Iraq’s Exiles Wait, Maneuver

The man who would be king of Iraq holds court in a living room lined with plush tapestries and mementos of bygone grandeur.

Like other leaders of the Iraqi opposition in exile, Sharif Ali bin Hussein left his homeland decades ago. His family fled in 1958 after the military massacred his relatives, King Faisal II and Crown Prince Abdul-Ilah, and other members of a royal clan resented as colonial puppets of Britain. The memory of the bloody coup makes it hard to imagine the return of a king even if, as the opposition claims, the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein is on its last legs.

But the exiled Bin Hussein, head of the Constitutional Monarchy Movement, has a trait in common with other potential leaders of a postwar Iraq. He dreams big.

“The monarchy ... is the most viable system to ensure the functioning of democracy,” asserted the 46-year-old former investment banker.

If President Saddam Hussein falls one day in a battle for Baghdad, perhaps Bin Hussein and other leaders of the Iraqi opposition will realize their dream of building a democracy in their homeland.

But recently, they have been busy fighting a battle here in London. Among themselves.

Ever since they pledged in August to overcome longtime differences, the six main groups representing opponents of the Iraqi president have been trying to organize a landmark conference of exiles to plan for their country’s future.

But renewed infighting forced several postponements, most recently of a planned gathering in Brussels this month. After U.S. diplomats, defense and national security officials mediated, the opposition groups said last week that they would meet next month in London.

The exiles want to declare a common mission and build a framework for a provisional government. But until they pull off a conference, the opposition forces will have failed a basic test of unity. This aggravates doubts about their effectiveness among critics, who say the opposition groups lack a base inside Iraq.

“Ninety percent of the people in Baghdad won’t know their names,” said Mustafa Alani, an Iraqi-born academic at the Royal United Services Institute, a London think tank. “You cannot parachute leadership from outside. In Iraq, there is a state, there are institutions. It is not like the Taliban in Afghanistan, who were not really a government.”

Despite the obstacles, the London-based activists lack neither experience nor outside clout. They have survived assassination attempts. They have run spy networks and guerrilla operations, albeit with mixed results. They have cultivated allies in the State Department, the Pentagon, Congress and the CIA, a web of shifting relationships that has created tensions among those branches of the government.

The Bush administration recently approved $92 million to provide combat training for Iraqi exiles, many to be drawn from lists provided by the Iraqi National Congress, or INC, the most prominent group. The opposition could be useful intermediaries for a U.S. government trying to build a postwar power structure in Iraq. The State Department has held workshops here with the groups to discuss tasks for a transition, such as democratization and justice reform.

But the stated U.S. commitment to bring democracy to Iraq could clash with the authoritarian traditions of the Middle East, analysts say. Most of Iraq’s rulers have been soldiers or former soldiers who gained power by force. A glaring exception: Despite his uniforms and swagger, Saddam Hussein never served in the military. He rose to the top as a gunslinging political operative.

Any ruler of Iraq must confront ethnic, religious and tribal fault lines. The country is about 60% Shiite Muslim and 35% Sunni Muslim, but the latter dominate the political elite. The Sunnis fear that mostly Shiite southern Iraq is vulnerable to encroachment by Iran’s Shiite fundamentalist government. Between 15% and 20% of Iraq’s population are ethnic Kurds, who control a semiautonomous region in the north.

The composition and conflicts of the exile organizations reflect that mosaic. There are two Kurdish groups, an Islamic Shiite group and the Iraqi National Accord, which is headed by a Shiite and includes former military and political officials. This “Group of Four” has clashed with the INC, which is theoretically an umbrella coalition of the major players, and with the monarchist party. The latter two of the Group of Four are a mix of Shiites and Sunnis, many of them well-off and Western-educated.

Skeptics in Europe predict that Saddam Hussein’s successor in a postwar scenario will not be a onetime exile, but rather a military strongman.

“There are those in U.S. government who see Iraq as a first step toward democratization in the Arab world,” said Remy Leveau, a Middle East expert at the Institute for Political Studies in Paris. “But the Americans have only relied on authoritarian figures in the past. They will continue to do so for fear of Islamic groups winning elections. An open democratic system is hard to control. There is the temptation to find a presentable general who makes certain guarantees: not attacking Israel, access to oil.”

A compromise for the U.S. may be to groom a military defector to work with the armed forces, which Alani argues would be an inevitable engine of transition.

“You cannot jump from absolute dictatorship to absolute democracy,” he said. “There must be a transitional period. You need a strong central government to rebuild, assert authority. Either you run the country, take care of rubbish collection, pay salaries, or you use the only institution that is viable: the military.”

The highest-ranking defector is Gen. Nizar Khazraji, 64, a former army chief of staff who fought with distinction in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

He fled Iraq in 1996 and lives in Denmark. While keeping his distance from the opposition, Khazraji has offered to lead an armed rebellion against Hussein.

But his prospects plummeted last week when Danish prosecutors charged him with war crimes. Khazraji had been under investigation for his alleged role in summary executions, forced relocation and pillage by forces under his command in Kurdistan, the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, between 1984 and 1988.

“Joining the Iraqi opposition cannot be a ‘get out of jail free card’ for mass murder,” said Hanny Megally of New York-based Human Rights Watch. “These charges send the signal that there is no impunity for former Iraqi officials who may be responsible for horrific crimes.”

