Key Shiites Divided on Iraq Rule

The U.S.-led administration’s plan to begin handing over political power to Iraqis will be tested above all in Najaf’s cobbled alleys, crowded with turbaned Muslim clerics and lined with religious bookstores.

Today, seven key Iraqi political leaders are expected to meet hundreds of miles from here in northern Iraq to decide whether to join a U.S.-proposed governing council. The one organization whose membership is crucial to the council but still deeply in doubt is the Najaf-based Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which represents many Shiites. Their faith, the dominant branch of Islam in Iraq, was brutally repressed under Saddam Hussein.

“This is a determining meeting because the original seven are getting together to decide whether they can be part of it,” said Sergio Vieira de Mello, the U.N. special representative in Iraq. “For the Shia, all the Shia players -- there is a will, a determination, to make sure that this time they won’t get a rough deal.”

The U.S.-led occupation authority can’t afford to ignore Shiite religious leaders, in part because they have broad popular support in southern Iraq, which is almost entirely Shiite. At least until recently, the region has been relatively friendly to American and British soldiers.

Shiites, who represent about 60% of Iraq’s population, are anything but a monolithic group. Shiites can be found who are secular or religious, intellectuals or laborers, sympathetic to the American-led coalition or resentful of its failure to bring change and political power more rapidly.

Bringing influential religious Shiites on board has proved difficult and is potentially troublesome for the Americans. Shiite religious leaders are expected to push hard for a constitution that designates Islam as the state religion, and they might attempt to make Iraq an Islamic state.

Although many Iraqi religious Shiites reject the idea of rebuilding their country in the image of Iran, where an even larger proportion of the population is Shiite, the Iranian influence is strong -- especially in southern Iraq.

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Affinity With Iran

Najaf, one of the holiest cities in the Shiite world, radiates outward from a richly inlaid central shrine and mosque to Ali, the son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad, who Shiites believe was Muhammad’s rightful heir. Surrounding the mosque complex is a rambling souk where street vendors do a brisk business in posters of Shiite religious leaders, among them Iran’s late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

The nearby streets are busy with Iranian pilgrims, many of whom cannot speak Arabic and can be seen puzzling over shop signs like any other foreigners.

Western policymakers in Iraq are split over the degree of Iranian influence. Some high-ranking diplomats in the U.S.-led administration believe the more extreme Iranian elements are being kept in check, but others seem fearful of Iran’s clout. One U.S. official in Iraq recently described the Shiite south as “the new front line in the war with Iran.”

The greatest uncertainty for the moment may be the status of the Badr Brigade, a militia controlled by Iran that is loosely associated with the Supreme Council. However, there appears to be a fairly widespread belief that the Shiites will lean more toward London and Washington than Tehran.

“I’ve been encouraged that Shia leaders by and large are moderate; they advocate the separation of religion and state and are resistant to the Iranian influence,” said Ambassador John Sawers, the top British diplomat who works for L. Paul Bremer III, the American director of the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Of the seven groups that are meeting today in northern Iraq, only the Supreme Council has a religious basis. Others, such as Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, are secular, or in the case of the two main Kurdish parties, defined by ethnicity.

The groups were largely formed in exile from Hussein’s Iraq, but soon after the war their leaders returned and most have been working with the U.S.-led administration to create an interim Iraqi government until a constitution is written and elections are held. That process is expected to take roughly a year -- a couple of months to form a constitutional council, eight months to draft the constitution and another couple of months to hold elections, according to a senior official in the occupation authority.

The authority has been struggling to ensure that at least one member of the governing council would be recognizable to religious Shiites.

“We’ve had to work hardest with the Supreme Council,” said a senior official in the U.S.-led administration.

The Supreme Council’s key demands are that Shiites be represented on the political council roughly in proportion to their numbers in the population, and that the council have real powers, said Ammar Hakim, the nephew of, and chief spokesman for, Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr Hakim, the religious leader of the Supreme Council.

“We are looking at the responsibilities of this council and whether it will have a serious role,” Ammar Hakim said.

In the last couple of weeks, several salvos from Shiite clerics appear to have been sent as signals that the religious Shiites are not confident that Bremer’s administration has heard their demands.

The broadly popular Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, known for keeping a distance from political matters, issued a fatwa, or edict, last week, condemning proposals for a constitutional council by the administration, which had implied initially that it would play a key role in picking the members of a constitutional council.

“The [U.S.-led authorities] do not have any power to appoint members of the constitution drafting committee. Moreover, there is no guarantee that the council will draft a constitution that is in harmony with the highest interests of the Iraqi people and will represent their national identity, the basic pillars of which are the true Islamic religion and the noble social values,” Sistani said in the fatwa.

He called on “all believers to demand” that the constitution be put to a vote.

De Mello said the composition of the constitutional council, and the charter itself, are perhaps more important to the Shiites and Kurds than the political council because both see the constitution as the only way to guarantee their rights in Iraq in the long term.

“They want to be sure that their voice will be heard,” he said.

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Group Oppression

The Shiites and Kurds essentially had minority status under Hussein’s reign, despite the Shiites’ large numbers -- a perpetuation of a centuries-long pattern in which Shiites have often found themselves on the losing end of battles for power. After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Shiites, with encouragement from the United States, led an unsuccessful uprising against Hussein. Tens of thousands of Shiites are believed to have been slaughtered, many of them buried to this day in mass graves. Today, southern Iraq feels in large part like a region in mourning, interspersed with killing fields.

Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council, gave several interviews last week in which he suggested that he was frustrated with how slowly the Americans were moving to hand over power to Iraqis, and even grumbled that the Shiites’ peaceful approach would not last forever.

Increasingly, the United Nations has been playing a crucial role behind the scenes in finding language and formulations everyone can agree on.

The U.N. pushed to change the panel’s name from the political council to the governing council to suggest the eventual growth of the government itself. U.N. diplomats also pushed to have the council appoint interim ministers rather than senior advisors, so that their responsibilities would be closer to those of an executive body than a merely advisory one.

American and British diplomats are now emphasizing that Iraqi representatives will attend meetings of international organizations such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization.

Agreement is not yet final, but American and British diplomats say Shiites will have a majority of the seats on the governing council, although many of its 25 to 30 members will not be religious Shiites. They also appear to be moving to give Iraqis far greater representation on the constitutional council and leaving it for them to decide whether to have the document approved in a referendum.

Even so, it is far from clear that the Shiites will be satisfied. Already there are some Shiite groups that feel left out, among them followers of Muqtader Sadr, a cleric with a talent for rallying the uneducated masses.

No one from the occupation authority has visited him -- a mistake in the eyes of some experts, who say he is too unpredictable to be left completely outside the fold.

At Friday prayers in Thawra, the squalid Baghdad neighborhood where Sadr has a large network of supporters, tens of thousands of believers gather every week, chanting anti-American slogans with increasing frequency.

“No to Saddam! No to America!” they shout.

Last week, clerics there told believers to hold off on jihad, or holy war. But the sermon, delivered to 10,000 believers in a vast open street, seemed calculated to rouse angry passions.

“Do you believe America wants an independent Iraq? Do you believe America will give you the country that you want? Don’t answer that question, we all know the answer,” said Hassan Zurgani, one of the clerics. “The people who jumped up and down like monkeys in front of Saddam are the same people who are supporting the Americans.”

--- UNPUBLISHED NOTE ---

In stories after April 9, 2004, Shiite cleric Muqtader Sadr is correctly referred to as Muqtada Sadr.

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