WELCOME TO IWPR'S IRAQI CRISIS REPORT, No. 13, April 11, 2003

DEATH OF A LEADER The killing of Abdul Majid in Najaf is a devastating
blow to the hopes of Shias, and all Iraqis, to build a new and moderate
society. By Ghanem Jawad in London.

TURKISH TENSIONS OVER MOSUL AND KIRKUK Kurdish advances into key oil
cities have raised alarms in Ankara over a possible Kurdish political
entity in Iraq. By David McDowall in London.

MEMORIES OF SADDAM An exile remembers a childhood in Iraq, and the fear
that followed his family well beyond the country's borders. By Raied Jawad
in Cambridge, England.

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DEATH OF A LEADER

The killing of Abdul Majid in Najaf is a devastating blow to the hopes of
Shias, and all Iraqis, to build a new and moderate society.

By Ghanem Jawad in London

Sayyed Abdul Majid el-Khoei, who was murdered in the holy city of Najaf on
Thursday, spent his life trying to reconcile Iraq's fragmented Shia
community. His murder has dealt a devastating blow to hopes that Iraqi
Shias could improve their community and build a new and more moderate
society - not just for Shias, but for all Iraqi people.

Since arriving in southern Iraq on April 3, Sayyed Abdul Majid had used
his influence to bring calm and stability. Because of his presence and his
intervention, Najaf was handed over to the allies without any bloodshed.

The main goal of his mission was to prevent any loss of life in Najaf -
not just his own home city, but also the holy shrine of the Imam Ali and
the centre of the Shia religion's high authorities. He set up a civil
authority to run services and take care of security in the city under
Abdul Hassan al-Kafaji, formerly director of the Al-Khoei Foundation
library in London.

Seeing his influence, the allies took him to Kerbala and Diwaniyah and he
took his message there: "Don't fight. Avoid bloodshed. Seek
reconciliation."

His death came after he called for a reconciliation meeting in Najaf's
Imam Ali mosque between local religious leaders and Haidar Rifeii, the
Guardian of the Shrine of Imam Ali. Imam Ali was the Prophet Mohammed's
son-in-law and is considered by Shias to be his successor.

The post of Guardian of the Shrine is an inherited one, passing down
within a family, and the man who held it inevitably had links with the
regime. It has been said that Haidar Rifeii was an "animal", someone with
close ties to Saddam. But he is reported wrongly. He was not a bad man: a
man in his position had to listen to the government's orders. When Saddam,
or any of his people, visited Najaf, Haidar Rifeii had to greet them and
deal with them.

When Najaf fell, Haidar Rifeii went into hiding for a few days. On
Thursday morning, Abdul Majid called religious leaders and Haidar Rifeii
together in the office of the Guardian of the Shrine to attempt a
reconciliation. An armed group came to the office and asked Abdul Majid to
hand Haidar over so they could kill him. They said he was loyal to Saddam,
a Ba'athist. Abdul Majid refused. He said: "We don't want bloodshed. We
must be tolerant." He was beginning to talk to them. But their minds were
closed and they were determined to do what they had come to do.

They opened fire on one of Abdul Majid's aides, Maher el-Yasseri, and
killed him. Then a crowd started to smash windows in the office. They
entered and cornered Abdul Majid. After they had injured him, and he was
already bleeding, they took him outside and finished him off with knives.

We do not know yet whose hand, if any, was behind the crowd that killed
Abdul Majid, whether it was the Fedayeen of Saddam, another militia or any
rival. All things are possible.

But the responsibility for Abdul Majid's death lies not just with those
who dealt the blows that killed him. It also lies with those who got rid
of Saddam Hussein's regime. When dictatorial governments fall, societies
collapse in chaos. The American and British forces who created the power
vacuum that we are now seeing in Iraq have a duty to control the situation
that has resulted from it. They have eliminated Saddam; now they have to
save the lives of innocent people.

Abdul Majid was brave and open-minded. His aims were humanitarian aims.
There was no-one like him. We have lost one of the most important leaders
who could have guided the Shia community, and Iraq, to live in peace and
stability. Our hopes of building a strong new civil society are
devastated.

After his murder, Sayyed Abdul Majid's body was taken to the al-Khadra
mosque, where it lies beside those of his father, Grand Ayatollah abu
al-Qasm al-Khoei, who died at the age of 92 after being kept under house
arrest by the regime, and his brother Mohammed Taki, who was killed in
1994 in a car crash orchestrated by the regime between Najaf and Kerbala.

Another brother, Ibrahim al-Khoei, is one of 106 members of the Grand
Ayatollah's staff who were arrested in 1991 as Saddam Hussein crushed the
popular uprising against him that followed his defeat in Kuwait. On that
occasion, the Grand Ayatollah was taken to Baghdad and detained in
military intelligence headquarters before being paraded on television in a
staged meting with Saddam.

