BAGHDAD, 15 April 2003 — Baghdad’s Shiites, part of the majority religious group in Iraq, have broken a long silence to claim a status commensurate with the size of their community in any post-Saddam Hussein political arrangement.
“It is religious leaders, not the Americans, who control Iraq,” the imam of the Al-Rasul Mosque in a primarily Shiite suburb of northern Baghdad, stated confidently.
To drive the point home, Sayyed Ali Al-Shawki has surrounded himself with militiamen armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles plus a personal bodyguard, clad in black and with a silver gun tucked to his belt.
Other leaders of the Shiite community, which makes up some 60 percent of Iraq’s 25-million population, are similarly speaking freely for the first time since Saddam’s Baath Party seized control of the country in 1968 after a nine-month stint in power five years earlier.
They are talking to the press, listing their demands, and even issuing threats against Iraq’s new American masters.
“Under Saddam, we did not have the right to either talk or move, and the United States knew this full well. Why did it take them so long to act?” asked the imam.
The Shiites’ stronghold in Baghdad, known as Saddam City until US forces took over the capital last week and ended Saddam’s 24-year rule, has been renamed Al-Sadr City in honor of Mohammad Sadeq Al-Sadr, a senior Shiite authority who was assassinated in 1999 ostensibly by the Saddam regime.
The shantytown of two million people, once barred to journalists by Saddam’s security services and where any hint of dissent was crushed, has turned into a platform for an emerging political force.
But it is also from the impoverished suburb that looters set out to central Baghdad to ransack and set on fire the symbols of a state they accuse of repressing them, but also libraries and museums — indeed the collective memory of a country from which they felt excluded.
The violence was brought to an end by Shiite leaders only after the point was made and the message received. Mosque preachers urged the faithful to return the booty, again demonstrating the authority they wield over the community.
“We are a people who suffered a lot. Saddam deprived us of everything including freedom,” Sayyed Al-Shawki explained.
“The Iraqis wanted to express their joy (at Saddam’s ouster) as well as their quest for revenge. They later heeded the appeals of religious leaders and started bringing the stolen goods back to mosques. We will return them when we will have a democratic government,” he said.
As things stand now, the Shiites are not happy with the broad lines of a settlement spelled out by the administration of US President George W. Bush, notably apparent plans to give exiled opposition groups a major role.
“We thank the Americans if they came here to liberate us,” said Sayyed Al-Shawki, whose community is dominant in the south of the country.
“But if they are here to colonize us, we will regard them as enemies and fight them with all means,” he warned.
Like other Shiite prayer leaders sounded out in Al-Sadr City in recent days, the turbaned imam called for a government grouping all of Iraq’s major communities — Shiite, Sunni, Kurdish and even Christian.
But when asked about the ultimate objective of the Shiites’ claim to a major say in the future Iraq, he did not mince his words.
“Our objective is to set up an Islamic state, because this is the supreme ambition of all Arab and Muslim countries. All Muslim countries would like to see their governments applying shariah (Islamic law),” he said.
Meanwhile, Iraq’s main Shiite opposition group said yesterday it would boycott a US-sponsored meeting of Iraqi organizations in Iraq to map out the postwar political future of the country.
The Iranian-based Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which draws its support from Iraq’s Shiite majority, said today’s meeting in the southern Iraqi city of Nassiriyah would not benefit the Iraqi people.
“We are not going to attend the Nassiriyah meeting because it is not to the benefit of the Iraqi nation,” Abdelaziz Hakim, a SCIRI leader, told a news conference.
“From the beginning, independence has been our manifesto. We don’t accept a US umbrella or anybody else’s,” he said.
The Nassiriyah meeting will be overseen by retired US Gen. Jay Garner, head of a transitional administration charged with running Iraq immediately after the US-led war. About 60 Iraqis are expected to attend today’s talks. Hakim said SCIRI had told US authorities of its intention not to participate in the Nassiriyah meeting.
SCIRI spokesman Mohsen Hakim told Reuters later that, as far as he knew, most other groups would not take part or were just planning to send low-level representation. He said the meeting should pick up from where one held in London in December left off, when some 330 delegates representing six Iraqi opposition groups agreed a political blueprint for the country’s future.
“We have to have some clear and specific structure to go by,” he said. “It is not correct to start from scratch. We have to continue the same process started in London and that has to be the basis,” he said.
Asked at the news conference whether SCIRI risked being isolated at the start of efforts to rebuild Iraq, Abdelaziz Hakim said: “We want to participate in an Iraqi government, but based on the people’s votes.”
