The Iran-Iraq war radically transformed the political economy and the social organization of resources in Basra and its environs. From an industrialized port city with a relatively productive agricultural hinterland, Basra was transformed into center for the mobilization of troops and goods, its hinterland destroyed by Iranian bombardment and the forcible removal of populations. While the Ba’thist government had, by 1979, managed co-opt or suppress labor and dissident party activism in Baghdad, it was only with the advent of the Iran-Iraq war that Communist labor activism gave way to other forms of resistance in Basra. My paper will examine the development of forms of resistance to the new realities of the war. I will argue that labor and party activism gave way to new forms or resistance. These included the developments of illicit networks of resistance to the war, often supported by an underground economy that facilitated the movement, employment and concealment of deserters even as the Ba’th Party spent inordinate amount of its resources trying to control these networks. In addition, the terrain of contestation to the Ba’th and to the war moved from organized labor and underground party activism within Basra and its immediate hinterland, into a campaign of insurgency waged on the eastern borderlands of the city. These forms of contestation did not constitute organized opposition or social movements with clear political agendas. Rather, they remained fragmented, fluid and multi-dimensional. They included entrepreneurs within the armed forces who sold false identity cards and a network of smugglers connected to opposition parties in Iran. They centered around certain mosques in hard hit parts of the city and the rituals of burial of the dead of the war. The Ba’thist state waged multiple campaigns to control these networks throughout the 1980s, but could not eradicate them. My paper examines the connection of these networks and the state’s violent attempts to control them with the dynamics of contention during within the city and its surrounding area during the 1991 Intifada. It asks whether the nature of the resistance itself, its fragmentation and its fluidity were not a result of the disciplinary structures instituted by the state during wartime, a problem that manifested itself in the fragmentation of the rebellion in 1991. I will draw in my analysis on Ba’th Party documents and interviews.

Poets, writers and journalists were prominent actors and chroniclers of the transformations and contentions of political modernity and the establishment of associational life and the public sphere of 20th century Iraq. The quest for social and cultural modernity, however, preceded the founding of the nation-state, and was first sought in the Ottoman context, and to a lesser extent, in the Iranian sphere. The major poets of the early 20th century, Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi and Ma`ruf al-Rusafi, both served as deputies in the Young Turk parliament and, celebrating political and cultural modernity, denouncing the dead hand of tradition, ‘backwardness’ and religious authority. At the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, this quest for modernity and rationality was transferred to the nascent nation-state of Iraq and into Iraqi nationalism. Zahawi celebrated ‘English’ power in a welcoming ode, not just as an opportunistic gesture but also as an aspiration of the modernising potential of empire. He wrote treatises of ersatz ‘science’ and celebrated Darwinian evolutionism, adding his own interpretations. Rusafi wrote a lengthy treatise on the life of Muhammad, presenting him and early Islam as an Arab national genius, stripping that history of its sacred and theological themes, not daring to publish the book in his own lifetime. Rusafi was also fiercely anti-Shi`ite, not for strictly sectarian reasons, but considering their religion as particularly conducive to ‘backwardness’ and ‘superstition’. The Shi`ite milieu, equally, spawned a lively intellectual production with prominent poets, authors and journals: the religious centres, especially Najaf, were fertile sources of literary and intellectual ferment, mostly oriented to a unified national modernity and religious reform. Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri, one of the most prominent from that milieu, chronicled in his poetry and journalism the turbulent history of the 20th century. Sectarian issues were never far away: his early confrontation with Sati` al-Husri, another Ottoman turned to a primary theoretician of Arab nationalism, was well chronicled. As director of education under Faysal I, Husri was concerned about what he considered Shi`ite subversion of the Arab project. The respective memoirs of Jawahiri and Husri provide an interesting picture of the sectarian issues in the perspectives of modern politics and culture. This paper will consider the cultural and political history of Iraq in the earlier 20th century as one of diverse tensions and contentions between the quest for common citizenship and the pull of sectarian identities, as expressed through some literary productions.

Focusing on Kirkuk and on the industrial conurbation developed around the city by the Iraq Petroleum Company after the end of the British mandate, this paper explores the ways in which oil urbanisation played out in the contested terrain of Iraq’s labour mobilisation at a crucial juncture of the country’s modern history. In the Hashemite era, Kirkuk represented the microcosm of multi-ethnic and multi-cultural Iraq. Its fast development as an oil city illustrates the complex configurations of class and ethnic solidarities in the country, as well as the interplay between national and imperial politics as it was driven by the oil industry. More specifically the paper concentrates on: 1. The development of Kirkuk as the oil enclave of monarchical Iraq, with a focus on the new landscapes of inequality generated by fast urbanisation that pitted squalid suburban Kirkuk against the glamorous oil stations that mushroomed around the city. For comparative purposes I will place Kirkuk’s urbanisation in the broader context of Iraq and explain its distinctive and common features; 2. The relationship between some elements of structural violence embedded in the spatial, disciplinary and institutional organisation of the oil industry and the strategies of resistance and mobilisation adopted by Kirkuk’s oil workers. To this end I will analyse two episodes of labour unrest in 1946 and 1948 and explain how they were part of the broader political and social dislocation engendered by the Second World War. Again a comparison will be drawn with similar episodes of industrial conflict in other Iraqi cities, Baghdad and Basra in particular; 3. Some of the rhetorical underpinnings of industrial unrest in Kirkuk in order to explain the intersection of national and Communist politics with community-based urban political mobilisation. One of the distinctive features of Kirkuk’s working class was that it included a majority of recently urbanised Kurds who became followers of the Iraqi Communist party.

In this paper, I explore the ways in which Iraqi Jewish communists responded to their marginalization in Iraqi society and later in Israel, by studying two series of demonstrations in which they participated. The first part will look at how Jewish communists in Iraq demonstrated against the state’s unjust social policies, pro-British sympathies, and its false equation between Judaism and Zionism during the Wathba, a series of grassroots demonstrations which shook Baghdad during the winter of 1948. After the Wathba, some of these Jews were forced to escape Iraq, and many found themselves in Israel, living in transit camps which were established by the state all over the country, together with fellow Iraqi Jews and other Arab-Jews who suddenly became Israeli citizens. In addition to the horrendous poverty and the loss of social status, these Arab Jews faced discrimination by the state because of their Middle Eastern origins and their Arab culture. The Iraqi communist Jews responded to these conditions, by organization a series of urban protests in Israel. In this part of the paper, I will study the staged movement of the newcomers from the transit camps to the Israeli cities and examine what it might teach us the rebirth of Iraqi communism in Israel of the 1950s. I argue that the Iraqi communists, in their organized demonstrations in urban spaces (be it Tel Aviv or Baghdad), wanted to challenge racialized spatial policies, to increase their visibility in subaltern communities like the urban poor, and to call for greater mobility in Iraqi and Israeli societies by disrupting the current urban order. Looking at Iraqi Jewish communism in both Iraq and Israel, I argue, yields a different periodization of Iraqi Jewish history: for Iraqi Jewish communists, the moment of arrival to Israel did not change everything at once as far as their Iraqi identity is concerned. They continued speaking in Arabic, believing in the same ideologies, and collaborating with fellow Muslims and Christians who upheld the same beliefs; it took, in other words, a long time to separate these Jews from their radical Iraqi culture. In fact, even after years of “assimilation” in Israel, this process was only partially successful. My readings are based on Iraqi police files, memoirs, the Arabic and Hebrew communist press in Iraq and in Israel, and records found in the Central Zionist archives in Jerusalem.