''YANKEES GO HOME'' dicono unanimi gli elettori ex-irakeni
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/24/international/middleeast/24shiites.html?th=&oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=
January 24, 2005
POLITICS
Shiites in Iraq Say Government Will Be Secular
By DEXTER FILKINS
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 21 - With the Shiites on the brink of capturing power here for the first time, their political leaders say they have decided to put a secular face on the new Iraqi government they plan to form, relegating Islam to a supporting role.
The senior leaders of the United Iraqi Alliance, the coalition of mostly Shiite groups that is poised to capture the most votes in the election next Sunday, have agreed that the Iraqi whom they nominate to be the country's next prime minister would be a lay person, not an Islamic cleric.
The Shiite leaders say there is a similar but less formal agreement that clerics will also be excluded from running the government ministries.
"There will be no turbans in the government," said Adnan Ali, a senior leader of the Dawa Party, one of the largest Shiite parties. "Everyone agrees on that."
The decision appears to formalize the growing dominance of secular leaders among the Shiite political leadership, and it also reflects an inclination by the country's powerful religious hierarchy to stay out of the day-to-day governing of the country. Among the Shiite coalition's 228 candidates for the national assembly, fewer than a half dozen are clerics, according to the group's leaders.
The decision to exclude clerics from the government appears to mean that Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, a cleric who is the chief of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the scion of a prominent religious family and an oft-mentioned candidate for prime minister, would be relegated to the background. The five Shiites most likely to be picked as prime minister are well-known secular figures.
Shiite leaders say their decision to move away from an Islamist government was largely shaped by the presumption that the Iraqi people would reject such a model. But they concede that it also reflects certain political realities - American officials, who wield vast influence here, would be troubled by an overtly Islamist government. So would the Kurds, who Iraqi and American officials worry might be tempted to break with the Iraqi state.
The emerging policies appear to be a rejection of an Iranian-style theocracy. Iran has given both moral and material support to the country's two largest Shiite parties, Dawa and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
The conviction that the Iranian model should be avoided in Iraq is apparently shared by the Iranians themselves. One Iraqi Shiite leader, who recently traveled to Tehran, the Iranian capital, said he was warned by the Iranians themselves against putting clerics in the government.
"They said it caused too many problems," the Iraqi said.
The secular tilt comes as Shiite leaders prepare for what they regard as a historic moment: after decades of official repression, the country's largest group now seems likely to take the helm of the Iraqi state. Mindful of that opportunity, and of previous opportunities missed, the Shiite leaders running for office say they are determined to exercise power in a moderate way, which would include bringing Sunnis into the government and ignoring some powerful voices in their own ranks that advocate a stronger role for Islam in the new constitution.
Still, for all the expressions of unity, just how much consensus exists within the coalition is unclear, as is the coalition's very survival beyond the elections. The Shiite leaders, and the rank and file in the Iraqi electorate, represent a wide array of political visions, and those blocs could rise or fall in influence over time.
Important Shiite clerics like Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani already exert considerable influence in the background, although his brand of Islam is thought to be relatively moderate. Shiite leaders like Mr. Hakim will probably continue to use their power behind the scenes; his views are thought to be more conservative.
During the drafting of the country's interim constitution last year, Mr. Hakim and others pushed for an expansive role for Islam in the new state, as well as restrictions on the rights of women.
Some Iraqis expressed concern that the more radical Shiites, notably the followers of Moktada al-Sadr, would be difficult to control once the election is over.
Mr. Sadr, a young firebrand who led a series of revolts against American forces in the spring and summer, has been silenced for now, and 14 of his followers are candidates in the Shiite coalition. But in mosques and in more private communications, Mr. Sadr and his supporters continue to express support for armed rebellion and for a boycott of the election.
The challenge, the Shiite leaders say, will be holding their coalition together after Jan. 30, when the jockeying for power, in what is likely to be a coalition government, begins.
"It was very difficult to bring the coalition together," said Ali Faisal, a leader of Iraqi Hezbollah, a Shiite party that is part of the group. "There is a good chance that it will fall apart."
