Page 1 of
2 Even more good news for
Maliki By Sami Moubayed
DAMASCUS - On Sunday, the Iraqi Parliament
debated a draft bill granting permission to 14,000
former Ba'athists, all being from the Sunni
community, to rejoin government jobs and the armed
forces. All of them had been fired in 2003 in a
ill-advised process called de-Ba'athification,
engineered by US proconsul L Paul Bremer and the
United States' number one man in Iraq at the time,
Ahmad Chalabi.
Reconciliation with the
Sunnis is a demand put forward by Sunni notables
and the former US ambassador to Baghdad, Zalmay
Khalilzad. It has been echoed
at the highest level by Defense Secretary Robert
Gates and US President George W Bush. The
Americans believe that unless the Sunnis take part
in government, they will never share in the
rebuilding of Iraq, nor will they shoulder
responsibility for its security. Only when given
their former role in government and society (minus
the presidency), would they work for a stable Iraq
and successful political process, seeing it as an
extension of their own success, stability and
continuity.
Additionally, the Americans
realize that all of their major allies in the Arab
world (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, Jordan and
Qatar) are Sunni states which will not stand by
and watch Iraqi Sunnis being crushed by the
Shi'ites and Kurds. Not everybody in Iraq,
however, shares in the US's enthusiasm for
cooperation with the former Ba'athists, who total
1.4 million.
The new proposal says that
members of the former security services and
Republican Guards will be entitled to their
pensions, while ordinary partisans will be
reinstated to their jobs and considered eligible
to run for any office, including prime minister,
speaker of Parliament, or president, if voted for
by the Iraqi people.
This does not apply,
naturally, to the 38,000 senior Ba'athists who are
standing trial, or have been convicted, or crimes
under Saddam Hussein. Major disagreements were
clear at the heated parliamentary session, with
led to its postponement, spearheaded by Kurdish
deputies and members of the Sadrist bloc.
Having suffered persecution and genocide
at the hands of Saddam, both blocs were equally
opposed to any kind of cooperation with the
Ba'athists. They failed to see any difference
between Saddam loyalists who had actually ordered
the massacres, and Sunnis who had joined the
Ba'ath Party with the sole purpose of professional
development and social elevation. As far as the
Kurds and Shi'ites are concerned, all of them are
criminals for having worked with Saddam.
The proposal was turned down, Kurdish
member of Parliament Mohammad Othman said, because
Parliament speaker Mahmud Mashadani (a Sunni) had
not presented it to the legal committee of
Parliament (probably fearing that in its current
form, it would be immediately rejected). The
debate will continue.
Despite tremendous
US pressure applied on Prime Minister Nuri
al-Maliki to push his weight around for a
rapprochement with former Ba'athists, the Iraqi
leader stood by and watched the parliamentary
session in complete silence. Like the Sadrists and
the Kurds, he simply could not digest bringing the
Ba'athists back into power. He wanted the
parliamentary meeting to fail. As far as he is
concerned, there is no such thing as an "innocent
Ba'athist".
Recently, adding to Maliki's
anger, the disbanded Ba'ath Party announced that
it is willing to work with his rival, the prime
minister-in-waiting, Iyad Allawi. The Izzat Douri
branch of the Ba'ath announced it was "more than
willing to work with Allawi, because we see him as
a nationalist and Iraqi patriot, and not a
sectarian figure [like Maliki]." Although they do
not agree with all that Allawi did when serving as
prime minister in 2004 (mainly his ties to the US
Central Intelligence Agency), "we have no doubt
that he would represent the interests of Iraq, not
of Shi'ites, or Sunnis, or any other group
[another clear reference to the prime minister]".
But all of this is not new. The tug-of-war
between Ba'athists and leaders of post-2003 Iraq
has dominated political life in Baghdad. What's
new is the apparent willingness of Muqtada
al-Sadr, leader of the Sadrist bloc, to coordinate
with Kurdish politicians. Muqtada also sent a very
strong message to Kurdish politicians through one
of his top loyalists, member of Parliament Bahaa
al-Araji. Speaking to the Iraqi newspaper Ilaf,
Araji defended article 140 of the constitution,
pertaining to Kirkuk. That is certainly a new line
for the Sadrists. The article, which has caused a
storm in Iraqi political circles, calls for a
census and referendum in the oil-rich city to see
whether it can be incorporated into Iraqi
Kurdistan. In 1986, as part of his Arabization
process, Saddam called for the relocation of Arab
families to Kirkuk, the center of Iraq's petroleum
industry, to outnumber the Kurds living there. He
also uprooted thousands of Kurds from Kirkuk.
Since the downfall of Saddam's
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