British occupation forces here tried to put a new local governing council in place on Sunday, but residents who were angry that it was handpicked by the British poured into Basra's streets by the thousands in protest.
"We can manage ourselves, by ourselves," read one of the banners carried by demonstrators.
PHOTO:AP
To prepare for the unveiling of the new government, British forces refurbished a building and turned it into Basra's city hall. They drew up an elaborate flowchart.
And they had sent out invitations to two dozen men who they decided had the wherewithal to help restore the city's power grid, its pumping stations and its other infrastructure.
But governing Iraq's second-largest city has proved as much a challenge as seizing it was, and the process has become embroiled in how much control religious leaders of the country's Shiite Muslim majority will assume.
The same soldiers who fought their way into the city and worked for weeks to suppress former president Saddam Hussein's loyalists hidden in the population are now struggling to devise a governmental structure that will stick.
"It's like trying to nail jelly to the wall," one official said. "If you want military precision on this, you ain't going to get it."
Basra, a city of 1.3 million people, is nowhere near as chaotic as Baghdad, and expectations were that Basra would serve as a model for how to rebuild a metropolis in the new Iraq. British soldiers here say they have not been fired upon like their US counterparts farther north, and that they have been able to devote more attention to getting the area back on its feet.
Still, ruling Basra has proved vexing. The new body that the military attempted to put into operation on Sunday was supposed to have replaced an interim council set up after the war and then disbanded because it was found to include people with ties to Hussein's Baath Party.
Officials also said that every time they completed some improvement for the city's infrastructure, looters managed to chip away at the progress.
The new council was to be headed not by an Iraqi but by Brigadier Adrian Bradshaw, who commands the 7th Armored Division, which is in charge of Basra. Ole Wohlers Olsen, a Danish diplomat who is the Basra representative for the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, a Pentagon division, was to play a major role as well.
The Iraqi participants were to be technocrats selected by the military: a water specialist, an engineer with the power company, a health official, a banker and the like.
The body was supposed to shield itself from politics and focus instead on the area's many woes.
But at the opening meeting on Sunday, the carefully laid plans began to fall apart. Several thousand protesters denounced the new setup as antidemocratic.
They were not assuaged by the military's creation of a separate civic forum to allow those interested in local issues to hold discussions without any decision-making authority.
When British military police tried to block the demonstration from approaching city hall, the protesters would have none of it. "This is an Iraqi road," one said. "We want to use it."
The military, eager to be flexible, allowed the demonstrators to march on.
The British also decided to select an Iraqi to serve as co-chairman of the body alongside Bradshaw. A chair was left open for that person at the meeting Sunday.
But no Iraqi chose to fill it. The two Shiite sheiks who led the protest, Ahmed al-Maliky and Khazal al-Saedy, were invited into the meeting. But they convinced the other Iraqis at the table that the British should not be selecting Iraqi representatives.
Eventually, the Iraqis walked out and said they would reconvene the meeting only after they had the backing of other Iraqis.
Despite attempts by Bradshaw to proceed with the agenda, which dealt with topics such as getting the city's power grid running, the group did not get very far before it broke up.
"This process is unpredictable and uneven, and sometimes we're finding that we take one step forward and two steps back," acknowledged Ronnie McCourt, a spokesman for the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance.
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