'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Moqtada reframes Iraqi politics

With the relative success of the mass rally his people organized in Firdaws Square today, Shiite Muslim firebrand Moqtada Sadr looks set to change the main "frame" within which Iraqi politics has been cast from the frame of sectarian politics to that of a determinedly inter-sectarian nationalist (i.e. anti-occupation) campaign.

Ever since last December or so, the main way in which westerners (and, perhaps, many Iraqis) have been viewing Iraqi politics has been through the lens of sectarian/national-group competition... "Will 'the Sunnis' participate in the election or not?"... "Can 'the Shiites' make a post-electoral deal with 'the Kurds'?"... "How can the interests of 'the Sunnis' be accommodated in the post-Saddam order?" Etc., etc.

That trend seems to have served the interests of the occupation forces well, keeping as much attention as possible focused on the relative "shares" of power the big three population groups inside Iraq (and the other, smaller groups) could enjoy within the political "system" whose sum-total of powers and authorities the occupation forces have continued to keep tightly limited.

It also served the broader regional interests of the Bush administration. Describing what was happening in Iraq in mainly sectarian terms (the "rise of Shiite power") allowed Washington to monger huge fears of this trend among many Sunni powers in the region. (Not the least of them, Jordan's 'King' Abdullah, Saudi Arabia's 'Crown prince' Abdullah, etc.) The scene seemed about to be set to entrench a region-spanning fissure between Shiite Arabs-- including the Lebanese Shia, the Shia communities of eastern Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and other GCC countries and also, most likely, the sort-of-Shiite Alawis who monopolize power in Damascus-- and the very tired old Sunni powers, including the two just mentioned, the Egyptian regime, and some others.

Just think of the contrast between this sectarian view of the Middle East and the euphoria that swept through most of the Arab countries back in May 2000 when Hizbullah proved itself capable of pushing the Israeli army almost completely out of Lebanon.

Divide and rule, anyone?

(I recall that back on April 23, 2003, the Brookings Institution's Martin Indyk had openly advocated just such a policy, telling an audience that, "We have to get rid of this naive notion that by turning on the lights and fixing the hospitals we are going to be able to build a moderate, representative government in Iraq. We're going to have to play the old imperial game of divide and rule and the stakes could not be higher." It's true, Martin had been a leading Middle East advisor in the Clinton, not the Bush, administration... So if that was what even the long-time Clintonites were advocating, you can bet that many people in Rumsfeld's Pentagon were also on the ball with implementing those thoughts right from the very beginning.)

But now, Moqtada seems to be having some success in his attempt to change the subject back to that of ending the occupation...

Both AP and the BBC are reporting that some "tens of thousands" of Iraqis responded to Moqtada's call for mass demonstrations around anti-occupation slogans to gather in Baghdad's Firdaws Square and other points around Iraq today.

Yes, it's true that turnout there fell far beneath the "million-person" target Moqtada had set for the action. But the crowd was many, many times bigger than the totally staged "rally" that the US forces and a few dazed-looking, just-returned Iraqi exiles staged in the same square two years ago today... That was the one in which US military vehicles were employed in helping topple the statue of Saddam...

In today's demonstration, AP reported that:

The protesters filled Firdos Square and spilled onto nearby avenues, waving Iraqi flags. Mimicking the famous images of U.S. soldiers and Iraqis pulling down a statue of Saddam as Baghdad fell, protesters toppled effigies of President Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Saddam — all dressed like Iraqi prisoners in red jumpsuits. Other effigies of Bush and Saddam were burned.

"Force the occupation to leave from our country," one banner read in English.

The Shiite protesters also called for the now-jailed Saddam to face justice, and they held up framed photos of al-Sadr's father, a prominent cleric executed by Saddam. Mahdi Army militiamen searched people entering the demonstration area as Iraqi policemen stood to the side.

Also, this:

Other marches were held across the country to demand that the United States set a timetable for its withdrawal. In the central city of Ramadi, thousands of protestors demonstrated in the al-Sufayaa neighborhood and at Anbar University, demanding that U.S.-led coalition forces set a withdrawal date.

Now, I'm thinking that the demonstration in Ramadi probably involved mostly Sunni participants?

The question of how many Sunnis participated in the main Sadrist rally is interesting, and murky. Before the demonstration, Jazeera reported that,

Sunni Muslims were urged by the Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq, an influential Sunni group, to demonstrate to mark the fall of Saddam and to demand US forces leave Iraq.

"Many of our brothers, including Sunnis, have welcomed the call and will take part," said Shaikh Abd al-Hadi al-Daraji, a spokesman for al-Sadr. "We hope it's going to be one million people strong."

