BAGHDAD, 15 December 2005 — Angry Shiites marched yesterday and set fire to the offices of a secular politician to protest remarks made on a talk show on Al-Jazeera television, in which a Sunni Arab guest criticized Iraq’s Shiite religious leaders.
Fadel Al-Rubaei, a Sunni politician living in exile, said Shiite clerics should not take part in politics and accused them of conspiring with the Americans against the mostly Sunni insurgents.
The statements angered many Shiites, including many who did not see the Al-Jazeera show but saw reports on an Iraqi station, Al-Furat, owned by the biggest Iraqi Shiite party. Al-Furat said that legislator Abdul-Aziz Al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, “condemns violations against Shiites religious leaders broadcast through one of satellite channels known for its hatred to the Iraqi people.” Al-Jazeera officials in Qatar were not available for comment.
Their Baghdad correspondent, Atwar Bahjat, told The Associated Press that she resigned from her job “in protest of what the guest of the station said.” Hours later thousands of people chanted anti-Al-Jazeera slogans in the streets of different Baghdad neighborhood such as Sadr City and Karradah as well as the southern cities of Najaf and Kerbala.
The demonstrations, which turned into political rallies, threatened to further polarize the elections after angry Shiites in the southern city of Nassiriyah set fire to a building housing the offices of former interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. A secular Shiite, Allawi has campaigned on a platform calling for national reconciliation.
“The headquarters was attacked by militiamen who broke inside and set fire to the building. This is a terrorist act that contradicts democracy and this is the reason we are calling for eliminating the militia groups in Iraq,” Thaer Al-Naqib, Allawi’s spokesman, told The Associated Press.
Several Shiite groups still maintain armed militias. “Those militiamen consider the political process as a threat to them and they want to stop this process. Those militia groups are working against the hopes of the Iraqi people and they should be finished,” Al-Naqib added.
The Shiite United Iraqi Alliance, which currently holds majority seats in Parliament, is expected to do well in today’s general elections. Shiite spiritual leaders have indirectly asked their followers to vote for the slate.
“Clerics, especially those in the Shiite seminary, go to your mosques and don’t work in politics. Keep politics for politicians and stop conspiring against the resistance,” Al-Rubaei said in the Opposite Direction program aired Tuesday night and yesterday afternoon on the Qatar-based station.
Al-Rubaei said the Shiite clerics were “the biggest conspirators against the resistance. They are the ones who want it to die in its first confrontation with the Americans.”
A group of senior religious students in the Shiite holy city in Najaf, where the country’s top four Shiite clerics live, called the program “a provocation and flagrant aggression on the values and feelings of Muslims whether in Iraq or around the world.”
The statement said Al-Jazeera is “is financed by countries, governments, regimes, intelligence agencies and Muslim extremists who came to power through military coups.”
The students said people will respond to Al-Jazeera in polling stations today “in the most beautiful democratic wedding in the east.” They added that Al-Jazeera knows that the emir of Qatar came to power in a military coup against his father.
