Ba'ath Party - Structure

Structure

The Ba'ath Party was created at the Second National Congress as a cell-based organisation, with an emphasis on withstanding government repression and infiltration. Hierarchical lines of command ran from top to bottom, and members were forbidden to initiate contacts between groups on the same level of the organisation—all contacts had to pass through a higher command level. This made the party somewhat unwieldy, but helped prevent the formation of factions and cordoned off members from each other. The party was difficult to infiltrate, because members did not know the identity of many other Ba'athists.

From its lowest organizational level (the cell) to the highest (the National Command), the party was structured as follows:

• The Cell or Circle, composed of three to seven members, constituted the basic organisational unit of the Ba'ath Party. There were two sorts of Cells: Member Cells and Supporter Cells. The latter consisted of candidate members, who were being gradually introduced into Party work without being granted membership privileges or knowledge of the party apparatus. At the same time, they were expected to follow all orders passed down by the full member that acted as the contact for their Cell. This served to prevent infiltration and to train and screen Party cadres. Cells functioned at the neighborhood, workplace, or village level, where members met to discuss and execute party directives introduced from above.

• A Division comprised two to seven Cells, controlled by a Division Commander. Such Ba'athist groups occurred throughout the bureaucracy and the military. They functioned as the Party’s watchdog and were an effective form of covert surveillance within a public administration.

• A Section, which comprised two to five Divisions, functioned at the level of a large city quarter, a town, or a rural district.

• The Branch came above the Sections; it comprised at least two sections, and operated at the provincial level.

• The Regional Congress, which combined all the branches, was set up to elect the Regional Command as the core of the Party leadership and top decision-making mechanism. A "Region" (quṭr), in Ba'athist parlance, is an Arab state such as Syria, Iraq, or Lebanon. The term region reflected the Party's refusal to acknowledge them as separate nation-states.

• The National Command ranked over the Regional Commands. Until the 1960s, it formed the highest policy-making and coordinating council for the Ba'ath movement throughout the Arab world, in both theory and practice. However, since 1966 when the Iraqi and Syrian Regional Commands entered into conflict and set up puppet National Commands, there have existed two rival National Commands. These are largely ceremonial, and were formed in order to further their rival claims to represent the original party.