If the Shiite coalition were to crumble, Shiite leaders fear, they could lose ground to the interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, a secular-minded Shiite, or to the Kurdish parties, which are unified on a single slate and which will probably benefit from a large turnout.
Kurdish leaders have already begun to talk up the prospect of Jalal Talabani, the leader of the Patriotic Union for Kurdistan, getting the post of president, which would give him enormous power in shaping the composition of the new government.
The Shiite coalition, known as the United Iraqi Alliance, was pulled together under the leadership of Ayatollah Sistani, the country's most powerful Shiite cleric and a native of Iran. Ayatollah Sistani, without formally endorsing any political party, has issued an Islamic edict calling on all eligible Iraqi Shiites to vote.
The Shiite coalition is widely expected to pull in the largest number of votes on election day. Shiites make up about 60 percent of the electorate here, and if, as expected, large numbers of Iraqi Sunnis boycott the election, then Shiites could capture an even larger percentage of the national assembly seats.
The decision to exclude clerics from the senior positions in the Iraqi government has set off a scramble for the post of prime minister. Under the election rules, the prime minister is to be chosen by the party or group that forms a government, presumably by the group that wins the largest number of seats in the 275-member national assembly.
Among the Shiites, the leading candidates for prime minister are thought to be Adil Abdul Mahdi, the Iraqi finance minister and a leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq; Ibrhaim Jofferey, the head of the Dawa Party; Hussein Shahristani, a nuclear scientist; and Ahmad Chalabi, who marshaled support for the toppling of Saddam Hussein's government in the Bush administration and has since become a pariah. All are candidates for the United Iraqi Alliance.
All four candidates are secular-minded leaders who spent much of their lives in exile. They maintain that they will borrow from Islam's tenets in writing the country's constitution, the main task for the new government, but will ensure that the Iraqi state does not have a religious cast.
Mr. Mahdi, for instance, flirted with communism in his youth, has two master's degrees from French universities and maintains a home in France. Mr. Shahristani was educated in Canada and is married to a Canadian. Mr. Chalabi, the most overtly secular of the group, has a doctorate in mathematics and spent much of the past 30 years in Britain and the United States. Dr. Jofferey is a medical doctor who lived in London.
Also a contender for the prime minister's job is Dr. Allawi, the current head of the Iraqi government, who was chosen last June by the United Nations envoy, Lakdhar Brahimi, and the American leadership. Dr. Allawi is running for the national assembly as the leader of his own slate of candidates, called the Iraqi List.
Dr. Allawi's chances to remain as prime minister are thought to depend not just on how well his group does at the polls, but on how well the United Iraqi Alliance fares. If Dr. Allawi's group performs well, and the Shiite coalition less well, then Dr. Allawi, Shiite leaders say, could become a leading candidate for prime minister. It was a deadlock between Dawa and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq last June that allowed Dr. Allawi to become minister.
That principal trend in Iraqi Shiism, known as quietism, rejects the kind of political role for the clergy that it has in Iran. Indeed, some prominent Iraqi Shiite religious leaders note that the Iranian government, after taking power in 1979, marginalized and persecuted Iranian followers of the quietist school in that country.
"It's a completely different concept of government," Mr. Shahristani said, referring to the Iraqi government. "The Iraqi government and the constitution will seek neither an Islamic government nor the participation of Islamic clerics in the government."
The ayatollahs will not be part of the government in any way or express views on day-to-day governance."
Ayatollah Sistani, though an adherent of the quietest school, has involved himself in every step of the political process here. Though he has stopped short of endorsing political candidates, he has come close to backing the Shiite slate. Earlier this month, some candidates in Dr. Allawi's slate protested that the use of Ayatollah Sistani's picture on the United Iraqi Alliance's election posters violated the ban on the use of religious symbols.
Indeed, some Iraqi Shiite leaders say it will probably fall to Ayatollah Sistani to hold the coalition together once the election is over.
Shiite leaders agree that the biggest task facing the next Iraqi government will be mollifying the Sunni Arabs, who they have displaced as Iraq's dominant group. The Sunnis are a minority in Iraq but a majority in the rest of the Arab world, and some of their leaders have had a difficult time reconciling themselves to a subordinate role.
