The Ba`th Party: and land reform

I wrote in anger a few days ago against the lousy Ba`th Party and its harmful ways in the Arab world.  I argued that one can't speak of any achievements.  I still stand by that.  Comrade/friend Laleh wrote to me that I may have missed the issue of land reform in my argument.  I thought about that, and here it is.  I still believe that over all, the Ba`th Party has had no achievements to speak of in the Arab world.  To be sure, their secularism (which has been inconsistent: lousy Saddam Husayn discovered religion after his humiliating defeat in 1991, and the secularism of Salah Jadid was sincere, genuine, and hard-core--he was perhaps the most secular Arab leader to ever reach power, and more so than the South Yemeni Marxist regime) and their advancement of women's rights are preferable to the model of misogynist governments that are loyal to US government.  But still: the land reform has to be evaluated.  I also think that one should go back to that talk by Hannah Batatu at Harvard University in the late 1970s about the causes for the dominance of Syria's ruling groups in which he talks about sectarian flavors to land reform in Syria (he gave the project at Al-Ghabb region as example).  See also the assessment by Shaw in his article Political Economy of Inequality in the Arab world" published years ago in Arab Studies Quarterly.  By late 1970s, poverty rates in rural Egypt were between 40 to 70 %.  In Syria, there are differences in achievement between different regions.  In Syria in the Muhafazah of Damascus, only 14% of the male labor force were illiterate in 1975, while the percentage was 50% in the largely rural areas of Dayr Az-Zur, Al-Haskah, and Rak`ah.  As for 8 countries that undertook land reform under study, the total distributed land was less than 20% of the total arable land in 5 of the 8 countries.  In Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, the reforms were largely confined to the redistribution of lands that had been inherited at independence (not the usurping of private lands in the hands of nationals).  In Egypt, 5.4% of owners of land still held 45% of the land in 1970; the average size of the large owner was 7.3 hectares versus 0.8 hectares for the remaining 95%.  In six of the 8 countries examined, beneficiaries of land reform represented a mere 1 to 18.3% of the total agricultural households.  So yeah, the Arab world would have been far better off without the Ba`th, notwithstanding the great achievements of the party in the introduction of innovative torture techniques.