, 10 Sep. 2001.
68. Babil, 9 November 1993.
69. Babil, 25 November 1993.
70. Babil, 30 November 1997. For a comment on the run-down shape of Baghdad's large Shiʿite slum, Medinat Saddam (formerly Medinat al-Thawra, today's Medinat al-Sadr) and the quarrel over responsibilities, see Babil, 5 March 1997. The blame is put on the local population's lack of initiative and cooperation with the state. Maintenance work on Iraq's main highways was also partly outsourced by the state and handed over to the local Popular Committees, but this move was criticized as having caused chaos on the streets due to quarrels between the state and the committees over responsibilities and money. See Babil, 15 December 1999. Alif Ba, 7 June 2000, commented that in Baghdad ‘the cooperation between the citizen and the municipality is a broken bridge’.
71. Alif Ba, 27 Jan. 1999 (‘Popular Committees: Some are unaware of their existence, some are suspicious about them’).
72. Ibid. Alif Ba, 2 February 1994, attributed the weak attendance to the fact that members received no payment for their work in these committees.
73. Alif Ba, 27 January 1999.
74. For comparable developments in Baʿthist Syria, see Laura Ruiz de Elvira and Tina Zintl, ‘The End of the Baʿthist Social Contract in Bashar al-Assad's Syria: Reading Sociopolitical Transformations through Charities and Broader Benevolent Activism’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol.46, No.2 (2014), pp.329–49.
75. See two lengthy reports on a meeting between Saddam Hussein and representatives of Popular Committees, Babil, 10, 11 March 2002. Faust, The Baʿthification of Iraq, p.114 n.69, mentions party documents that describe ‘the tendency not to provide a true picture of the organzational reality in administrative reports, statistics, or studies, and, similarly, in symposia and meetings to please the high command’.
76. Sassoon, Saddam Hussein's Baʿth Party, p.124.
77. Asef Bayat, Life as Politics. How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Amsterdam: ISIM/Amsterdam University Press, 2010), pp.74, 81.
78. For articles pointing to police corruption or outright complicity in such crimes from among the countless reports and comments on the rising crime rate, see Babil, 14 March, 27 April 1993; 11, 16, 31 January; 19 February 1994; 2 March 1995. The ‘weakness of the law’ and state corruption was lamented in Alif Ba, 5 Jan. 1994; Babil, 26 October 1993; 14 February 1994; 5, 9 January; 11, 18, 21, 22, 28 February; 9, 12, 15 March 1995.
79. For some typical accounts from among the countless reports on violence in daily life, see Babil, 9 Jan. 1994 (a young man disappears without a trace, after he had previously been beaten up by unknown men; the state is doing nothing to trace his whereabouts); 8 March (settling economic disputes by killing the neighbour); 11 March (a woman in the city of Qut shoots and kills a man married to a member of her family because of a private dispute); 15 March 1995 (a woman laments the male habit of settling disputes with knives and guns, laments the state's inability to prevent such crimes); 8 April 2000 (armed violence among students from rival families).
80. See Babil, 23 January 1993 (killings in tribal feud are not prosecuted); 23 January 1994 (corruption among judges); 28 January; 23 March 1995 (a woman cannot register a plot of land she purchased due to conflicting procedures of the various government offices involved). For articles blasting tribalism as a ‘civilisational decline’, see Babil, 18 January (regarding tribes in the Najaf area confronting the governor); 21 January (judge decisions fail to have an effect on inter-tribal quarrels); 16 February (regarding tribes involved in car theft and the inefficiency of the ministry of agriculture in facing tribal structures); 16 March 1995. In southern Iraq, criminal gangs sometimes attacked and robbed state institutions, like the army hospital in Basra. See Babil, 6 February 1995. Instances of state involvement in organised crime that were portrayed in the press included the story of a woman who acted as the head of a mafia-like criminal network in Basra, defying even state prosecutors thanks to her good personal relations with the city's governor and her membership of the ‘Association of the Friends of Saddam’. See Babil, 10 October 1993. For a comment pointing to state corruption and a lack of transparency as a main reason for the rising crime rate, see Babil, 26 June 1996. See also Babil, 29 January 1994 (state laws regarding property rights on land are overrun by tribal authority); 9 April 1996 (a judge's decision is influenced by tribal threats); 11 January 2000 (a defendant is shot in front of the court building by unknown gunmen from a passing car, a tribal background is acknowledged); 24 February 2000 (a man sentenced for murder is freed after one year, as the court acknowledges the murder as part of a tribal dispute). In contrast, during this period a court in Qadisiyya sentenced a man to 60 years in prison for car theft. See Babil, 16 January 2000. Th, 31 July 2002, declared that tribalism had become stronger than laws and that people would turn to tribalism as a means of safeguarding their interests.
81. Babil, 30 January 1993 (a woman suffers from police harassment, even though she has been robbed); 14 March 1993 (a family is taken to prison because the son is accused of theft); 20 March 1993 (a police officer portrayed as an angel of death); 29 January 1994 (protest against police practice of extracting testimonies by force); 8 February (protest against collective punishment and police harassment); 2 March (a family protests against not being entitled to the benefits of a martyr's family, even though the father had died in the war against Iran in 1987); 15 March 1995 (lack of justice in the allocation of state rents); 14 May 1998 (police opens fire on a woman in a wheelchair).