While Shiite leaders say they intend to reach out to the Sunnis, they will have to overcome no small amount of suspicion. Publicly, that suspicion is usually expressed by making reference to Iran, the powerful Shiite-majority neighbor to the east.
"We're not afraid of the Shia or the Kurds governing Iraq," said Sheik Moayad Brahim al-Adhami, leader of the Abu Hanifa mosque, a Sunni bastion in Baghdad. "But what we're afraid of is a fundamentalist representing a foreign country's interests."
Edward Wong contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article.
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I will bring al-Sadr into government, says the man tipped to be Iraq's new PM
By Toby Harnden in Baghdad
(Filed: 06/02/2005)
A leading contender to become Iraq's new prime minister has offered to welcome Moqtadr al-Sadr, the demagogic Shia cleric behind bloody uprisings against coalition forces, into a new government expanded to include those who boycotted the election.
Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a moderate Shia whose United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) list is certain to top last weekend's poll, told The Telegraph that Sadr, wanted for alleged involvement in the hacking to death of a fellow cleric, was "a good person" who could play a constructive role in the new Iraq.
"Moqtadr Sadr's father was killed by Saddam Hussein," he said. "He has a large number of followers. We can involve them. If they are not killers, and if we have no evidence against them, then we can give them a chance to share in the political process."
His comments show the lengths to which Iraq's likely new leaders are prepared to go in order to divide the insurgency and marginalise its most fanatical elements. Last spring, American spokesmen were insisting that Sadr, whose rebel Mahdi army has killed British and American troops, be "killed or captured". Sadr, who on Friday called for all coalition troops to be withdrawn, also has ties with figures in Iran who might welcome failure in Iraq.
As he staked his claim for the premiership, Dr Jaafari, who lived in exile in Britain before the US-led invasion of Iraq and still maintains a family home in Wembley, north London, also said there could be a role for leaders of Iraq's Sunni minority who boycotted the poll. "It's not necessary that all those who are going to share in the government should have participated in the election," he said. "We have Sunni brothers who do not believe in elections and we respect them. We think they are very honest and talk frankly."
Dr Jaafari, 57, sipped lemon tea in his office in a mansion that overlooks an ornamental lake in the heavily protected Green Zone, as he set out his ambitious agenda for drawing both Sunni rejectionists and disaffected Shia into government.
He lives under constant threat of assassination and, although the notion initially offended his sensibilities, American guards use sniffer dogs to check all electronic items brought into the building, while a US Army Humvee is stationed outside.
The new assembly, which will draw up Iraq's constitution, is supposed to have 275 members, but Dr Jaafari, a physician who advocates a moderate Islamic state, said more seats could be added: "In politics, nothing is fixed. We are dealing with something new."
Even former members of the Ba'ath Party, which forced him into exile, could take part so long as they did not have blood on their hands. "We have to be open to all those within our country, with the exception of those who have killed our people," he said.
That formulation would open the door to followers of Sadr, whose Mahdi army killed soldiers but generally refrained from targeting civilians, and will please Sunni politicians. Adnan Pachachi, the octogenarian elder statesman of Iraq who was foreign minister before the Ba'athists seized power in 1968, said former insurgents, particularly disaffected supporters of Saddam's regime, could be accommodated.
"If they have committed terrible crimes, that's another matter, they have to be tried in a court of law," he said. "But others… there is a possibility of involving them."
Dr Jaafari's name was second on the UIA list, which had the blessing of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Shia Islam's most revered religious leader. It is believed that Abdel Aziz Hakim, the cleric who headed the list, is not interested in becoming prime minister, but Adel Abdel Mahdi, now finance minister and also on it, is a strong contender.
Early results from some mostly Shia provinces last week suggest that the UIA has won a wide victory over the rival and secular "Iraqi list", headed by Ayad Allawi, the interim prime minister, whom many Shia leaders regard as unacceptable. Polls last year found Dr Jaafari to be Iraq's most popular politician and its most recognised leader after Mr Sistani.