In Al-Hayat today, I read this (Arabic readers only):

Sadr's spokesman Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Darraji told al-Hayat that... "The invitations that Sayed Sadr sent out for people to participate in the demonstration show that the demonstration will not be limited only to his followers," confirming that, "Numerous invitations were sent to the Sunni community and the Association of Muslim Scholars and the members of the 'founding conference' [?] and the Iraqi National Association and officials of parties and humanitarian organizations."

... And the imams of the Shiite and Sunni mosques in Baghdad yesterday called Iraqis to take part in today's demonstration.

The head of the (Sunni)Association of Muslim Scholars Sheikh Harith al-Dari said in his Friday sermon in the Um al-Qurra mosque west of Baghdad, "I call on all Iraqis to all go out tomorrow in peaceful demonstrations against the occupation."

And he called on the Iraqi people to "Speak their piece with one tongue: 'No to the occupation' and that the occupation must go."

Dari made clear that, "It's the duty of Iraqis to express this in practice. They must shout with one voice and go out tomorrow in demonstrations in all the cities of Iraq from Basra in the south to Dohuk in the north to say 'Enough' of games and playing around, Enough of raising unclear slogans, slogans of sectarianism, and watered-down slogans."

He added, "I beg [the people of] all Iraqi cities that they go out to express their loathing of the occupation and everything that it has caused."

All in all, very interesting... An action that may or may not have been joint, but that was at least massively parallel in both communities.

Moqtada has been notable, within the Shiite community, for three things over the past 18 months:

(1) His insistence on continuing to try to reach out to the Sunnis. Including during last November's US assault on the Sunni city of Fallujah. During that assault, "mainstream" Shiite leaders including Ayatollah Sistani stayed notably silent, giving rise to specualtion that they were kind of happy to see the Sunnis being given a bloody nose.

(2) His focus on, and success in, grassroots organizing within the Shiite community. If you haven't read the great piece that Anthony Shadid had in Friday's WaPo, you should do so quickly before they take it offline. Bottom line: Beyond Baghdad... Iraqis see a new boldness in the militia in cities like Nasiriyah, Basra and Amarah, all south of the capital and all patrolled by foreign forces allied with the United States. In Basra, the [Sadrist] Mahdi Army is widely viewed as the force that can put more armed men in the street than any other. Amarah remains its stronghold. In Nasiriyah, it has struck an alliance with the secular police chief, who views the group as a counterweight to other militias. "The silent majority is not with him, but the majority of active people are," said Ayatollah Mohammed Taqi Mudarrassi, a cleric in Karbala, referring to Sadr. "If you count the ballot boxes, the balance is with the moderates. If you count those in the streets, it's the opposite." The enduring appeal of Sadr's militia speaks to the forces still shaping Iraq: nationalism, religion and guns. And,

(3) His insistence on not "playing any games" with the occupation, in terms of seeing it as "a necessary presence, in the short term, in order to protect 'my' community from that 'other' community"... In other words, the classic kind of a game that a policy of 'divide and rule' seeks to set in motion... All the high-up figures from the pols elected on January 30 have joined that game to one degree or another since late December-- no doubt, to the delight of Donald Rumsfeld. Sadr has always refused to play it; and now he's coming out on the streets in conjunction with leading parts of the Sunni community to openly demand the end of the occupation.

So, this is an interesting and welcome new dynamic in Iraq. It is great that this new anti-occupation movement is using as its main organizing vehicle the convening of peaceful mass demonstrations to express the people's will.

The violence in Iraq has not ended, by any means. Just yesterday, one of Sadr's organizers traveling from the south to attend today's demonstration, was gunned down along the road. There are still extremists and hoodlums out there, all of them enabled and empowered by the continuing crisis in public security and some of them probably set in motion by heinous, behind-the-scenes forces.

But if the main trend within Iraq's Sunni and Shiite communities can be swung toward the concept of peaceful mass action, then there is a hope there (as in Lebanon) that the people intent on fomenting violence, hatred, and social breakdown can become marginalized and defeated.

Regarding peaceful mass actions and Shiite-Sunni collaboration on an anti-"imperial" agenda, I note too that in Lebanon Hizbullah has been paying a lot of attention to trying to restore relations with the local Sunni community that had become frayed (or worse?) as a result of the whole Hariri issue...

And in Gaza and the West Bank, Hamas has been showing a whole new stress on organizing peaceful mass demonstrations in various parts of the occupied territories... But the situation there is so explosive in general, with the extremist Israeli settlers apparently about to hold a huge rally in Jerusalem and Israeli troops having just killed three Palestinian youths in southern Gaza... Who knows what will happen there in the next 48 hours?

A correction: I have just looked again through some of AP's gallery of photos of the Hamas marches in the occupied territories. They certainly don't all look peaceful. I also noticed for the first time that the Fateh-linked Al-Aqsa Brigades people pictured there were wearing yellow bands and had yellow flags. In that part of the world yellow is overwhelmingly associated with Lebanon's Hizbullah.