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... and black-bereted Baghdad police
too
By Ian Urbina
The trouble
with democracy is that it has everything to do with the
rule of the majority. If 60 percent of a country
consists of one constituency, you can forget about
getting anything done without a significant portion of
them on board. Unfortunately for the Pentagon and the
White House, it is the 60 percent Shi'ite population of
Iraq that is proving most resistant to post-Saddam
Hussein plans.
Only days ago, all attention in
Iraq faced north. The media riveted on the unpredictable
effect of the Kurds, who were then in the process of
seizing the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. The scowls from the
Turkish capital Ankara and reprimands from Washington
were soon to follow. Now, all eyes look south as the
Shi'ites of Iraq prove ominously obstructionist to US
post-war plans.
Four recent events stand out
over the past week.
A crowd of anti-American Shi'ites in the city of
Najaf, led by Moqtada Sadr, surrounded the home of the
nation's top Shi'ite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali
Sistani, and ordered him to leave the city. Eventually
town elders convinced the crowd to disperse.
The same raucous crowd was suspected of having
stabbed and killed Ayatollah Sayyed Abdul Majid Khoei,
the London-based Shi'ite cleric who had been working
with US forces.
Then there was Kut. A cleric there opposed to the US
presence boldly announced that he was in charge of the
city. Marines had earlier attempted to get access to the
cleric, who is protected by over 20 armed guards, but a
crowd of more than 1,000 protesters forced the American
soldiers to retreat.
Finally, as US-led planning meetings get under way
in the city of Nasiriyah, Iraq's most important Shi'ite
group, the Supreme Assembly for the Islamic Revolution
in Iraq, or SAIRI, stated that it was boycotting the
event because it objected "to any process which is under
an American general". At the last minute, a low-level
representative was sent.
In the lead-up to the
war, the US had made some overtures toward opposition
Iraqi Shi'ite groups, but Washington did not succeed in
making real inroads or establishing solid relations.
Another complicating factor within the Shi'ite community
in Iraq is a group called Dawa Islamiyah, or Islamic
Call, which has several thousand fighters under arms.
Dawa agents almost succeeded in killing Uday Hussein,
the deposed Iraqi president's eldest son, in 1996,
shooting him 14 times as he drove in Baghdad. Dawa is
split into factions, some of which are based in Iran.
The fundamentalist, anti-Western supporters of Dawa are
said to have been very active since Saddam's demise -
they have taken control of Saddam City, a slum area of
Baghdad that is home to about 2 million Shi'ites and
last Sunday they renamed it Medina Sadr, or Sadr City.
But recent skirmishes and potential violence is
by no means limited right now to the Shi'ites. On
Tuesday, a crowd in the northern Sunni city of Mosul
allegedly attacked a group of Marines trying to take
over a government building. Iraqis threw rocks, hit the
Marines with fists and elbows and spat at them,
according to Brigadier General Vincent Brooks at US
Central Command in Doha, Qatar.
The next day,
three people were killed in Mosul and at least 11
injured, including several who said American troops
fired at them from rooftops. A Marine sergeant near the
scene said the Americans were responding to fire from
another rooftop.
Finally, the rioting in Baghdad
seems to be over. But the real question is whether the
slow-motion low-grade clashes now begin that could turn
the situation into a quagmire.
In all
likelihood, the initial looting in the capital was not a
shock to US war planners. What else would they expect
when a vacuum opens where decades worth of repression
once was? Yet, these same planners probably did not
think it wise to have US Marines immediately turning on
Iraqi civilians. Let the reveling take its course for a
short stint and wait until an international cry went up
to intervene.
Once Iraqis themselves were seen
to be pleading for the restoration of order, which many
were, then it was safe for US forces to make a move.
Average Baghdad residents surely hoped to see the
streets returned to calm, but they also faced a choice
between two bitter pills. On the one hand, an occupying
army, few of whose soldiers speak the native language
but most of whom were now were manning checkpoints and
policing neighborhoods. On the other hand, local control
handed back to the very same black-bereted Baghdad
police officers, many of whom likely committed some of
the ugliest of day-to-day atrocities under Saddam.
Clearly, it will not just be the Shi'ites in the south
who look with fast growing frustration at the US
presence.
For the time being, it is not clear
which is the stronger emotion taking hold: the desire of
Iraqis to have the US forces live up to their promises
of democracy, meanwhile fixing what they destroyed in
their pursuit of Saddam. Or the desire for US forces to
hurry up and get out of their country. Either way,
tensions are mounting and the clock is ticking.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication
policies.)
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