Dr Jaafari is stressing secular values, in an attempt to reassure potential partners in what may be a multi-party government. Limiting the rights of women was unacceptable, he said. "This would cause a problem between me and my wife because she is a surgeon. She can open an abdomen but not drive a car? It is not logical."
Asked if Dr Allawi could remain prime minister, Dr Jaafari suggested it would be undemocratic to give the job to a man who finished a distant second: "We have to respect the choice of the voters and prove we are really taking into consideration the process of election." He was ready, he confirmed, to lead Iraq. "My goal was the election and I have no larger ambition. But suppose my people choose me, probably I'm going to agree."
Mr Pachachi said: "The horse trading has already begun."
Iraq's Sunnis Rethink Strategy
Conciliatory Line Carries Conditions
(The Washington Post)
Al-Sistani-backed alliance leads in Iraq vote
United Iraqi Alliance outpolls Allawi group; no Sunni-area tally yet
MSNBC News Services
Updated: 5:36 p.m. ET Feb. 4, 2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S.-backed Prime Minister Ayad Allawi was trailing a Shiite Muslim ticket with ties to Iran in Iraq’s historic election, according to partial returns released Friday.
Meanwhile, two U.S. soldiers were killed and eight others were wounded by roadside bombs in the north, and an Iraqi contractor working with the U.S. military was gunned down in a drive-by shooting Friday west of the capital, U.S. and Iraqi reports said.
The United Iraqi Alliance, which has the endorsement of Iraq’s top Shiite clerics, including the widely revered Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, won more two-thirds of the 3.3 million votes counted so far, the election commission said. Allawi’s ticket was running second, with more than 579,700 votes.
The partial figures from Sunday’s contest for 275 National Assembly seats came from 10 of Iraq’s 18 provinces, said Hamdiyah al-Husseini, an election commission official. All 10 provinces have heavy Shiite populations, and the alliance had been expected to do well there. So far, 45 percent of the vote has been counted in Baghdad, with varying percentages tallied in the other nine provinces.
Nevertheless, the huge lead the Shiites were rolling up among their core constituency in the Shiite heartland of southern Iraq pointed to the likelihood of a tremendous victory, enabling the majority community to claim power long denied it by the Sunni Arab minority.
Sunni views
No returns have been released from mainly Sunni provinces north and west of the capital. That has sparked fears that the Sunni Arab minority, which forms the backbone of the insurgency, will reject any government and constitution that emerge from the election.
Shiite Muslims, however, turned out in droves to vote, seizing the opportunity to turn their majority status in Iraq into political power for the first time.
The Alliance appears to have reaped the greatest benefit, even though Allawi is a secular Shiite.
The Alliance’s leader, Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, and others among its top candidates spent years of exile in Iran, helping build a movement against Saddam Hussein and building ties with the regime there. Although many clerics are on the ticket, its officials have said they do not seek to impose Islamic law in Iraq.
The number of seats a political faction wins in the National Assembly will be based on the proportion of votes each receives. About 14 million Iraqis were eligible to vote; the turnout has not been announced.
The Alliance also won a plurality among the 265,000 votes cast by Iraqis abroad, with 36 percent, compared to 29 percent for the main Kurdish coalition and 9 percent for Allawi, according to a complete count released by the International Organization for Migration, which organized the vote in 14 countries.
Allawi, who lived in exile in Britain under Saddam’s rule, had been expected to draw support from many voters outside Iraq.
Voting complaints
A definitive outcome is not expected for at least six days, but although horse-trading and negotiation over who would take which spots in the next government have begun.
As the partial returns continued to be tallied in Baghdad, election officials also announced that they were investigating allegations of voting irregularities in Mosul and other areas. The complaints ranged from a shortage of ballots to polling stations that never opened because of the volatile security conditions.
Many of the complaints were emerging from areas of the country dominated by Sunni Arabs. The Sunni minority appeared to have stayed away from the polls in large numbers either because of violence or calls for a boycott from clerics and politicians who objected to holding elections under foreign occupation.
