More than 12,000 former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party have been or will be reintegrated into public service one year after losing their jobs under a policy to punish those loyal to the ousted regime, a senior official said Thursday.
In a backtrack on its once hard-line stance, the national de-Baathification committee - a body created and headed by ex-Pentagon favourite Ahmad Chalabi - reinstated the public servants.
"Our committee, which fired 30,000 people, has decided to reintegrate 12,000 who have appealed the decision," committee director Mithal Allussi told AFP.
"They are from a range of sectors, for example the interior ministry, that of education or electricity," he explained.
"Some decided to restart active work and others chose retirement."
The Iraqi press on Thursday began to release a list of 3,000 people who have already returned to work.
In a statement, signed by Chalabi and released in Iraqi newspapers on the same day, the committee said it has "accepted the request for certain sections of the Baath party to be reintegrated into public office and in business and the state."
They will be on a one-year probation, the document explained, adding that "certain people in the number released by the newspaper must appear before the de-Baathification committee and finish preparing the necessary paperwork before they can restart work."
Some 694 names released by the media on Thursday were all of teachers from Baghdad and the Sunni region of Al-Anbar to the west, notably Ramadi and the rebel stronghold of Fallujah, which saw heavy fighting in April.
The reinstated workers, however, were all low down in the Baath party and Allussi said no members of the party's top three ranks would ever work in the civil service again.
The softer stance on former Baath party members followed Chalabi's fall from favour in a head-on collision with his former US allies last month.
US and Iraqi forces raided Chalabi's offices amid a swirl of allegations that the political leader had handed US spy secrets to Iran.
Even before the run-in with Chalabi, US overseer Paul Bremer reversed the policy in late April, after deciding Chalabi's de-Baathification committee had been too severe in handing out judgements.
Bremer said the coalition would rehabilitate government functionaries and military veterans.
Bremer's April announcement had sparked a sharp reaction from Chalabi who compared the move to bringing back the Nazis after World War II.
When Bremer arrived in Iraq one year ago, he sided with Chalabi and issued a decree expelling all senior Baathists from the administration and dissolving the armed forces.
The policy was the result of Chalabi's fierce wrangling with his well-placed friends in Washington at the expense of Bremer's predecessor Jay Garner, who saw administrating the war-torn country was the priority, not a witch hunt.
The powerful debaathification committee, headed by Chalabi, fired 30,000 civil servants, including 6,000 teachers. The wide-scale purges, along with the dissolution of the Iraqi army, aggravated unemployment and stoked the flames of the insurgency against the Americans.
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