Khazraji has denied the allegations. Curiously, Kurdish leaders had said weeks before the arrest that they had no quarrel with the general. He has not been jailed but is prohibited from leaving Denmark.

The civilian opposition disagrees vehemently with the idea that Iraq needs a providential soldier to hold it together. The exiles are known quantities to Western and Arab governments.

That is both a strength and a weakness for Ahmad Chalabi of the INC, a cagey and combative veteran of exile politics. He said the opposition has been energized by the international community’s confrontation with Hussein.

“For the groups in exile, the more remote the goal seemed, the more division there was,” Chalabi said in an interview at his headquarters near London’s Hyde Park. Now the groups agree at least that the time has come to take on Hussein, he said.

“The opposition now is being challenged to put together a program and a structure,” Chalabi said. “From our point of a view, it’s a war of liberation. It’s a war for Iraq, not against Iraq.”

Chalabi’s critics accuse him of maneuvering to promote himself as a first among equals and sow divisions by refusing to attend the conference unless it was expanded.

Chalabi’s advocates say he held out against old-school exile politicians for an event representing more young and independent exiles. The proposed size of the conference has grown from 75 delegates to at least 300, with negotiations underway to include an additional 50.

“The conference in Brussels was a nonstarter,” said Zaab Sethna, a spokesman for the INC. “This is a totally different conference. We want the process to be open, transparent and democratic. The previous process would have been smoke-filled rooms.”

Chalabi, 57, comes from an elite Shiite family that fled Iraq after a coup brought the Baath Socialist Party to power in 1968. Chalabi earned advanced degrees in mathematics from the University of Chicago and MIT and became wealthy in banking and business.

In the early 1990s, he built a base of political and financial support in Washington. He led an armed insurrection based in Kurd-controlled northern Iraq. But his forces were routed by Hussein’s troops in 1996.

Since then, Chalabi’s relationship with U.S. diplomats and intelligence officials has worsened. His critics accuse him of dubious ethics, citing a conviction in absentia for bank fraud in Jordan in 1992. (He has called it a political setup.) A State Department audit blocked his U.S. financing this year because of allegations of abusing funds.

Chalabi says interference by U.S. “kingmakers” has contributed to the opposition’s disarray. Nonetheless, his strong ties to the Pentagon and congressional leaders make him a force to be reckoned with as a potential showdown with Iraq approaches.

One of Chalabi’s sometime rivals, Iyad Allawi of the Iraqi National Accord, is also from an upper-class Shiite background. He is Chalabi’s relative by marriage.

Allawi, 57, got his start in Iraq’s ruling Baath Socialist Party. He met Hussein when they were both rising stars in the party.

In jovial and cultivated tones, Allawi recalls riding in a car in 1969 with Hussein, then a chief of the security forces, and telling him the government was excessively repressive. Hussein, looking askance, replied: “Doctor, you cannot rule with a soft heart.”

Allawi got a brutal taste of that philosophy in 1978 after he went into exile in London. Attackers believed to be Iraqi agents broke into his home and gave him a beating that left him hospitalized for a year.

Allawi later worked for the World Health Organization and in private business. After the invasion of Kuwait, he formed the Iraqi National Accord, which has established a presence in Middle Eastern countries and contacts in the U.S. intelligence community.

The Iraqi government crushed a coup attempt engineered by his group in 1996. Critics say the INA has few members and an undemocratic mentality.

Allawi describes any differences with Chalabi as healthy competition.

“When we criticize the INC for not having a solid plan of operations, we don’t mean to ridicule them,” Allawi said. “They are in the opposition. We have to be partners. We can work together.”

Nonetheless, Allawi does not seem especially enthusiastic about the exile conference, which will take place between Dec. 10 and Dec. 15 if delegates can get visas in time and the U.S.-brokered agreement holds together.

“It is mainly symbolic,” Allawi said. “You cannot discuss these matters in an open forum. Once Saddam is gone, yes.”

The London conference is also being organized by two Kurdish parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party. Their leaders, Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani, respectively, have at least temporarily overcome historic enmity and share authority over Kurdish-held territory in northern Iraq.

The Kurdish organizations control tens of thousands of troops on the ground. And that will make them a factor in future coalitions, negotiations and disputes.

Like the Kurdish groups, the Iranian-backed Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq is a faction with an armed presence on the ground. The Iran-based Shiite organization oversees a guerrilla force in southern Iraq. The Tehran connection has caused the council to have a wary relationship with other exiles and especially with the U.S. government.

But that could change. The council’s leader, Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr Hakim, will send his brother, a religious scholar, as his emissary to the London conference.

Leaders of the supreme council hope that this will contribute not just to unity among the opposition, but an improved relationship between the U.S. and Iran as well.

“Iraq will be a good test for the relationship,” said Hamid Bayati, the organization’s London representative. “It could be key to improving relations between the two countries.”

Although the Islamic group stayed away from the State Department’s workshops on the future of Iraq here, Bayati on Tuesday praised American officials for helping the exiles arrive at an understanding.

“Their mediation was good,” he said. “Things are improving. There are differences in our views, which are obvious. But we are trying to come to an agreement. I hope we can have a successful conference.”

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Rotella was recently on assignment in London.