In Nasiriyah, Hopeful Pockets of Pragmatism
By David Ignatius
Washington Post commentary
NASIRIYAH, Iraq -- A month ago Shiite Muslim supporters of renegade Iraqi cleric Moqtada Sadr stormed two bridges across the Euphrates River here as part of their uprising in southern Iraq. Enraged by an American threat to capture or kill Sadr, they controlled the city for two days.
Today Nasiriyah illustrates a new mood of pragmatism emerging in southern Iraq as Shiite political, religious and tribal leaders prepare for a transfer of sovereignty less than two months away. Iraqis here seem to understand that unless they quickly take more responsibility for security, the country could descend into chaos after June 30.
This political realism is voiced by Athir Abdel-Hussein, a young engineer working on the U.S.-financed reconstruction of a power plant here. "Moqtada and the Americans both made mistakes," he says. He applauds Sadr's defiance of Saddam Hussein's regime before liberation, and of the American occupiers now. But he doesn't like the Sadr militia's violent tactics.
Behind him stand 14 young Iraqi laborers in powder-blue work suits, digging at the rubble around the plant with homemade shovels. When a visitor asks how many lost a brother, father or cousin to Hussein's secret police, nine hands go up.
Iraq's best chance is people like these, who suffered under the old regime, welcomed their liberation a year ago and now want their country back. The problem is that they must learn self-government almost from scratch.
A stable transition remains a long shot. But five days of touring southern Iraq leaves me convinced it's not impossible -- at least in this part of the country, where the British-led occupiers have tried to stress dialogue rather than confrontation. "I think that the Iraqi people have seen over the abyss during the events of the last month, and it frightened them," says Patrick Nixon, a British diplomat who heads the Coalition Provisional Authority in southern Iraq. "So the political, tribal and religious leaders as well as the governors began to work together."
Nasiriyah illustrates the process of change. Hundreds of Sadr's militiamen seized the bridges on April 6, cutting off the local CPA headquarters. Italian troops stationed across the river quickly counterattacked, killing between 15 and 20 of Sadr's fighters, and regained control of the city two days later.
The leader of Sadr's local office was weighing his options when he was summoned by the sheik who heads his tribe. According to Rory Stewart, the senior CPA adviser in Nasiriyah, the sheik warned the militia leader to pull his men back; the sheik said he was under pressure from tribal leaders in the south who didn't want the region to turn into another Fallujah.
Local self-government took a big step forward yesterday, when Sabri Rumayidh, the governor of the province surrounding Nasiriyah, called a meeting of about 45 senior police officers. It began with the police griping about a lack of resources from the coalition, but the Iraqi governor cut them off.
"That's all past," he said, according to Stewart, who attended the meeting. "We're taking over in eight weeks and we had better get on with it." The governor ordered the police to make lists of criminals in their areas. Meanwhile, he asked local tribal sheiks to suspend their usual demands for guama, or "blood money," in the case of police operations, so the cops could arrest lawbreakers without fear of reprisal.
Other signs illustrate the new trend. In provincial elections held over the past several months, most of the winners in the Nasiriyah area have been technocrats, rather than members of religious parties or tribal groups.
One convert to pragmatic politics is a Shiite militia based in Nasiriyah known as "15 Shabaan," after the Arabic date of the beginning of the 1991 Shiite uprising against Hussein. The group's political adviser visited CPA headquarters in Basra last weekend and asked officials how his group could become a political party. Two other militant Shiite groups in the south have made similar requests over the past week. "Increasingly, there is a recognition that the political future of Iraq will be decided through debate and discussion, not guns," says the CPA's spokesman in Basra, Dominic d'Angelo.
Iraq is heading toward a ragged transition June 30, despite these encouraging signs in the south. An optimist would hope that pockets of security and political stability will emerge -- and that over time, these enclaves will spread outward until they eventually encompass the whole of Iraq. |