82. Babil, 7, 11 August 1996.
83. Babil, 4 August 1996. See also, 26 October 1996; Th, 6 June 1996.
84. See Babil, 15 June 1996.
85. Babil, 25 March 2000.
86. Babil, 3 December 1996.
87. Rakiah al-Kayssi, ‘The Baʿth Party's Conception of Law and Justice: An Evaluation of Saddam's talks to jurists on 9 June 2001’, Al-Huquqi, Vol.1, No.4 (2001), pp.80–92.
88. Sassoon, Saddam Hussein's Baʿth Party, p.228 (see note 2).
89. Babil, 18 February (state as a mediator in tribal disputes); 14 March 1995 (report on a session of the presidential diwan headed by ʿUday Hussein); Th, 29 September 1997 for a three day diwan headed by a district governor. Faust, The Baʿthification of Iraq, mentions a wealth of petitions on a variety of issues filed by citizens to party organs and ultimately to the President's office as a ubiquitious feature in the party documents he analyzed.
90. During the 1990s, the Iraqi press regularly portrayed and often criticized court rulings in specific cases. These items fluctuated between a kind of sensationalist courtroom soap and serious background inquiries. For columns on judicial and procedural questions, authored mainly by judges or lawyers, or articles portraying the daily workload of judges under increasingly difficult conditions, see for example Babil, 6 March 1993; Alif Ba, 25 May 1994; 4 July 1996; 7, 21 January 1998; Th, 6, 17 March, 16 August 1996, 2 March 1998; Babil, 15 June (a judge chooses not to interfere in what he calls a tribal feud), 13 June (a divorce suit is stuck between contradictory decisions of the court of Personal Status and a religious qadi, indicating the increased power of the latter to the detriment of the formally responsible state court), 22 June (police officers involved in organised crime), 10 October 1998 (a whole family is massacred in their house by gunmen who are identified by the neighbours, but police investigations produce no results); 19 May 1999 (a court refuses to hear witnesses before handing down prison sentences in a bloody family feud); 13 December 1999 (bribing judges in a court of Personal Status in Basra); 3 January 2000 (leaking sensible data from the Ministry of Interior that shows alarming levels of corruption inside the ministry). For various articles under the category ‘Law and Society’, see Th, 9 July, 24 September 2002. The diwan also circumvented a special Parliamentary Committee formed during the 1980s to receive citizens’ complaints in specific cases. For a meeting of the NA's Committee for Citizens’ Affairs, see Th, 12 September 2001.
91. In a cabinet meeting in May 1999, Saddam Hussein spoke of a state that functions ‘humanely’ and works to the benefit of its citizens as a basic right. But in case the state cannot fulfil this function any more, he argued, the leader has to step in. He declared that democracy and a functioning state were means, not ends in themselves. What mattered was the well-being of the people. See Th, 5, 13 May 1999.
92. Isakhan, Democracy in Iraq, p.110 (see note 1).
93. Borzou Daragahi, ‘Rebuilding Iraq's Media’, Columbia Journalism Review, Vol.42, No.2 (2003), pp.45–50, quote p.47.
94. Darle, Saddam Hussein Maître des mots, pp.76–77 and 132–3. Informal networks have been conceptualized as relevant parts of civil society in MENA countries. See, Diane Singerman, ‘Restoring the Family to Civil Society: Lessons from Egypt’, Journal of Middle East Women's Studies Vol.2, No.1 (2006), pp.1–32.
95. Darle, Saddam Hussein Maître des Mots, pp.145–60 (see note 13).
96. Rohde, ‘Gays, Cross-Dressers, and Emos: Non-Normative Masculinities in Militarized Iraq’, Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, Vol.12, No.3 (2016), pp.433–49.
97. See, for instance, Karsten Timmer, Vom Aufbruch zum Umbruch. Die Bürgerbewegung in der DDR 1989. Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft, Bd. 142 (Göttingen: Vandenoeck & Ruprecht, 2000); Thomas Lindenberger (Hrsg.), Herrschaft und Eigen-Sinn in der SED-Diktatur. Studien zur Gesellschaftsgeschichte der DDR (Wien, Köln, Weimar: Böhlau, 1999).
98. For the use of this concept in the Soviet context, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York/Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999). It was developed by Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1957).
99. Faust, The Baʿthification of Iraq, Ch. 8 and 9, pp.151–82 (see note 2).
100. Darle, Saddam Hussein Maître des mots, pp.119/120 [To be honest, all decisions are subject to subtle negotiations, as the regime could not do without a form of implicit ratification of its actions by the populace]. See also, John F. Burns, ‘In Opening the Gates of its Gulag, Iraq Unleashes Pain and Protest’, The New York Times, 23 October 2002; Françoise Rigaud, ‘Irak: l'Impossible Mouvement de l'intérieur ?’, in Mounia Bennani-Chraïbi et Olivier Fillieule (dir.), Résistances et Protestations dans les sociétés musulmanes (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2003), pp.197–218.
101. Faust, The Baʿthification of Iraq, pp.9–10, 58 (see note 2).
102. Sassoon, Saddam Hussein's Baʿth Party, p.51 (see note 2).
103. Bengio, ‘My Memoirs: Half a Century of the History of Iraq, by Tawfiq al-Suwaydi / Saddam Hussein's Baʿth Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime, by Joseph Sassoon’, Middle Eastern Studies Vol.51, No.2 (2015), pp.332–335; Rohde, ‘Review Essay: Writing the History of Ba'thist Iraq’, TAARI, Newsletter, Vol.8, No.1 (2013), pp.18–21.