National Agenda : Exiled Opponents of Hussein Start to Harmonize Their Voices : Salahuddin conference is a watershed for the splintered forces opposed to the Iraqi dictator.

If Mashan Jebouri had gotten lucky, he might even have given President Bush’s reelection campaign a boost. But for reasons he still doesn’t understand, Jebouri’s third attempt in three years to organize a coup against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein failed in July.

He hasn’t shaved since--an act of penance for the arrest of 420 members of his tribe linked to the coup attempt. Like him, all are former intimates of Hussein’s extended ruling family, his regime and its feared security apparatus.

This ultimate Baghdad insider surfaced last week at an unprecedented meeting of the Iraqi opposition here in the liberated mountains of Kurdistan, 200 miles north of the Iraqi capital. And his presence illustrated how broad-based the Iraqi opposition movement has become.

The opposition meeting--the first of its kind held on Iraqi soil--brought together almost all factions of what had previously been a fragmented dissident community that had fled the excesses of Hussein’s rule over the last generation. While most of them live in exile, they retain family, tribal and religious connections inside Iraq.

“We helped him murder thousands of people,” reasoned Jebouri, a former official in Hussein’s private office and a family friend until he fled to Jordan in 1989 just 10 days before the first coup attempt he had organized. “So we do have more responsibility than the others. We are his bodyguards, his secret police. If we can’t get rid of him, nobody can.”

Jebouri, 35, added that “the only way to get him out is a coup. But when the magic spell cast by Saddam is broken, the people will demand a complete change. So we need to prepare a proper alternative government as well.”

After five days of talks, about 200 dissidents from Europe, North America and the Middle East elected a ruling troika and a 25-member executive to fill the power vacuum if and when Saddam goes.

Previously during the 24 years that Hussein has ruled this country of 16 million, such exiled opponents were easily intimidated, divided and eliminated. But much has changed since the Iraqi leader’s defeat in the Persian Gulf War.

“Before, we never dared to talk to each other,” said Ayad Rahim, 30, now living in Boston. “These days, everyone in the diaspora is meeting, networking, making newsletters. There were practically no newspapers two years ago, now there are 30.”

Influenced perhaps by the revolutionary atmosphere of Iraqi Kurdistan, a democratic spirit invested the threadbare corridors of Salahuddin’s once popular resort hotels during the opposition gathering. Turbaned Islamic mullahs with long robes debated with democrats in sports jackets. At dinner tables laden with fruit, baggy-trousered Kurdish tribal leaders in turbans hosted Sunni Muslim Arab nationalist dignitaries in headdresses.

The Iraqi opposition sees recent meetings they’ve been granted with former U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III, Turkish President Turgut Ozal and European leaders as evidence of newfound Western backing. Such sympathy was denied while Saddam Hussein’s petrodollars spoke louder than his invasion of Iran, his poison gas bombing of Kurds and his murders of dissidents.

“They were not just not interested. They even called us terrorists and liars,” said Dr. Muwaffaq Fatuhi, a London-based democrat who was once a high-ranking official in charge of Iraq’s economic planning.

The Salahuddin meeting was part of a process started last June in Vienna under the umbrella of the Iraqi National Congress, a new opposition political group.

One of the key points dividing Hussein’s opponents has been the demand of the 3 million Iraqi Kurds to self-government within a federal state. Syrian and Saudi-backed Sunni Muslim Arab nationalists and Iran-backed Shiite Muslims oppose that approach, fearing it would lead to the breakup of the country and a regional conflagration over the spoils.

The opposition leaders reportedly made progress on a compromise here.

“We want Islamic rule, but we won’t impose it by force. Islam is the choice of the people. We are the majority, so the (Shiites) will be quite happy with free elections and a parliament,” said Sheik Mohsen Husseini, spokesman of the Islamic Hope Party.

With at least 50 parties great and small attending, the achievement of the Salahuddin conference was to keep everyone talking to each other, focused on creating a viable alternative to Hussein.

“What we all have is a pluralistic vision,” said Jawad Attar, a Tehran-based Islamist. “We all want power to be distributed so that nobody can ever again become a dictator like Saddam Hussein.”