None of the 106 have been seen since.

Ghanem Jawad is a human rights activist who has worked closely for many
years with UN special rapporteurs for Iraq. He is head of the culture and
human rights department of the Al-Khoei Foundation in London.


TURKISH TENSIONS OVER MOSUL AND KIRKUK

Kurdish advances into key oil cities have raised alarms in Ankara over a
possible Kurdish political entity in Iraq.

By David McDowall in London

Turkey announced yesterday that it has sent some 15 military observers to
monitor developments in northern Iraq after Kurdish forces, in
coordination with the Americans, took control of key oil towns there. With
Kirkuk and now Mosul "liberated" by Kurdish forces, Turkey is getting
increasingly tense over the Kurdish role in the war in Iraq. Its anxiety
arises from several factors.

Principally, Turkey is determined that Iraq's five million Kurds should
not acquire a coherent political entity such as the federal state to which
the Democratic Party of Kurdistan and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan
aspire. Kurdish reassurances that there is no intention to secede from
Iraq cut no ice.

Turkey does not want a federal state in Iraq because it reminds its own
much larger Kurdish community what it has itself been denied. From 1923
onwards, Turkey ruthlessly suppressed Kurdish identity in Turkey. It spent
15 years defeating the separatist Kurdish guerrillas of the Kurdistan
Workers Party (PKK), but having won the military war it knows it is still
in danger of losing the much more important political one. Turkey taught
its own Kurds about their distinctive identity much more effectively than
the PKK. By its killings, torture and the mass evacuation of the
countryside, it must take credit for creating the Kurdish national
movement in Turkey.

Now that Turkey badly wants to join the European Union, it finds itself
having to liberalise internally, something replete with the danger of
pluralism. The last thing it wants is for Iraq's Kurds to demonstrate just
what can be achieved in Iraq, a state that admits to pluralism.

Behind this immediate fear, however, stands a far longer history - a
history of claim to Mosul, which yesterday fell into the hands of Iraqi
Kurds.

In 1918, at the end of World War I, British forces cheated on the
Armistice of Mudros by requiring the defeated Ottoman forces to withdraw
completely from both the city and the province of Mosul - ensuring that
Mosul became a bitter bone of contention. Ataturk's National Pact of 1919,
the emotive 'title deed' of modern Turkey, included the province within
its boundaries and it was only reluctantly that Turkey accepted the 1925
League of Nations ruling that the province would remain part of Iraq. Deep
down, most Turks who know this history still feel cheated.

It is most unlikely that Turkey will ever seek to regain the province of
Mosul except in the case of complete Iraqi meltdown. But the Kurds are
justifiably fearful of Turkey, even so. They are also fearful that just as
Britain reassured Turkey in 1923 that the Kurds would not be allowed to
form a separate political entity, so the US may likewise reassure its NATO
ally that no Kurdish state will be allowed on its south-eastern border.

Turkey has also made protective utterances about the one million or so
Turkomans who live along an arc of land on the fringe of the Kurdish
mountains. It is essentially a ploy for Turkey to have a legitimised hand
in the internal affairs of northern Iraq. The Turkomans may be Turkic and
may have been subjects of the Ottoman Empire, but they have no real
connection with the Republic of Turkey. But Turkey expresses interest
because of the many Turkomans in Kirkuk and does not want the Kurds to
acquire physical control of the oilfields there.

Like the Kurds, the Turkomans were strongly represented in Kirkuk until
Saddam 'arabised' the area by forcible population exchange. Until the
1950s, the Turkomans almost certainly outnumbered the Kurds. That changed
first as Kurds drifted down from the mountains to find employment in the
expanding oilfields, then when Saddam began his arabisation policy in the
1970s.

Turkey never threatened action to protect the Turkomans from Baghdad. But
then Turkey is only really interested in the Turkomans vis-à-vis the
Kurds. The Turkomans are its lever.

Turkey has warned the Kurds not to mistreat the Turkomans. But that is
unlikely. The Turkomans and Kurds share the same grievance over Kirkuk:
they want their homes and lands back. And they want the 250,000 or so Arab
settlers to go. What is important is that neither the Kurds nor the
Turkomans claim Kirkuk as exclusively their own. There was always an Arab
community in Kirkuk too and that will need to be protected, and
differentiated from those moved in under Saddam's settlement schemes.

As long as outsiders do not interfere, there is a real chance that Kirkuk
can come to symbolise the symbiosis of pluralism within the new Iraq. With
the exception of one major explosion of anger in 1959, there has never
been serious ethnic conflict between Kurds and Turkomans. But those who
believe in pluralism will have to be on their guard. There are any number
of potential trouble-makers both inside and outside the country who will
be looking to exploit the fault lines between Sunni and Shia, Kurd and
Arab, Turkoman and Kurd, Muslim and Christian and secular and religious.

