BAGHDAD, 14 May 2003 — The US administration for Iraq sacked its newly appointed Iraqi head of the Health Ministry yesterday after he refused to publicly denounce Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. A statement by the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) said Stephen Browning, the senior adviser to the ministry, asked Dr. Ali Shinan to resign “because he refused to denounce the Baath Party”.
The ORHA statement said Shinan would be appointed as a specialist at a local hospital with full benefits. Shinan’s appointment 10 days ago caused uproar in medical circles, with many doctors saying he was too close to Saddam’s government and demanding all senior ministry figures be changed.
Browning told a medical conference on Saturday that Shinan and other employees at the ministry had signed a statement denouncing the Baath Party but at a news conference after the meeting Shinan declined to denounce the ousted administration publicly when asked by journalists.
Shinan told reporters he had previously been appointed to his position of undersecretary in the ministry because of his skills, not because he was a member of Baath Party. “I was just an employee at the ministry,” he said. Iraq’s health service, desperate for medicine and equipment after years of sanctions, war and looting, is finding it hard to cope with its sick.
The US-sponsored Iraqi television news station complained of American censorship ahead of its first broadcast yesterday, including attempts to stop it airing passages from the Qur’an. If the network overcomes last-minute transmitter glitches, a country fed on a diet of state propaganda could see the start of what is being trumpeted as a new broadcasting era.
Meanwhile, Iraqi Shiite leader Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer Hakim said yesterday Iraq needed a broad based government to avoid a “social explosion”, apparently backing away from past calls for an Iranian-style Islamic state.
Baqer, who returned from two decades of exile in Iran last week, also said he wanted his group’s militia integrated into a new Iraqi national army following last month’s US-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein. “I will be working to set up a government which will represent all the people of Iraq, restore security, reconstruct it and take it out of its isolation,” Baqer told a news conference in the holy Shiite city of Najaf.
“The majority of Iraqi people are Shiite. They should have a political role but not to the exclusion of other Iraqi people,” he said. “We want a political revolution and government including all the parties and people of Iraq or there could be some kind of social explosion.”
Baqer, leader of the Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SAIRI), returned on Monday to Najaf, the seat of Iraqi Shiite clerical learning and place of his birth in 1939, to a tumultuous welcome.
