[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: Iraqi Conference on Election Plan Sinks Into Chaos

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Iraqi Conference on Election Plan Sinks Into Chaos

August 16, 2004
 By JOHN F. BURNS 



 

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 15 - A conference of more than 1,100
Iraqis chosen to take the country a crucial step further
toward constitutional democracy convened in Baghdad on
Sunday under siege-like conditions, only to be thrown into
disorder by delegates staging angry protests against the
American-led military operation in the Shiite holy city of
Najaf. 

After an opening speech by Iraq's interim prime minister,
Ayad Allawi, delegates leapt out of their seats demanding
the conference be suspended. One Shiite delegate stormed
the stage before being forced back, shouting, "We demand
that military operations in Najaf stop immediately!" 

Shortly afterward, two mortar shells fired at the area
where the meeting was being held landed in a bus and truck
terminal nearby, killing 2 people and wounding at least 17.


The three-day conference, called to elect a 100-member
commission that is to organize elections in January and
hold veto powers over decrees passed by the Allawi
government, was not halted. But reporters who had been told
to wear flak jackets and helmets when entering the
convention center complex past American tanks were
frantically waved back from the center's plate glass
windows as the mortar shells exploded, shaking the complex
and rattling the windows. 

In many ways, the scene seemed like a metaphor for
America's problems in Iraq, with the rebel attacks that
have spread to virtually every Sunni and Shiite town across
this country of 25 million threatening to overwhelm plans
for three rounds of national elections next year, ending
with a fully elected government in January 2006. 

Just as American troops in Najaf have failed so far to
quell an uprising by a rebel Shiite cleric, Moktada
al-Sadr, so on Sunday's showing here, American political
plans for Iraq remain hostage to the violence that has made
much of the country enemy territory for the Americans. 

The fighting in Najaf, which resumed Sunday after the
Allawi government walked out of truce talks, is part of a
wider insurrection across southern Iraq by militiamen loyal
to Mr. Sadr, who has cast himself as a tribune of the
Shiite underclass and as the leader of a national
resistance movement against American troops. 

The signs in Najaf were of preparations for yet another
attempt to force Mr. Sadr and a force of perhaps 1,000 men
from his Mahdi Army militia to relinquish control of the
Imam Ali Mosque, Shiism's holiest shrine, and by defeating
them there, to begin rolling back the challenge he poses to
plans to stabilize the country. 

After a day of sporadic gunfire and explosions that shook
Najaf's Old City, with the mosque at its center, reporters
said they had seen American tanks blocking almost every
street leading to the shrine, some as little as 1,000 yards
away. 

American commanders spoke of tightening the cordon they
threw around the Old City last week, but of leaving any
attempt to move into the immediate vicinity of the shrine
to the Iraqi forces that Prime Minister Allawi said
Saturday would now carry the brunt of the Najaf fighting. 

By using Iraqi troops, Dr. Allawi and the American
officials who are his partners in Baghdad hope to avoid the
eruption of fury among Iraq's majority Shiites - and across
the wider Shiite world, particularly in Iran - if American
troops were seen to have damaged or desecrated the mosque,
which is revered as the burial place of Imam Ali, Shiism's
founding saint. 

In a further sign that a new push against Mr. Sadr might be
imminent, the Allawi government ordered the expulsion of
all reporters working in Najaf, Iraqis as well as
Westerners, and even warned Najaf residents working as
freelancers for Western news outlets to cease work. 

"I received orders from the interior minister, who demands
that all local, Arab and foreign journalists leave the
hotel and the city within two hours," Gen. Ghaleb
al-Jazairi, Najaf's police chief, told newsmen at the hotel
on the edge of the Old City that has become a news media
headquarters. He gave as his reason the government's
inability to protect the journalists if major new battles
erupted. 

Taken together, the events in Baghdad and Najaf appeared to
catch Iraq at a new tipping point. Many Iraqis believe that
events in the days ahead are likely to signal as clearly as
anything in recent months whether the wider American
enterprise in Iraq can emerge from a seemingly endless
sequence of reverses and achieve at least a part of what
President Bush and other advocates of the war have said
they are seeking here. That is the midwifing of a new,
peaceful, democratic Iraq - or, contrarily, a further
descent into bloodshed and chaos, at a continuing heavy
cost in Iraqi and American lives. 

>From modest beginnings 16 months ago, when American troops
toppled Saddam Hussein, Mr. Sadr has used every
confrontation with United States forces to build his
political following, and his militia, to the point that he
now boasts of being able to thwart attempts to build a
Western-style democracy, and to fundamentally disrupt the
$18 billion American reconstruction program. 

