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[tvoivozhd <tvoivozd AT infionline.net>]

Anywhere, whether in the U.S., Iraq,, Iran, Saudi Arabia, to live under 
the religious looneys is to live in well-justified fearl


        

*washingtonpost.com* <http://www.washingtonpost.com/>
*Political Islam Put to the Test In Southern Iraq*

By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 25, 2005; Page A01

BASRA, Iraq, Jan. 24 -- Along Basra's Algeria Street, a bustling 
thoroughfare as storied and dreary as this city, Adnan Abu Tariq hurried 
to his trading company office Monday and whispered his plans for 
Sunday's elections.

"I will choose anyone who believes in freedom," the 53-year-old 
businessman insisted.

Furtively, Abu Tariq then looked both ways -- out at traffic snarled 
along a muddy street with buckling pavement, and into an arcade of dusty 
shops cloaked in the darkness of a blackout that had stretched 24 hours. 
With a hint of melodrama, he hid his face behind a stack of papers 
sheathed in a blue folder. And in a murmur, he spoke again: "Anyone but 
the religious parties."

Among the fault lines that define Sunday's vote for an Iraqi parliament, 
the divide between religious and secular is one of the most decisive. 
The slate that has attracted the most attention is a coalition known as 
the United Iraqi Alliance, which brings together Iraq's most prominent 
Shiite parties and, many Iraqis believe, has the blessing of Grand 
Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Its campaign is steeped in religious imagery, and 
its success in the elections would ensure a voice for the country's 
conservative clergy in the writing of a new constitution.

Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, those parties have effectively run 
Basra. Under their leadership, power and water supplies remain sporadic, 
city officials have been accused of corruption, and political killings 
have sown fear in the city. Judging by the opinions of residents, what 
may be postwar Iraq's first experiment in Islamic rule may also be its 
first failure.


"How long has it been? Two years?" Salah Abdullah, 34, asked while 
shopping at a cell phone store downtown. "Show me one person from the 
parties who has paved the road. Either you're a thief working for them 
or you are on your own."

"They failed," he said dismissively, jabbing his finger. "They're 
riffraff, and they've used religion as a cover."

*The Weight of Power
*

Basra, a onetime jewel of the Middle East scarred by three wars in 25 
years, has become a surprising, unintended laboratory for the marriage 
of political Islam and democracy in the Arab world. In Egypt, Syria, 
Persian Gulf states and elsewhere, authoritarian rulers have often cited 
the popular support for Islamic parties and their grass-roots networks 
as an argument against democracy. But here in Basra, simply being in 
authority appears to have sapped that support. The biggest challenge 
those parties faced was not taking power, residents said, but what to do 
once they were in charge and saddled with the unenviable task of making 
sense of postwar Iraq.

"They had an opportunity, and they didn't seize it," said Amar 
Abdel-Ali, another customer at the phone store. "They could have done 
good work and gained votes, but they didn't prove anything -- not even a 
quarter of what we wanted."

The party at the center of Basra politics is the Supreme Council for the 
Islamic Revolution in Iraq, whose leader, Abdul Aziz Hakim, sits atop 
the electoral slate of the United Iraqi Alliance. Founded by Iraqi 
exiles in neighboring Iran in 1982, the party returned to southern Iraq 
and Baghdad after the U.S. invasion. It was led by Hakim's brother, 
Mohammed Bakir Hakim, a respected ayatollah who was assassinated by a 
devastating car bomb detonated outside one of Shiite Islam's most sacred 
shrines in Najaf in August 2003.

In Basra, whose majority Shiite population has been largely spared the 
carnage of Baghdad, Hakim's movement soon emerged as the best-organized, 
best-funded and most influential organization among 25 or so contenders 
in the city. The group is now seen as the dominant force on the city 
council, and leaders of the Badr Organization, its militia, hold the 
office of mayor and powerful positions within the city's security forces.

With some other Islamic groups perceived by residents as little more 
than gangs, the party oversaw a growing conservatism in a city long 
famed as the most libertine in the region. Liquor stores, once numbering 
in the dozens, have shuttered. Shadowy, vigilante justice was meted out 
to former members of Hussein's Baath Party. At high schools and at Basra 
University, women were encouraged -- often by force -- to wear veils.

"Those who control the power in the administration are the Islamic 
parties, so they should take responsibility for the situation," said 
Majid Sari, the leader of a small party in Basra who is running on a 
secular slate known as the National Democratic Coalition.

As Sari spoke, the lights went out in his office. "This is one of the 
new government improvements," he quipped.

A friend in the office chimed in: "And the sewage in the streets!"

The grim reality of Basra has proved a boon for opposition candidates. 
Over the four-day Eid al-Adha Muslim holiday that ended Sunday, some 
neighborhoods had electricity for an hour, if at all. One newspaper 
editor bitterly remarked that residents wouldn't know what to do with 
themselves if they had a full day of electricity. Water quality has 
improved, thanks to a multimillion-dollar reconstruction project, but a 
dilapidated delivery network means it is still scarce in some areas. 
Complaints about corruption are rife, and residents say a fuel crisis 
that has gripped much of Iraq is exacerbated by the smuggling of oil to 
the Persian Gulf.