There were concerns that the Sunnis, who lost their privileged status in Iraq with the fall of Saddam’s Sunni-dominated regime, would be further alienated if few of their leaders joined the National Assembly and the resulting government. That could also add fuel to an insurgency that is largely driven by Sunni extremists.
U.S. welcomes drop in attacks
Thursday, a U.S. Stryker combat vehicle rolled over several anti-tank mines, killing a U.S. soldier and injuring another. Fighting in Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city, has been heavy in the past three months, since rebels launched an uprising there that drove off nearly all of the city’s Iraqi police force.
Another U.S. soldier died Friday when a roadside bomb hit a patrol near Beiji, 155 miles north of Baghdad. Seven other soldiers were wounded, the U.S. military said. At least 1,443 U.S. military personnel have died in Iraq since the war began in March 2003.
The U.S. military, however, said the number of attacks had declined significantly since election day, when there were 125 strikes on U.S. and coalition forces. Since then, then they have dropped sharply.
“We have reason to believe that’s been the case over the past two days, although we don’t have figures yet,” said Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad. “There’s no way of knowing if this is going to be a continuing trend — we can’t foretell what the insurgency is going to do — and we don’t want to raise expectations.”
Instead, the insurgents appear to have stepped up their targeting of Iraqi security forces and others perceived to be working with the Americans. At least 32 people have been killed since Wednesday night.
In a statement posted Friday on the Web, the terrorist group al-Qaida in Iraq, led by Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, vowed to carry out attacks against military targets in the coming days. The authenticity of online statements could not be verified.
Army Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. general in charge of training Iraqi troops, said Friday that the intimidation of Iraqi soldiers has hampered U.S. efforts to build a reliable security force.
The Iraqi units have suffered “losses due to severe intimidation,” Petraeus, speaking from Baghdad, told reporters at the Pentagon. He did not cite an absentee or desertion rate, and he offered no other specifics.
Other developments
West of the capital Friday, an Iraqi contractor was gunned down by assailants who pulled up next to his car on the dangerous desert highway running out to Baghdad International Airport. The man was in charge of a road construction project inside the airport complex that was contracted by the U.S. military, Iraqi police Lt. Akram al-Zoubaie said.
A female Italian journalist was kidnapped by gunmen Friday near Baghdad University, Italian and Iraqi officials said Friday.
U.S. military sources confirmed that they were holding three Frenchmen who were captured while fighting alongside insurgents near Fallujah in November. They were thought to have been recruited by a now-defunct Islamic network in France.
A roadside bomb hit a U.S. military convoy Friday in downtown Baghdad but caused no casualties, witnesses said.
Overnight in northern Baghdad, gunmen entered a Shiite mosque and ordered several guards to leave the building, which they then rigged with explosives, area residents said. The blast blew a small hole in a wall of the Tawhid Mosque. Sunni insurgents have targeted several Shiite mosques in bomb attacks in recent weeks.
In the west, a roadside bomb exploded as a U.S. convoy passed on a highway near Qaim, on the Syrian border. The blast damaged a Humvee, a witness said. The U.S. military had no immediate details.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6913272/
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ELECTIONS IN IRAQ
Iraqi clerics lead unsettled vote
Politicians led by Shiite Muslim clerics are dominating early Iraqi election results as violence again surged.
BY TOM LASSETER
Knight Ridder News Service
BAGHDAD - A Shiite Muslim political group dominated by religious clerics, the United Iraqi Alliance, is leading the Iraqi national elections by a landslide, according to partial results released Thursday by the national electoral commission.
As the results trickled out, grumbling over irregularities in the elections grew louder.
And violence surged in an indication that the vote didn't quell the insurgency, as interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi had boasted earlier this week:
• Insurgents pulled 14 Oil Ministry guards off a bus in northern Iraq late Wednesday and shot 12 of them dead on the side of the road, leaving two to tell others not to work for Iraqi security forces, the Defense Ministry said.
• A suicide car bomber rammed into a convoy of SUVs being escorted by U.S. military Humvees on Baghdad's airport road, leaving vehicles smoldering and an unknown number of casualties. Nearby, another insurgent attack killed five Iraqi police and an Iraqi soldier.
