Handpicking Iraq's interim leadership to reflect its ethnic and religious makeup seemed like the right thing to do six months ago. But communal tensions are on the rise, deepening the country's ethnic and religious fault lines and casting doubt on prospects for installing a peacefully elected government next year.
While Iraqis revel in their newfound freedoms to speak, worship, publish and broadcast as they please, their future as a unified state is being tested by rivalries among Sunni Muslims, Shiites and Kurds jockeying for power after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
Cobbled together by colonial Britain less than a century ago, Iraq has struggled for years with ethnic and religious rivalries.
The prospect of national dismem-berment may seem remote, but that possibility has been enough for Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey to warn publicly against steps which might lead to the division of this nation of 25 million. Clashes between majority Shiites and minority Sunnis are not uncommon. On Dec. 9, a Sunni mosque was bombed in Baghdad, killing three people. On Friday, a car bomb killed five people outside a Shiite mosque in Baqouba, a mixed Sunni-Shiite city in a mostly Sunni region.
Attacks on the offices of Kurdish political parties also are increasing, as is squabbling among members of the Governing Council -- the Iraqi interim administration of 13 Shiites, five Sunni Arabs, five Kurds, one ethnic Turk and one Christian -- over whether to adopt a federal system in which the Kurds would retain the substantial self-rule they have enjoyed in their northern provinces since the end of the 1991 Gulf War.
Iraqi politicians routinely explain away their differences as part of the country's newfound democracy and assure Iraqis that only dialogue, rather than violence, would be used to settle differences.
They accuse hard-liners and the media, especially Arab satellite news channels such as Al-Jazeera, of fomenting strife.
"There is no such thing as a 'representative' of Sunni Arabs," said Samir Shakir Mahmoud, a Sunni, when asked about his role on the Governing Council.
"I consider myself an Iraqi citizen first ... and I try to serve Iraqis, all Iraqis -- Sunnis, Shiites, Arabs, Kurds and others," he said in a newspaper interview this week.
But for Sunnis, the prospect of minority status in a future, Shiite-dominated government is unsettling, given their long ascendancy under the British and then under Saddam. Many Sunnis accuse the Americans of fanning sectarianism as part of a divide-and-rule policy. They complain that the Americans are paying excessive attention to the views of senior Shiite clerics on the political process, which is designed to hand over sovereignty to Iraqis by July 1 and put a democratically elected government in place by the end of 2005.
On the other hand, when it comes to resisting Kurdish autonomy demands, Sunni and Shiite Arabs on the council are united.
The patchwork face of post-Saddam Iraq is on vivid display. Iraqi TV broadcasts of the five daily Muslim calls for prayer include both the Sunni and Shiite versions. The Muslim Eid al-Fitr holiday in November was observed on three different days to accommodate all faiths, and the Governing Council runs three religious affairs departments -- one for Shiites, one for Sunnis and one for non-Muslims.
Fair enough, an ecumenical-minded outsider might conclude. Wrong, argue many Iraqis, mostly Sunnis but also some secular-minded Shiites, who see the seeds of secession in the new Iraq.
"The sectarian and religious approach to politics in Iraq is very dangerous," warned Fahmi Howei-di, a prominent Islamic writer from Egypt who closely monitors religious issues in the Arab world.
"It has created a divide that will be difficult to mend or reverse in the future," Howeidi said.
A beauty queen who pulled out of the Miss South Africa competition when her nationality was questioned has said she wants to relocate to Nigeria, after coming second in the Miss Universe pageant while representing the West African country. Chidimma Adetshina, whose father is Nigerian, was crowned Miss Universe Africa and Oceania and was runner-up to Denmark’s Victoria Kjar Theilvig in Mexico on Saturday night. The 23-year-old law student withdrew from the Miss South Africa competition in August, saying that she needed to protect herself and her family after the government alleged that her mother had stolen the identity of a South
BELT-TIGHTENING: Chinese investments in Cambodia are projected to drop to US$35 million in 2026 from more than US$420 million in 2021 At a ceremony in August, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet knelt to receive blessings from saffron-robed monks as fireworks and balloons heralded the breaking of ground for a canal he hoped would transform his country’s economic fortunes. Addressing hundreds of people waving the Cambodian flag, Hun Manet said China would contribute 49 percent to the funding of the Funan Techo Canal that would link the Mekong River to the Gulf of Thailand and reduce Cambodia’s shipping reliance on Vietnam. Cambodia’s government estimates the strategic, if contentious, infrastructure project would cost US$1.7 billion, nearly 4 percent of the nation’s annual GDP. However, months later,
HOPEFUL FOR PEACE: Zelenskiy said that the war would ‘end sooner’ with Trump and that Ukraine must do all it can to ensure the fighting ends next year Russia’s state-owned gas company Gazprom early yesterday suspended gas deliveries via Ukraine, Vienna-based utility OMV said, in a development that signals a fast-approaching end of Moscow’s last gas flows to Europe. Russia’s oldest gas-export route to Europe, a pipeline dating back to Soviet days via Ukraine, is set to shut at the end of this year. Ukraine has said it would not extend the transit agreement with Russian state-owned Gazprom to deprive Russia of profits that Kyiv says help to finance the war against it. Moscow’s suspension of gas for Austria, the main receiver of gas via Ukraine, means Russia now only
‘HARD-HEADED’: Some people did not evacuate to protect their property or because they were skeptical of the warnings, a disaster agency official said Typhoon Man-yi yesterday slammed into the Philippines’ most populous island, with the national weather service warning of flooding, landslides and huge waves as the storm sweeps across the archipelago nation. Man-yi was still packing maximum sustained winds of 185kph after making its first landfall late on Saturday on lightly populated Catanduanes island. More than 1.2 million people fled their homes ahead of Man-yi as the weather forecaster warned of a “life-threatening” effect from the powerful storm, which follows an unusual streak of violent weather. Man-yi uprooted trees, brought down power lines and smashed flimsy houses to pieces after hitting Catanduanes in the typhoon-prone
RSS