BAGHDAD, 17 August 2003 — Even as the United Nations voted to welcome Iraq’s “Governing Council”, the United States was increasing the already intense security surrounding it.
Iraq’s US administrator Paul Bremer has issued orders for no fewer than 120 new security guards to be found to guard the 25 members of the council appointed by the US to help run its occupation. Already, the council members are almost never seen in public. They meet behind closed doors in a building set back half a mile from the road. No one is allowed in unless they are personally met by a member of the council, and then they have to pass through two checkpoints manned by American soldiers.
The new security arrangements were ordered after the bombing of the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad last week, and the Americans are presenting them as an effort to protect the council from Saddam Hussein loyalists and the foreign militants the US claims are now slipping into Iraq.
But the reality is that the Governing Council has more to worry about. Its members need protection from the ordinary Iraqi people they are supposed to “govern” as much as from anyone. That is the real reason they are almost never seen in public here.
“If Chalabi walked down the street without security guards, the people might kill him,” was the opinion of one Iraqi, referring to the member of the council most often singled out for loathing by Iraqis, Ahmad Chalabi.
The Americans were disappointed the UN did not vote in the early hours of Friday morning to give the Governing Council full recognition, but they are hoping the vote to “welcome” the council will at least give it some legitimacy. But on the Iraqi street, it has none.
“We want the Americans to go and take the Governing Council with them,” said Salman Hatem, a young bookseller in Baghdad’s Friday book market. Wherever you go, from the book market to Shia slums of Sadr City, you hear nothing but contempt for the council. “As far as we are concerned, all of the council are looters,” said Sabah Al-Bahadi, a shopkeeper in Sadr City.
The council is hardly made up of people with respectable pasts. Chalabi is wanted in Jordan for his alleged role in the multi-million dollar Petra Bank fraud. Iraqis also accuse other members of the council of shady pasts in organized crime.
The council has not helped its image problems with its ineptness so far. For one thing, there was Chalabi’s decision to thank the Americans for invading in his first speech, which did not go down well with Iraqis who had been watching their loved ones die under the American bombs while Chalabi was safe.
The council’s first decision was to cancel all the existing Iraqi national holidays — hardly a move to make it popular with the local population. Then it made things worse by naming April 9, the day the Americans captured Baghdad, as a new holiday.
“How can any country celebrate the day on which its capital was occupied by foreigners?” one Iraqi asked angrily.
Since then, the council has been bogged down in squabbling over who gets which jobs. First the members couldn’t agree who would be leader, so they agreed to appoint nine leaders, who share the presidency on a rotating basis. Then they couldn’t agree on who would get to be leader of the nine first, so it had to be alphabetic. Now they are arguing over who gets which ministerial portfolio. But the council’s problems go deeper. “Yes to an elected council, no to an appointed council” read banners hung in the streets of Basra, in the south.
“Who elected them?” asked Qais Atta, a Shiite in Sadr City. “They are a tool in the United States’ hand.” The Council was not elected by the Iraqi people — it was appointed by Bremer. And the people he chose have infuriated Iraqis. Many are former Iraqi opposition leaders who spent years living in exile.
“We want people from inside Iraq, who were suffering like us, interred in the prisons,” said Atta.
Worse than this, some of the council’s members spent their years of exile in Iran, leading opposition groups funded by the Iranian government. Iran is still loathed and regarded as an enemy by many Iraqis because of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war which left hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead.
“Iran is invading us more than the US. They reach even to the Governing Council. The council was established outside our borders. Half of them are backed by Iran,” said Mohammed Dahag, in the book market.
