Baghdad, Iraq ? In a move that may signal a more measured attitude toward some members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath party, the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council said on Sunday it that would allow some senior Baathists to appeal their dismissals from government jobs or retire and receive pensions.

At an afternoon news conference, council member Ahmad Chalabi, a committed anti-Baathist and a favorite of civilian officials in the Pentagon, described how the coalition would distinguish hardcore Baathists from those who joined the party out of necessity. He called for an end to revenge killings of Baathists and described a two-judge appeals process that would reinstate some of the roughly 32,000 senior members of the party.

Chalabi denied that the move was a turnaround by the coalition, saying the council’s intention had always been not to exact revenge but “to cleanse Iraqi society and Iraqi state from the scourge of the Baath party.”

Critics of the Bush administration’s handling of postwar Iraq argue that the decisions to disband the 400,000-strong Iraqi Army and purge all senior Baathists in the government, done partly at the urging of Chalabi and other anti-Saddam Iraqis, fueled much of the anti-American insurgency.

The moves last May, among the first official acts by Paul Bremer, the top civilian administrator in Iraq, stripped more than 500,000 Iraqi soldiers and bureaucrats, most of them Sunni Muslims, of their jobs and incomes. The purges also deprived Iraq of many of the technocrats needed to restore security and rebuild the economy, and left Iraqis in the “Sunni Triangle” at the heart of the country with little say in how to govern postwar Iraq, the critics said.

A senior coalition official characterized Chalabi’s announcement Sunday as the final step in transferring “de-Baathification authority” from the coalition to the council, adding that the council’s policy would be much more focused on reconciliation and forgiveness.

British troops ready themselves to face protesters in the southern Iraqi city of Amarah. Sunday hundreds of Iraqis hurled stones at British soldiers, one day after clashes that killed six protesters and wounded at least 11.