Red Retreat

When he needed help to consolidate his coup d'etat last year, Iraq's Premier Karim Kassem trustingly relied on the local Communists. Soon they controlled the press, the state radio and government censorship, key propaganda posts where they set to work creating the legend of the revolutionary hero, the Sole Leader. Friends tried to warn the Sole Leader that he was being had, but it took the shocking evidence of the Red-led killing and burning at Kirkuk (TIME, Aug. 3) and Mosul to convince Kassem that the Communists were out to divide, not to unite. Now, though he refers to them as "anarchists," Kassem is moving firmly against the Communists.

Last week Kassem announced that a court would try the "anarchists" responsible for the Kirkuk "massacre" of at least 120 persons. Sixty members of the Communist-infiltrated Popular Resistance Force were haled before a court-martial on charges of murdering three Baghdad notables--the first proCommunists to stand trial in Iraq since the revolution of July 1958.

Perhaps because Khrushchev has ordered a Communist go-slow in Iraq, in the hope of gains elsewhere, or perhaps because the Communists are not strong enough at the moment to challenge Kassem, Iraq was treated last week to the spectacle of militant Communists in retreat, beating their breasts and confessing their sins in old-style Stalinist selfcriticism. In an emergency session, proclaimed the party newspaper Ittihad al Shaab, the "enlarged" Communist Central Committee had condemned "individual leaders" for their "criminal acts, emotionalism and miscalculation."

"The party," said its newspaper, "has done great deeds, but it has also made mistakes owing to the drunkenness of victory and the conceit resulting from its great achievements. It has wrongly assessed its own powers, exaggerated its own importance and given insufficient attention to the roles played by other national forces." Furthermore, the Communist paper itself has "dealt in an inflammatory manner with certain events." Just so everybody would understand its previous "wrong assessment," the Central Committee now assured everyone that "the party condemns all draggings, torture, pillage."

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