For months, American officials have said Mr. Sadr's
challenge must be overcome if he is not to imperil all they
have worked for here. The sense now, in the heavily guarded
compound beside the Tigris River where the American Embassy
works side by side with United States military commanders
and top officials of the Allawi government, is that the
moment may have arrived. 

Deliberately killing or capturing Mr. Sadr, as American
commanders vowed during an earlier Sadr insurrection in
April, has now been ruled out, American officials say,
since the cleric, if harmed in circumstances for which the
Americans could be blamed, could become more of a rallying
point among his following. 

With Mr. Sadr believed to be entrenched with his militia in
the Najaf shrine, or somewhere in areas of the Old City
controlled by the militia, the need not to harm him
personally has added extra complexity to American military
planning. But a greater problem is the political one. 

American officials have been hoping for months that
moderate Shiite leaders would coalesce in a condemnation of
Mr. Sadr's resort to arms. But this time, as in April,
there has been mostly silence from those leaders, even from
those who privately excoriate the cleric as a
rabble-rousing upstart who has defiled a 1,000-year
tradition by making an armory of the Imam Ali shrine. 

With the conference in Baghdad, Dr. Allawi and the
Americans saw an opportunity to demonstrate that, the
violence across the country notwithstanding, it was
possible to proceed with the timetable for democracy laid
down earlier this year, when Iraq was still formally an
occupied country. As well, in the context of the uprising
in Najaf and the Sadr militia's attacks elsewhere, they
wanted to show that a large number of politically active
Iraqis - Shiites a majority among them - would defy threats
of violence from Mr. Sadr's fighters and other insurgent
groups and attend the gathering. 

By that measure, Iraqi and American officials said, they
counted the conference a success, just for the fact that it
had convened. 

For weeks, at caucuses across the country, thousands of
Iraqis competed for election to the conference, and for the
say it would give them in shaping the country's political
future. A two-week postponement of the gathering, ordered
in hope of broadening participation, did not yield any
breakthroughs, particularly in persuading influential Sunni
Muslim groups like the Muslim Clerics Association, or Mr.
Sadr, to abandon their boycott of the process. 

Still, the turnout exceeded the goal of at least 1,000
delegates, including some from Najaf and the other cities
now roiled by Mr. Sadr's uprisings. 

Yet the conference's opening day was dominated not by
discussion of the coming elections or of the many other
issues that confront Iraq, including the ruined economy,
but by delegates' demands for an end to American and Iraqi
military operations against Mr. Sadr. In speech after
speech on Sunday, delegates called on Dr. Allawi to stop
the fighting. 

In an attempt to regain control, conference organizers
established a committee to draft a resolution on Najaf, and
it was carried to Dr. Allawi by a small group of delegates.


A larger group of about 100 threatened to walk out over the
issue, but eventually relented. "Nobody withdrew, and that
was all there was to it," said Fouad Masoum, the
conference's principal organizer. 

Dr. Allawi, a 59-year-old physician who came to the prime
minister's post with a reputation for toughness, made a
brief opening address to the gathering that suggested that
he had little intention of backing down over Najaf, which
he visited a week ago, vowing "no negotiations or truce"
with Mr. Sadr. 

"Your blessed gathering here is a challenge for the forces
of evil and tyranny that want to destroy this country and
this assembly," he told delegates. With that, he quickly
withdrew to his offices 500 yards away, avoiding the
clamorous protests that ensued on the conference floor. 

His compromise was to meet with the conference delegation,
led by Hussein al-Sadr, a Shiite cleric and distant
relative of Moktada al-Sadr who, like Dr. Allawi, spent
years in exile in London, escaping the repression of Mr.
Hussein. 

On the conference floor, Hussein al-Sadr had taken an
ambiguous position, as have many Shiite religious leaders,
saying that military operations in Najaf should end, but
that somehow "the government should enforce its control
over all of Iraq." 

That appeared to cut little ice with Dr. Allawi, a Shiite,
who scheduled a news conference in the convention center at
the end of the day's discussions, then abruptly canceled
it. 

In his place, he sent a junior minister, Wael Abdul Latif,
who reiterated the government's demand that the Sadr
militiamen disarm and quit Najaf, or face a showdown with
Iraqi troops. He said Dr. Allawi had not yet given the
order for the operation to begin, but implied that it might
not be long in coming if Mr. Sadr failed to send word that
he was ready to negotiate seriously on the government's
terms. 

"We call on everyone who is in the shrine to vacate it," he
said. "There is an open door, but it will not remain open
for very long." 

Sabrina Tavernise contributed reporting for this article.


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/16/international/middleeast/16baghdad.html?ex=1093677940&ei=1&en=67869e163b25c121


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