Senior Iraqi technocrat chosen to head oil ministry

The American-led reconstruction body for Iraq has named a senior Iraqi technocrat to run the country's vital oil industry amid growing unease at the number of former officials of the Baathist regime securing key posts in the post-war administration.

Although the Oil Ministry's new chief executive, Thamir Abbas Ghadban, will be advised by several outsiders, including Philip Carroll, the former head of Royal Dutch Shell in the US, his appointment comes at a time of increasingly fierce debate at many levels of Iraqi society on the future role of those who worked for the deposed regime. An oil ministry official said Mr Ghadban could be considered "minister for oil."

The appointment by the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance came less than a week after senior sources at the Office proclaimed their success in developing agreements with leading officials just below ministerial rank in several pre-existing government departments. The day-to-day running of the Ministry of Health, for example, is likely to be in the hands of many of its former administrators and regional directors.

The ultra-pragmatic approach to the Health Ministry was described yesterday by Zaab Sethna, a senior aide to Dr Ahmed Chalabi, the chairman of the Iraqi National Congress as a "bad mistake". Mr Sethna said America and Britain were leaning too far "in the interests of expediency" towards appointing those associated with the former Baathist regime to key jobs. Dr Chalabi is one of six leading former opposition figures responsible for setting up a conference to pick a transitional government.

Mr Sethna's complaints partly echoed those of doctors in Basra and parts of Baghdad who have already openly, and in the former case successfully, revolted against attempts to restore local medical administrators from the former regime to their previous jobs.

Several senior American and British military and civilian officials have argued that it is sensible to harness the talents of those who belonged to the Baath party simply to use their professional skills. But Mr Sethna said: "People forget that there is a whole group of people who were forced to stop doing their jobs because they refused to join the Baath party." He said that the INC had recently been visited by a delegation of 25 former judges and senior police officers who had quit their post in the late Seventies and early Eighties for just that reason.

Mr Sethna said that some 30,000 senior Baathist officials from the old regime should be regarded as having no future in Iraqi public life. But the party's other 1 million-plus members should be vetted, preferably by an independent commission, once a transitional government was established. Those who had simply "made a mistake in their youth" by joining the party and had subsequently led relatively blameless lives would have a fresh start. But those who had clearly acted in corrupt and repressive ways would not.

He added: "De-Baathification is not about individuals but about institutional reform... about how do you reform an education curriculum corrupted by our past, how you remake a judicial system, which had no independence."

The INC approach is already sparking a debate over whether the Baath party would be allowed to re-form in a fully democratic Iraq. Mr Sethna said it should not, citing the continued illegality of the Nazis in Germany. But Shakr al-Dujaily, a senior official of the Iraqi Communist Party, which was brutally suppressed by Saddam Hussein after 1979, said yesterday that in its uncontaminated form the party had a social platform and should be allowed to exist again.