BAGHDAD, 17 March 2005 — Iraq’s Sunni minority watched the opening of the new Iraqi Parliament yesterday straddling a fence, torn between support of the deadly insurgency and a wish to join the democratic process. If the first session of Parliament was a celebration of democracy for Iraq’s long persecuted Shiites and Kurds, the Sunnis, who ruled the country for most of its 85-year modern history, found it a stinging reminder of how far the mighty had fallen.
The Sunnis, who make up around 20 percent of Iraq’s 27-million population, are trying to reconcile themselves to their new destiny as just one face among the many. Iraq’s insurgency has sprung up mainly in central Iraq in Sunni Muslim areas, where anger about the US-led invasion two years ago and the meteoric rise of the Shiites persuaded many to take up armed struggle or democratic politics.
Sunni politician Meshaan Jabouri, a member of the new Parliament, embodies the contradictions. He draws a distinction between good and bad resistance fighters. “We are part of the resistance but we are relying on peaceful ways to drive out the occupiers. They think that arms is the best weapon (to fight the occupation). We are brothers complementing each other,” he said.
Genuine regret over the Sunni decision to boycott the Jan. 30 election appears to exist in the community. The vote left the Sunnis with a paltry 20 Parliament seats and handed the long-oppressed Kurds disproportionate influence in the next government. But the Sunnis have yet to reconcile themselves to the new political order. The Shiite and Kurdish victors have repeatedly stated their wish to have Sunnis represented in government posts and the committee that will draft Iraq’s permanent constitution.
In a bid to organize the Sunnis politically, Iraq’s outgoing president, tribal magnate Sheikh Ghazi Al-Yawar, whose list gained five seats, has established an alliance with the Islamic Party and elder Shiite and Kurdish leaders on Tuesday for talks on forming the next government. “The committee maintains its position: We will not take part in the government as long as the country is under occupation. But we do not oppose those who want to take part to serve the country and pull it out of its misery,” Sunni cleric Harith Al-Dari, who heads the organization, said on Tuesday.
But questions remain whether the establishment parties truly represent Sunnis, who are now widely seen as lacking any coherent voice. “It’s almost like what you had is a glass statue and you smashed it with a hammer and all you’ve got is these pieces. And that’s the state of the Iraqi community today. It’s really fractured,” a Western diplomat told AFP. “The only thing that I think is going to help is to very quickly organize some broadly representative caucuses or meetings.
Senior Sunni politician Nasser Al-Chaderchi worries that the Sunni community is too caught up in the romanticism of violent resistance. This is illogical, and unacceptable. It is an extreme speech aimed at erasing others which is something unbelievable. “They (Sunnis) are against Shiites and Kurds and do not accept the idea of having power rotating democratically. They are against the interim constitution and against democracy in Iraq.”
He criticized many of the Sunni groups for failing to break unequivocally with the insurgency. “First of all, Sunni Islamic and nationalist parties should have the courage to condemn terrorism in all of its shapes,” the politician said. The paradox is on full display among the religious hierarchy who have eclipsed any secular Sunni leadership with the fall of Saddam Hussein.
“Honest resistance is a crown that should be put on head of Iraqis and we cannot give it up. But that does not mean that we are to give up being part of the political process,” says Sheikh Rafi Al-Samarrai, a member of the Sunni Waqf (endowments), a body responsible for administering Sunni mosques and charitable works.
And Shiites realize they need to reach out to the country’s fragmented communities if they are to rule. The United Iraqi Alliance list, blessed by the community’s spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, holds 146 of the 275 seats in the assembly, which puts Shiites in the driving seat for the first time in modern history.
Although they held some 30 percent of government positions under the monarchy which was overthrown in 1958 and were influential in both the Communist and Baath parties before Saddam Hussein’s rise in the 1970s, Shiites never held the reins of power. “This is a historic day Iraqis have elected a government that truly represents them. Iraqis are hoping that the national assembly will form a government that will serve them better,” said Hussein Shahrastani, a nuclear scientist jailed 10 years under Saddam for refusing to work on his weapons program.
“Shiites ... feel that on this day the blood of the victims defeated tyranny. And that now they can build a future in a civilized and democratic way for their children to spare them what they had to live through.” With Saddam came decades of brutal oppression as his system of selective patronage favored members of his Sunni Tikrit clan.
The former strongman also held deep suspicions that many Shiites, who make up about 60 percent of the population, were more loyal to neighboring Iran and its ruling Shiite clerics. Shiites bore the brunt of fighting in Saddam’s successive wars against Iran and Kuwait. With Saddam’s fall came liberation and now the burden of power.
“The permanent constitution should be accepted by all components, by all the people of Iraq, except for the terrorists,” Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim, the head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq party, recently told AFP in an interview. SCIRI, which is a leading member of the alliance, was based for nearly two decades in Iran before Saddam’s fall and was shaped by the idea of a building a theocracy in Iraq.
