As Maliki Clings to Power, Iraq’s Fissures Deepen
Ayman Oghanna for The New York Times
Men discussed politics in a teahouse in a Sunni district of Baghdad on Sunday. The parliamentary election results are threatening to alienate Iraq’s Sunnis.
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
Published: October 3, 2010
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LinkedinDiggMixxMySpaceYahoo! BuzzPermalink. BAGHDAD — When Nuri Kamal al-Maliki began his bid for re-election as prime minister — exactly a year ago on Saturday — he pledged to unite a population splintered and suspicious after years of war. He has not, and while he is hardly alone in blame, the consequences could haunt Iraq for years to come.
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The purging of ballot lists before the election, the contentious and inconclusive challenges to the results, and the protracted delay in forming a new government since then have all deepened the ethnic, sectarian and societal cracks in a newly democratic state as fragile as an ancient Babylonian vase.
Sunni leaders in particular are angry at the prospect that they may be disenfranchised once again.
“The past four years have been full of injustice and oppression,” Atheel al-Nujaifi, a Sunni who is governor of Nineveh Province in northern Iraq, said Sunday in Mosul.
He accused Mr. Maliki of having abused his authority by arresting opponents, pressuring the courts, and hiring and firing security forces based on sectarian identity — practices, Mr. Nujaifi said, that Mr. Maliki continued even now as a caretaker leader with no mandate or parliamentary oversight. “Mr. Maliki’s continuation as prime minister will create a dictatorship,” he warned.
Even plans to conduct a census this month ran afoul of these divisions. On Sunday, Mr. Maliki’s caretaker government postponed the census — the first in years — until December after angry protests that an accurate count of the country’s population would rub raw the divides, especially in regions like Kirkuk and Nineveh, with myriad peoples and territorial disputes.
The challenge now is for Mr. Maliki to overcome the divisions and suspicions — among Sunnis, above all — that have dogged Iraq since its creation in 1920 under British rule, cobbled together out of disparate Ottoman provinces. Even though Mr. Maliki is all but assured of leading the next government, it could take weeks or months more for him to persuade the Sunnis to join the government in some way.
Mr. Maliki secured the nomination for a second four-year term on Friday, but he did so with the support, save one, of only fellow Shiites, in particular the followers of a radical cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, who not long ago were involved in the fighting that plunged Iraq into civil war.
Mr. Maliki, whose bloc narrowly lost the election in March to a secular and largely Sunni coalition led by Ayad Allawi, has fought so tenaciously to regain his post, and alienated so many potential allies in government, that few on Sunday said they believed his pledges, once again, to unite all Iraqis under his leadership.
Among Iraq’s Sunnis the view is acute and disturbing, given the disenfranchisement that once provided Al Qaeda and other Sunni extremist groups succor.
The electoral map of Nineveh, like that of all Iraq, traces the fault lines that divide the country and could yet sunder it, violently or otherwise.
Mr. Allawi’s alliance, Iraqiya, won an overwhelming majority of the province’s 31 seats outside the area under the control of the semiautonomous Kurdish region, which Mr. Nujaifi cannot even visit. Mr. Maliki’s State of Law coalition did not win a single seat there. The same was true in the Sunni provinces of Anbar and Salahuddin. The coalition won only one seat north of Baghdad, in Diyala. By contrast, Mr. Maliki or his main Shiite rivals won in all the provinces of the overwhelmingly Shiite south, while Mr. Allawi picked up only a handful of seats there.
Baghdad, like Kirkuk and Diyala, was split, like the neighborhoods that even now, despite improved security, are defined as either Sunni or Shiite, separated by checkpoints and blast walls that outsiders are wary to pass.
In the Sunni quarters on Sunday, despair, anger and fear prevailed. A common view blamed Iran, Iraq’s Shiite neighbor, for orchestrating Shiite dominance of a multicultural nation. Many accused Mr. Maliki of resorting to political expedience to retain power, rather than exercising national leadership.
In the Adhamiya area of Baghdad, a parking lot attendant who gave his name only as Suhaib Abu Farah, which means father of Farah, said another four years with Mr. Maliki would roil the streets. “The only choice for Iraqi men,” he said, “is either leaving Iraq or joining armed groups for money.”
The election — Iraq’s second for a new Parliament since the American invasion in 2003 — was supposed to blur the sectarian divisions that the toppling of Saddam Hussein exposed, if not erase them entirely.
To an extent, all the major parities and blocs sought to appeal to voters outside their bases, which are defined not by ideology as much as identity.
“National unity” was the theme, but when all the votes were counted — then recounted and finally certified months ago — identity triumphed. In an interview this summer, Mr. Maliki himself expressed disappointment that when it came to sectarianism, the country had returned to “square one.”
Of course, all sides blame one another for sectarianism, but the election results made it inevitable. One reason a government has not yet been formed is that Mr. Maliki had to spend the past seven months shoring up his nomination first among Shiites, overcoming a challenge from rivals for the post, including Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi.
Reporting was contributed by Omar al-Jawoshy and Yasir Ghazi from Baghdad, an employee of The New York Times from Mosul, Iraq, and Helene Cooper from Washington.
Mr. Maliki now has the support of at least 148 members of the new 325-seat Parliament, just short of a majority. With the support of the Kurds, who have 57 seats in all, he could easily form a government that excludes Sunnis almost entirely.
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That is the biggest fear of the United States, as well as many Iraqis. Obama administration officials have pushed for a compromise power-sharing agreement that would allow Mr. Maliki to retain his post, but curb his authority and bring in Mr. Allawi’s alliance, with its Sunni supporters.
“If the result is a government that has a leadership role for Iraqiya and the Kurds as well as Maliki, I think that’s a good result that reflects the elections,” a senior Obama administration official said Sunday. But “if there’s somehow a government that results in the grouping together of one faction or another with the exclusion of one major group, that’s not a good result.” The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the negotiations.
Mr. Allawi, a secular Shiite who served as interim prime minister in 2004 and 2005, arguably had the most success in building a coalition that crossed sectarian lines in the election, winning 91 seats to Mr. Maliki’s 89.
In the aftermath of Mr. Maliki’s nomination, he has reached out to Mr. Mahdi’s party, as well as other smaller parties representing Sunnis and Shiites. His supporters have vowed not to negotiate with Mr. Maliki to join the government in a subordinate role.
The math appears to be against Mr. Allawi, though, unless he can overcome the disputes between Sunnis and Kurds in Nineveh, Kirkuk and Diyala, which few believe is possible.
The sole Sunni in Mr. Maliki’s bloc, Hajim al-Hassani — who was appointed to a compensatory seat, not elected outright — said Sunday in an interview that Mr. Maliki intended to create a governing coalition that distributed posts in correlation to the percentage of votes.
“We have to create an environment where there is no marginalization,” he said. “Iraq today is a democratic society. We must represent all Iraqis.”
The question is whether Mr. Maliki now can. The Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq, a Sunni organization, said Mr. Maliki’s sectarianism was merely a reverse of the Sunni domination of Iraq under Mr. Hussein’s dictatorship.
“Iraq’s fate,” the organization said in a statement, “is at a tipping point.”
Reporting was contributed by Omar al-Jawoshy and Yasir Ghazi from Baghdad, an employee of The New York Times from Mosul, Iraq, and Helene Cooper from Washington.
A version of this news analysis appeared in print on October 4, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition..
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