NICOSIA, 22 April 2003 — Ahmed Chalabi, touted as a possible future leader of Iraq, has managed to maintain close ties with the US authorities despite finding himself on the wrong side of the law in Jordan. For Chalabi was sentenced to 22 years hard labor in 1992 after being tried in his absence concerning the mysterious disappearance of $60 million from the Petra Bank, which he set up in 1977 and which crashed in 1989.
But it is for his checkered political career that Chalabi is currently under the microscope. Even so, the damning assessment of the Qatari newspaper Al-Watan is that Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress (INC) movement are little more than “failures” and “not even qualified to run a grocery shop”.
As leader of the INC, one of the foremost Iraqi opposition movements, the 57-year-old former businessman has become one of his country’s best known political figures in exile and even tipped as a possible successor to Saddam Hussein. However, he has consistently denied that he is a candidate for office in the new Iraq he and the INC faithful are preparing to help the US interim government build.
He is also on record as expressing the hope that American troops will remain on Iraqi soil until after the country has held democratic elections and put a new government in place, echoing Washington’s position that it should be the United States and not the United Nations who supervise the peace. A member of Iraq’s Shiite Muslim majority community born into a wealthy banking family in 1945, Chalabi left Iraq in 1958 when the revolution overthrew King Faisal II.
He has lived mainly in the United States and London ever since, working as a mathematics professor after taking degrees from Chicago University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Chalabi has managed to forge strong links with US Vice President Dick Cheney and other hawks around the White House, another argument used against him by his detractors, and one reason why he has little popular support in Iraq.
He has been accused of using the INC to further his own ambitions, but he has always claimed: “I am not seeking any positions. My job will end with the liberation of Iraq from Saddam’s rule.”
The low point in Chalabi’s political career came in 1995 when he and the INC tried to organize an uprising in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, which ended in abject failure with hundreds of deaths.
He immediately found that the CIA withdrew their support and the INC was chased from northern Iraq when Saddam’s troops overran its base in Arbil. Many party officials were executed but others, Chalabi among them, managed to flee the country.
Chalabi is often described as a controversial figure, charismatic and determined but crafty and cunning at the same time. His conviction for fraud still hangs over him but he has always maintained it was the result of a plot by Baghdad to frame him.
In 1998, then US President Bill Clinton approved a plan to spend almost $100 million to back the Iraqi opposition, principally the INC, to topple Saddam. But only a fraction of the money was ever spent, and the INC was plunged into bitter internal squabbling, although Chalabi insists the movement is now united behind him.
Chalabi said yesterday that Saddam Hussein is still inside the country, and his son Qusay has been seen over the weekend in the heart of Baghdad. “Yes, he (Saddam) is in Iraq.
Yes, he is moving around,” Chalabi said in an interview with BBC radio in Baghdad. “We have received information about his movements and the movements of his sons,” he said, but added that the information reached Chalabi’s sources too late for them to locate Saddam before he had moved on again.
“We cannot locate Saddam so that we would have a coincidence of time and position simultaneously ... But we are aware of his movements and we are aware of the areas that he has been to and we learn of this within 12 to 24 hours,” Chalabi said. “We will work to develop more information about his whereabouts,” he said.
