Word: baathist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Syria and Iraq have been enemies for years, ruled by feuding wings of the Baathist Party. So they surprised just about everybody in the Middle East when they announced that they were seriously thinking of merging into one unified state...
Considering the fact that the rival wings of the Baathist Party that rules both countries have been at loggerheads for years, and that agents of the two governments have lately been unusually busy trying to blow each other up (there have been three assassination attempts against the Syrian Foreign Minister by Iraqis and shootouts in embassies around the world), the giddy rhetoric of unity was greeted with some bemusement by foreign diplomats. Still, the fact that these erstwhile enemies, concerned not only about Camp David but also the instability in Iran, were even talking about merging was genuinely remarkable...
...observers of the Arab world, it was no great surprise that Iraqi diplomatic missions figured so centrally in the bloody raids. Iraq's fanatic Baathist government rejects any negotiations whatsoever with Israel. Baghdad was annoyed when the P.L.O. in May decided to suspend its Lebanon-based military operations against Israel.* In response, the Iraqis shut down P.L.O. weapons factories in the country and reportedly intercepted shipments of arms and medicines from China intended for Arafat's troops...
Third World socialism embraces such disparate systems as the Islamic socialism preached by Algeria and Libya, the Baathist (Renaissance) socialism of Syria and Iraq, the ujamaa (familyhood) socialism...
...liberty of some Third World socialists is no better than that of the Marxist-Leninists. Tanzania's prisons contain about 1,500 opponents of Nyerere's regime. Mozambique's socialist rulers have herded up to 10,000 "undesirables," including political dissidents, into primitive "reeducation camps." Iraq's xenophobic Baathist socialists have not held national elections since they came to power in 1968, and any critic of the Ahmed Hassan Bakr regime is quickly arrested by the Soviet-trained secret police...