• A police convoy leaving Baghdad for southern Iraq was ambushed; at least one was killed and five wounded.
• The death of a second Marine killed in fighting in western Iraq was announced by the U.S. military. Both Marines died Wednesday in Anbar province, home to the restive city Fallujah, where sounds of a fierce gun battle could be heard late Thursday.
Amid the violence, complaints about the vote grew. There are allegations that thousands of Christians weren't allowed to vote in northern Iraq. Sunni Muslims were met with closed polling stations in central Iraq, according to anecdotal evidence. Several politicians said the United Iraqi Alliance used religious threats in southern Iraq to bring out the vote.
PARTIAL RESULTS
The electoral commission made public the results of 1.6 million votes across six provinces in the southern Shiite region of the country. The United Iraqi Alliance took 1,164,770 of those votes, about 72 percent. Electoral commission officials have said a little more than eight million Iraqis voted throughout the country.
The partial results suggested that Allawi, who was backed by the CIA during the years he was in exile from Iraq, had little hope of being a major player in the new government. His ticket -- the Iraqi List -- brought in just 274,669 votes, or about 17 percent of the total so far. Should that relatively poor showing be confirmed in the final tally, U.S. hopes for continued leadership by a solidly secular government could be dashed.
Projections by the United Iraqi Alliance show strong voter support in other parts of the country as well, a result that could serve to widen the divide between the minority Sunni population, which apparently voted in small numbers, and the Shiites, who dominate the alliance.
Many Sunnis worry that the alliance, which has strong Iranian connections, ultimately will pursue theocracy. Alliance members deny this and say they'll make every effort to include Sunnis in a government in which the mosque doesn't rule the state.
Hussain Shahristani, a prominent nuclear physicist who is on the alliance list and helped to form it, waved away fears of a religious government, saying they're a scare tactic used by politicians angry about the prospect of losing the election.
The ticket was formed under the guidance of the most powerful Shiite cleric in the country, Grand Ayatollah Ali Husseini al Sistani, an Iranian by birth. At the top of the ticket is Abdul Aziz al Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which formed in Iran. A major party on the ticket, Dawa, received Iranian backing during its guerrilla fight against Saddam Hussein. One of the ticket's more secular members is Ahmad Chalabi, a one-time favorite of the White House who has been accused of funneling classified U.S. intelligence to Iran.
Iraqi officials stressed that the domestic votes came from just 10 percent of the nation's polling centers and the results were heavily weighted toward Shiite voters because they came from five Shiite-dominated provinces.
With a hefty margin of victory -- each ticket will get seats in the 275-member National Assembly according to the percentage of the vote it gets -- the United Iraqi Alliance may be able to broker deals with the ethnic Kurds in the north on issues such as drafting the new constitution.
KURDISH POWER
The Kurds, who are demanding the president or prime minister positions, figure to sweep the northern provinces, and together the two groups could easily end up with enough national assembly seats to control the drafting of the constitution.
While the Kurds are secular-minded and may be unwilling to live under the rule of Shiite clerics, there's speculation that they'd simply broker a deal in which they're left alone in the north, living under their own rules as they have since the early 1990s.
Knight Ridder special correspondents Huda Ahmed and Yasser Al Salihee contributed to this report from Baghdad.
LAS
Shiites Lead in Partial Results; Violence Resumes
By Patrick J. McDonnell
BAGHDAD-Partial returns from Sunday's Iraqi election showed strong support for the Shiite Muslim ticket linked to the nation's leading ayatollah.
NYT
Shiite Coalition Takes a Big Lead in Early Vote Count in Iraq
By JOHN F. BURNS and DEXTER FILKINS
Preliminary returns showed that religious groups with links to Iran were ahead of the alliance led by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi.
Interactive Feature: Early Results in Iraq
With 1.6 million votes counted, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's slate has a strong lead over Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's party.
Al menos 24 muertos en ocho atentados
Los iraquíes acuden a las urnas
desafiando a las bombas
Agencias
30/01/05, 12.27 horas