|
New Iraq PM Nominee a Veteran Shiite Pol
The new nominee for prime minister is a veteran insider in Iraq's oldest Shiite political party who spent years in exile after being sentenced to death by Saddam Hussein's regime.Since Saddam's ouster in 2003, Jawad al-Maliki has been a prominent operative for the Dawa Party. He was a key negotiator with Sunnis and Kurds in the tough deliberations to draft Iraq's constitution last summer. His nomination to succeed prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Dawa colleague, would herald a dramatic change in style for that office. While al-Jaafari is soft-spoken, often poetic in his conversations with other politicians, al-Maliki is seen as tougher and more strident -- but also more pragmatic. It was al-Maliki who announced to reporters Thursday that al-Jaafari had abandoned his bid for a second term in the face of strong opposition from Sunnis and Kurds. Al-Maliki is "firmer and a much more insistent and practical man compared to al-Jaafari," said Saleh al-Mutlaq, a leading Sunni politician who was also on the constitutional drafting committee. He "gets to the point, doing his best to make the audience understand what he is trying to say." Al-Maliki was born Nouri Kamel al-Maliki about 50 years ago in Hindiya, Iraq, a small town south of the Shiite holy city of Karbala. As a young man he joined the Dawa, the main Shiite opposition to Saddam's rule. Sentenced to death for his membership in the party, fled in 1980 shortly after the death sentence and took the name Jawad. He, al-Jaafari and much of the Dawa leadership went first to Iran. But in the mid-1980s, he and al-Jaafari left for Syria after Dawa split between a pro-Iranian faction and a second branch that refused to join Iran's army for the bloody war with Iraq. While in Syria, he was in charge of the "Jihad Office," a branch responsible for directing activists inside Iraq. After Saddam fell in 2003, al-Maliki returned to his homeland. He was named to the National Council, a U.S.-brokered consultative body created in 2004 when sovereignty was returned to Iraq. In the first post-Saddam election in January 2005, he was elected to parliament as part of the alliance of Dawa and other Shiite parties that dominated the vote. He served as the head of parliament's Security and Defense Committee. He became a member of the De-Baathification Commission, the body that led the purge of members of Saddam's ousted ruling party from the military and government. Sunni Arabs -- who formed the backbone of the Baath Party -- deeply resent the program, saying it aims to push them out of participation in post-Saddam Iraq. Al-Maliki also bargained on behalf of the Shiite alliance during the months of haggling over the permanent constitution. The Shiites, backed by the Kurds, won provisions allowing them to form semi-autonomous mini-states in the north and south, a policy sharply opposed by Sunni Arabs. The constitution was passed in an October referendum only after Sunni Arabs won a promise that parliament consider major amendments. That will be one of the first orders of business in Iraq's political process after the government is formed. "I think if al-Maliki worked hard to get rid of his Baath party complexes, he will succeed," al-Mutlaq said. Al-Maliki has a son and three daughters. Posted by: Anonymoose 2006-04-21 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=149336 |