But it's a prevailing sense of insecurity that nags at many Basra 
residents. Unlike the car bombs and mortars that have become a routine 
part of life in Baghdad, Basra is unsettled by a murky campaign of 
killings. Two men running in Sunday's elections in the coalition of 
interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi were killed this month, and an 
elementary school teacher, Iman Jawair, was shot dead in front of her 
house 10 days ago, apparently for not wearing a veil. Khairallah Malaki, 
a police brigadier who serves as the local government's security 
adviser, estimated that as many as 10 percent of the city's 13,000 
policemen were loyal to religious parties rather than the civil 
leadership, a figure deemed low by opposition parties.

"You can't raise your voice unless you can back it up by firing a 
bullet," said Abdel-Khaleq Karim, the producer of a call-in show on 
Basra's Nahrein Radio that runs daily from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m.

*Who Is Responsible?
*

Islamic activists bristle at the complaints and insist the problem is 
not their mismanagement. Rather, they say, the interim government in 
Baghdad, the British forces occupying Basra and the law as it stands 
deprive them of the power they need to be effective.

"There is no authority in the city council to carry out its work," said 
Salah Battat, a city councilman.

Battat, a former resistance fighter, is one of the most well-known 
figures among the Supreme Council's new generation of leaders. He left 
Iraq in 1979 and returned after the fall of Hussein. Sometimes ill at 
ease in public, he speaks in generalities and has yet to shed the 
clandestine style characteristic of a member of an underground movement. 
In Basra and elsewhere, that quality distinguishes the Supreme Council 
from the grass-roots street swagger of the rival movement led by Moqtada 
Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric who enjoys popularity among poor youth here.

In a style familiar in Iran, Battat wears a gray suit with shirt 
buttoned to the collar, but no tie. Over his desk is a portrait of Abdul 
Aziz Hakim; a larger picture of Hakim's slain brother sits in the 
corner, near a table sprinkled with burned incense.

Battat acknowledged the local government's shortcomings but said the 
Supreme Council should not be singled out for blame. Despite having too 
little money and too little authority, he said he still takes pride in 
what the city council has done over the past year: providing $100 
monthly stipends to 5,000 families in Basra with members who were killed 
by Hussein's government; delivering houses to 20 of those families; 
barring Baath Party members from working in the city government; and 
repaving and repairing some streets and bridges.

Then, in an unsolicited comment, Battat denied his party had any role in 
corruption or in doing the bidding of Iran's Islamic government, which 
Western diplomats say still generously funds the movement.

"You cannot say these parties are imported from abroad or that people 
fear them," he said, speaking softly and slowly. "We haven't taken any 
advantage from our position or appointed people on our behalf."

Battat paused for a moment. "We work in Basra," he said, "and we haven't 
found anyone who says these things."

*The Role of Iran
*

The question of Iranian support is debilitating for Basra's Islamic 
parties, in particular for the Supreme Council, which fought on the 
Iranian side during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war and, as is bitterly 
recalled by some Iraqi veterans, oversaw prisoner-of-war camps. Some 
Supreme Council officials in Basra still speak Arabic with a Persian 
inflection, and many residents -- both religious and secular -- 
punctuate their conversations with rumors about the involvement of 
Iran's intelligence service in southern Iraq.

One rival Islamic party, an offshoot of Sadr's movement known as 
Fudhala, is campaigning on a slogan that is a not-too-subtle jab at the 
Supreme Council's perceived leanings: "Born in Iraq, Iraqi financed, 
with Iraqi leadership."

Despite the disenchantment, the Supreme Council and allied parties still 
have a powerful card to play: the stature of Sistani, whose leadership 
is known as the marja. While the ayatollah has not formally endorsed the 
United Iraqi Alliance in the parliamentary vote or the Supreme Council's 
list in local elections, the party has emblazoned his portrait on 
campaign literature. "All of us are with the list of the marja," one 
poster reads. In sympathetic mosques, preachers have insisted that 
voting for the alliance is equivalent to a religious duty.

Opposition candidates suggest that while secular groups such as the 
Communist Party-backed People's Union and Allawi's coalition will fare 
well in Basra, religious parties will still find success in the 
countryside, which is far more conservative and religious.

In their view, rural Iraqis are more willing to follow the lead of the 
clergy and tribal leaders historically loyal to the Shiite leadership in 
Najaf.

"The Islamic parties have locked up the countryside," said Ahmed 
Khudheir, a spokesman for the Communist Party, whose decrepit office is 
lined with portraits of cadres killed under Hussein's rule and pictures 
of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. "It's religion, not politics there."

In the city, though, there is a process underway that might be called a 
demystification of authority, a narrowing of the distance between ruler 
and ruled that was so ingrained under Hussein. The elections' greatest 
success may prove to be the degree to which Basra's residents now hold 
the government accountable, whatever its leaning, voicing criticism 
never heard in 25 years.

Often the talk comes furiously.

"None of the parties had done anything," said Saad Fatlawi, standing in 
an appliance store along Algeria Street. "They steal, they loot, they 
use force, and those who don't serve them, they'll break their back."

His colleague, Khaled Hassan, interrupted, saying Sistani had "blessed" 
the Supreme Council's list.

"There's no life in Iraq," Fatlawi answered. "This is the way we're 
going to live? This is not a life."

The secular parties are counting on that sentiment, in the city at 
least, to improve their fortunes.

"It's not because we have a strong project or activity in the field. 
We're weak, confused and disorganized," said Sari, the opposition party 
leader, "but the people are going to vote for us, solely so that they're 
not under the hammer of the religious parties. This is the reality."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company