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2 Maliki seeks a lifeline in
Syria By Sami Moubayed
which has the capacity of producing
200,000 barrels a day at a revenue of US$1.2
billion for Syria.
Instead of courting the
Sunnis, Maliki alienated them even more. He turned
a blind eye to the death squads that roam the
streets of Baghdad. He was unable to prevent a
backlash against the Sunni community after the
double Samara bombings in 2006 and 2007 that
resulted in targeting Sunni mosques, bombing Sunni
neighborhoods and target
killings of Sunni notables.
He then
sent emotions souring last December by ordering
the execution of Saddam in the early hours of the
Muslim holidays. Instead of giving them more power
within the government, he actually provoked them
into walking out of his coalition, and this led to
the recently walkout of the Iraqi Accordance
Front, with its six ministers, including the
deputy prime minister.
This week, nearly
100 armed gunmen, dressed in police uniforms and
driving 17 four-wheel jeeps that resemble those
used by the police, kidnapped the deputy minister
of oil, who is a Sunni from Mosul, along with five
of his team. For months, Maliki's opponents have
claimed that the prime minister tolerates militia
infiltration of the Ministry of Interior. Shi'ite
militias, they claim, use the police apparatus to
hunt down prominent Sunnis, arrest them, torture
them and sometimes liquidate them at the dungeons
of the ministry.
Maliki realizes that he
needs to act - fast - before his government falls
apart and before he loses what remains of US
support for his coalition. Already, 18 of his 37
ministers have walked out on him. This includes
the Sunnis of the Accordance Front, the seculars
of the Iraqi Nationalist List of former prime
minister Iyad Allawi, and the Sadrists of his
former ally Muqtada al-Sadr.
The Sunni
bloc has 44 seats in Parliament, out of a total of
275. Allawi's group has 25. Combined, the can
create trouble for the 128 members of the United
Iraqi Alliance that controls the parliamentary
majority - but they cannot bring it down. Although
he has worked hard to court the Kurds, as
substitutes for the Sadrists and Sunnis, even some
Kurdish leaders have voiced their displeasure at
his policies.
This week, Kurdish MP Mahmud
Othman said, "This government is suffering a great
deal of problems with everyone, including the
Kurds." Maliki realizes that there is a
mid-September deadline approaching for the Bush
administration to deliver its Iraq progress report
to Congress. So far, his security plan has failed
to bring security to the country.
This was
made all the more clear this week when five truck
bombs hit two villages in northwest Iraq, near the
Syrian border, killing up to 500 people in an area
of Kurdish-speaking ethnic Yazidis. This was the
worst terrorist attack since the US invasion in
2003. In March, a twin truck bombing killing 152
people in Tal Afar, and in July 155 Iraqis were
killed in a huge explosion in the town of Amerli.
One thing that Maliki can learn from Syria
during his two-day visit is how to resist
occupation. The Syrians were among the first in
the Arab world to end foreign occupation from the
French in 1946. They did that by rising above
sectarianism - by working as one united resistance
bloc, divided into warriors and diplomats - to end
the hated Mandate.
The National Bloc, as
it was called in Syria, was not a sectarian
movement, but a coalition of the educated, the
wealthy, and the notable, who worked together to
end the Mandate through diplomatic means - after
failure of armed resistance in 1925-1927.
Independence would never be achieved through
diplomacy alone, they reasoned, nor solely through
armed resistance.
Diplomacy complimented
resistance, they said. The bloc had Sunnis,
Shi'ites, Druze, Alawites and Christians. Syria
under the bloc produced a Christian prime minister
in 1944. He helped defend Syria's case before the
United Nations, at its founding conference in
1945. The Syrians can teach Maliki a lot about
what it means to be prime minister of a proud
nation like Iraq - where he is supposed to
represent and honor all sects of society, not only
those within his Shi'ite community that are loyal
to him, his branch of the Da'wa Party, and the
United Iraqi Alliance.
The bloc taught the
Syrians good citizenship. If Maliki finds the time
to walk down to the Qanawat neighborhood in Old
Damascus, he will come across the headquarters of
the National Bloc. From there, bloc leaders staged
a 60-day strike in 1936 objecting to French
measures in Syria. To break the strike, which was
answered to promptly by Syrian merchants
everywhere, the French forces went to the old
bazaars and forcefully opened the shops by
shooting their locks. Afraid that if left open,
their shops would be looted, the Syrian
businessmen hurried to obediently break the
strike.
A man in his mid-40s came to the
National Bloc office in Qanawat. He met with Faris
al-Khury, the future Christian prime minister.
"Let the shops remain open and we will guard them
for you Faris Bey," said the man. He turned out to
be the head burglar in Damascus. "If so much as
one item is stolen from the shops, hold me
directly responsible! To trust, keep my ID at your
office until the strike is finished. Don't let the
French defeat you!"
And in fact, for three
nights, the thieves of Damascus guarded the
streets of Damascus. This is not a fairytale, but
a true story told to the author by Munir
al-Ajlani, one of the politicians present at the
National Bloc office in Damascus in 1936.
Too bad Nuri al-Maliki did not get a
chance to meet him.
Sami
Moubayed is a Syrian political analyst.
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