Mayor of Baghdad removed... interesting perspectives:
The political downfall of a Canadian in Baghdad
After weeks of tension end with an armed coup by Shiites, the mayor of Iraq's capital calls it quits
By JEFF SALLOT Globe and Mail
Saturday, August 13, 2005 Page A3
OTTAWA -- The Canadian mayor of Baghdad is calling it quits and coming home after 15 frustrating months on the job, a wild ride that included everything from incessant complaints about trash collection and looters stealing key parts at the sewage plant to attempts on his life and an armed coup.
"I don't think I will return to office. I'm finished," Alaa al-Tamimi said yesterday.
It's not that Dr. al-Tamimi, who holds dual Iraqi-Canadian citizenship, has a lot of choice in the matter.
Under cover of a sandstorm, heavily armed Shia militia marched into Baghdad City Hall on Monday and announced a change in civic administration.
Dr. al-Tamimi, 53, was forced into hiding. He fled to safety across the border to Jordan on Thursday, where he was reunited with his wife and his son, a university student. They expect to be back in Canada this month.
Dr. al-Tamimi, a structural engineer with no particular political allegiance, was installed as mayor of Baghdad -- a city of seven million -- by Paul Bremer, the former U.S. occupation administrator, after the defeat of the Saddam Hussein regime to try to fix things such as bomb craters in the highways and water mains blown apart by saboteurs.
His appointment was confirmed by the interim central Iraqi government last year. He got a hint that things were starting to go sour for him a few weeks ago when he returned to Baghdad after a brief vacation outside the country. He was arrested at the airport and detained for a full day.
But Monday's coup was a surprise, occurring as it did in the middle of a fierce sandstorm. He hadn't made it in to the office yet when he got a call warning him away.
He was ousted by Shia militia forces with close ties to the radical Islamic regime in neighbouring Iran.
The weak central Iraqi government doesn't have enough clout to counter this challenge to its authority, Dr. al-Tamimi said in a telephone interview. "And I don't have a militia of my own."
Dr. al-Tamimi comes from a Shia background, so he doesn't want to blame all Shiites for his unceremonious removal from office. He says he's secular and his identity "is not Shiite or Kurdish or Sunni but national Iraqi."
That's one of the big problems in the country, he believes. People identify too much with a group or a clan. "Even Iraqi police don't believe they are Iraqi -- but they are part of an ethnic group or belong to a religion."
The way Canadians have been able to accommodate each other -- people from so many different races, religions and political beliefs -- is something most Iraqis wouldn't understand, he said.
He tries not to sound bitter about his recent experience and the chaos and frustration that were the daily routine for the past 15 months. It is hard to blame people who have had no experience of democracy, he explains.
"They lived in darkness all their lives under Saddam. Then they were liberated and it is like bright light. They are blinded. What does democracy mean? They don't know."
Echoing the complaint of big-city mayors everywhere, Dr. al-Tamimi said his municipal administration was starved for cash by senior levels of government. He got only a small fraction of what was needed from the central government's oil revenues to fix basic infrastructure, yet he had to take the heat when the trash wasn't collected or the sewers backed up. And he complained about the Americans cancelling a plan to build Baghdad's first sanitary landfill.
As much as he likes the Americans, he says, they made some mistakes after toppling the Hussein regime. A big one was totally dismantling the Iraqi army, one of the few institutions with national cohesion. The military leadership could have been purged without demobilizing thousands of rank-and-file soldiers who suddenly had no job and no paycheque but families to feed.
Talk of any U.S. military reduction in Iraq any time soon is not realistic, he believes. He said a major U.S. military presence will be needed for at least three to five years.
Dr. al-Tamimi says he isn't one of those Canadians who are always criticizing Americans. "I like them."
But as to the way Washington has handled the rebuilding of postwar Iraq, he paraphrases Winston Churchill: The Americans always do the right thing -- after they do everything else.
When Dr. al-Tamimi fled Iraq with his wife and son in 1995, he was not sure he would ever return. He had been a professor of structural engineering at Baghdad University and then was forced to work for the Iraqi nuclear agency. But he wants it understood that he helped make buildings, not bombs.
The Tamimis were granted refugee status and settled in Southern Ontario. He does not want the location identified any more than that because he still fears for the safety of his family. He's been able to practise his profession.
"Canada is my country, too. It protects me and gives me all I need."
Would he ever return to Iraq? Too soon to tell, he says.
theglobeandmail.com
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