Baghdad: A day after Saddam Hussein was sentenced to hang, the country's Shiite-dominated government declared a major concession to his Sunni Muslim backers that could see thousands of purged Baath Party members reinstated to their jobs.
The Supreme National Commission for de-Baathification has prepared a draft law with the amendments and will soon send it to parliament for ratification, the commission's executive director, Ali al-Lami said on Tuesday.
"We decided to make the announcement after the Saddam verdict so that the de-Baathification commission would not be accused of bias," al-Lami said.
The amendments are in harmony with a 24-point national reconciliation plan that was announced in June by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in which he called for reviewing the de-Baathification programme, al-Lami said.
Al-Maliki's reconciliation plan aims to end an insurgency that has killed tens of thousands of Iraqis since the March 2003 US invasion of Iraq.
Before the amendments were drawn up, the organisation listed names of 10,302 senior Baath Party members who were to be fired but the new proposed law includes only 1,500 names, al-Lami said. Those who will lose their jobs will get retirement pensions, he said.
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