The challenge for the three ethnic communities of Kirkuk is to be
inclusive - not only in their rhetoric, but also in the way Kirkuk is
managed.

David McDowall is author of A Modern History of the Kurds.


MEMORIES OF SADDAM

An exile remembers a childhood in Iraq, and the fear that followed his
family well beyond the country's borders.

By Raied Jawad in Cambridge, England

My earliest childhood memories are of portraits of Saddam Hussein, the
great leader, the father, the conqueror of the Arab world, adorning every
wall in our house. My parents told me stories of the greatness of Saddam.
They kept the truth about Saddam from me until we were thousands of miles
and many years away from Iraq . . .

When I saw the statue of Saddam being pulled down in central Baghdad, on a
television screen in Britain, I cried. I am 25 today, and have been denied
the right to live in my country for the past 22 years. Iraq is an
obsession for me. I breath its air as if I never left it.

My mother tells me stories of how Saddam, before becoming president, used
to stroll through her neighbourhood, surrounded by bodyguards. He mingled
with the people, asking how they were doing and what they needed. He tried
to project an image of a man of the people, an Iraqi who cared about his
fellow Iraqis. My mother used to stand on the street with her sisters, all
shrouded in their abayas, to get a glimpse of Saddam. No one knew what he
was like back then.

One day Saddam paid a surprise visit to our nursery school. He sat me on
his knee, gave me a present and asked if I liked him. I said: "Of course.
I love you. You are the great leader". He asked me what my parents thought
of him and I told him: "They love you too. We have pictures of you all
over the house and they praise you whenever they see you on television".

Then it was the turn of my friend. When Saddam asked "What do your parents
do when I appear on television?" my friend said: "My father spits on it!"
I never saw my friend again: he disappeared the next day, with his entire
family.

No one could criticise anything in Iraq, not even the eggs. My father
recalls that our neighbour in Baghdad, a well-known member of the security
police, would quiz him every time he saw him to assess whether he was
pro-regime. If my father had bought groceries, our neighbour would ask
him: "How fresh were the vegetables in the market? How good were the
eggs?" My father would respond: "Everything is great, thanks to Saddam".
Anything else could land you in the headquarters of the dreaded
mukhabarat, the secret police.

In 1980, Saddam started a war with Iran and my father was sent to Algeria
to teach. The Saddam posters adorned our house in Algeria just as they had
in Baghdad. A few other Iraqi families lived close by, some of them under
the pretext of teaching. Now my parents tell me they were members of the
mukhabarat, sent to keep an eye on us.

At the end of my father's contract we didn't return to Iraq. This was a
crime punishable by death and, in case the regime guessed our intentions,
we had left Iraq with only the barest necessities. So my parents do not
have the pictures of their wedding; they left them on the fireplace in
Baghdad. I do not have any pictures of myself until the age of three. I
have nothing of my life in Iraq.

When we arrived in Britain, my father had to rebuild his life from scratch
at the age of 40. Once a respected teacher, he now became a laundry man, a
minicab driver, a builder and a delivery driver. My mother, who grew up
having a nanny, a driver, a cook and a backyard so big she got lost in it
as a child, now lived with only the most basic possessions. But we were
the lucky ones: we had our freedom, we didn't live in fear, my sister
could walk down the street without running the risk of being taken by the
secret police and raped.

I know the "coalition" is following its own interests in Iraq. I know the
removal of Saddam is only one item on its agenda. I know that East and
West helped Saddam develop his weapons of mass destruction. I know that no
country really cares about the Iraqi people: Australia sits and watches
Iraqi asylum seekers drown in the darkness of the ocean; Iraqi
asylum-seekers are caged like animals. But I have been disgusted by Arab
reaction to the war. Seeing people in Jordan so pro-Saddam, calling their
babies Saddam, presenting the war as if it was a crusade between Muslims
and infidels . . .

You can oppose the war; that is your right. But to support one of the most
brutal dictators the world has ever seen goes beyond all human
comprehension. In doing this, you are supporting a man who has killed
nearly two million Iraqis, gassed and poisoned his own people, drained the
marshes, destroyed the history and heritage of Iraq and let his people
suffer under sanctions while he built palaces and monuments.

Saddam becomes religious for the cameras, but he has so much Muslim blood
on his hands. In 1991 he shelled the holy shrines in Karbala and Najaf in
which civilians had taken shelter. After the 1991 uprising, he killed half
a million people in two weeks. No one spoke up about that. There were no
demonstrations. The Arabs were silent.

The onus is now on the coalition forces, on Bush and Blair, to keep their
promises. They must honour the notion of giving Iraq democracy; they must
rebuild Iraq and bring back law and order. Iraqi people must have a real
democracy - not a puppet regime. Mr. Bush, Mr Blair, I urge you, I beg you
to keep your promises.

Raeid Jawad is a Ph.D. student at Cambridge University.

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IRAQI CRISIS REPORT No. 13