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Marv
Posts: 35540
Alba Posts: 69
Joined: 9/2/2002
Member: #315
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Is Iraq going to need to split into 3 separate states for Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds???
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/weekinreview/30filkins.html?pagewanted=print
April 30, 2006
The World
Votes Counted. Deals Made. Chaos Wins.
By DEXTER FILKINS
BAGHDAD, Iraq
THE country's new leaders were only five days into their jobs Thursday morning, when a BMW filled with armed men pulled alongside a van carrying the sister of Iraq's new Sunni vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi. The men opened fire, killing Maysoon al-Hashemi, a 61-year-old grandmother.
Just two weeks before, Mr. Hashemi's brother Mahmoud, a father of six, was shot to death in a similar way. At his sister's funeral service Thursday, Mr. Hashemi walked behind her coffin and looked on as his men lifted it into an S.U.V. that then carried her to Martyrs' Cemetery in northern Baghdad. The silver-haired Mr. Hashemi turned and walked away, his head hung low. "Let's go back, guys," he said to his men. Ms. Hashemi's murder offered not just another reminder of the horrible sacrifices made by so many Iraqis who have signed on to the American-backed democratic project here. It also highlighted what has become the single most confounding paradox of Iraq's and America's three-year-old war: that the democratic process, seen as the main hope for ending the violence, has been unable to stop it. Two constitutions, two elections and a referendum later, Iraq is reeling toward more chaos, not less.
The Iraqis who gathered last week around the newly chosen prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, said they saw a fresh chance to bind the communities back together and put the country on a path toward normalcy. Indeed, a sense of relief pervaded the offices of Iraqi officials, who had finally broken a deadlock over results of popular elections that took place more than four months ago.
But the question hanging over the parliamentary votes last weekend was whether the elected leaders, most of them now barricaded inside the protected Green Zone, could do anything to stop the slide toward anarchy and civil war. Two years' worth of dealmaking by Iraq's elites has proved largely irrelevant to the realities unfolding on the ground.
In northern Baghdad, Shiite families arrive regularly at the Muamal Sadr refugee camp, fleeing the ethnic cleansing that is transforming the mixed cities around Baghdad. Four months ago, the camp was a vacant lot; today, about 150 families live there, many of them in tents provided by the government.
One of the newly arrived is Kharmut Hanoon, a 40-year-old farmer from Abu Ghraib, who said he abandoned his home and a pair of wheat fields a month ago after gunmen driving Opel sedans started killing Shiites in his neighborhood. "They just drive by and shoot you," he said.
Now, Mr. Hanoon and 14 relatives share a pair of tents at the camp. "Can you imagine that anyone would ever leave his home, for any reason?" sighed Mr. Hanoon, waving a cigarette. "Only bad people and gypsies live in tents."
Mr. Hanoon said the ugliness that forced him to flee was not a passing phenomenon, but the final measure of Iraq's Sunnis. When he packed his belongings and prepared to leave, he said, not a single one of his Sunni neighbors stopped by to say goodbye.
"It's in their genes," he said. "It's a disease. They hate the Shiites. I don't think things will ever go back to normal between Shiites and Sunnis."
According to the Iraqi government, about 14,000 families — probably close to 100,000 people — have been displaced by the violence. More than 80 percent, the government said, are Shiites. About 2,000 Iraqis have been killed since the Askariya Shrine, a holy Shiite mosque in Samarra, was destroyed in a bombing two months ago.
There is no way to verify such figures, but a similar despair pervades conversations with Sunnis. Omar al-Jabouri, who runs the Iraq Islamic Party's human rights office, keeps a photo album by his desk. It contains picture after picture of Sunni men who have been executed and tortured to death by, Mr. Jabouri says, Shiite death squads and their comrades in the Interior Ministry.
"These people were burned with acid," Mr. Jabouri said, pointing to a tableau of mangled corpses.
"This man, they used an electric drill," he said, flipping another page.
"Can you see this?" Mr. Jabouri said, turning the book for a visitor. "They drove nails into his head."
Finally Mr. Jabouri sighed.
"They have invented new methods," he said.
The mistrust for the Shiite-dominated government runs so deep in Sunni neighborhoods that some have tried to keep government forces out altogether. Earlier this month, when word spread that Interior Ministry commandos were planning to sweep the area, residents in the Adamiya district took up arms and sealed off the main roads. They dragged fallen date palms into the streets and piled bricks across others.
When the commandos finally came, the Iraqis said, the men of Adamiya were waiting for them. An all-night gun battle erupted, with dead on both sides. The commandos finally retreated. "For us, as Sunni people, we know that if the police take you, they will interrogate you and shoot you," said Mohammed Jaffar, 24, who took part in the fighting.
As often happens these days in conversations with ordinary Iraqis, Mr. Jaffar at first offered a reasonable explanation for the events in Adamiya, and then plunged into conspiracy theory. The police commandos are loyal only to the Shiite political parties that control the government, Dawa and the Supreme Council, Mr. Jaffar said, an assessment that many Iraqi and American officials endorse. Then he added: "The Shiites have a secret 50-year plan to turn Iraqi into an Islamic state like Iran. We know this from the Sunnis in Iran. There will be very few Sunnis left in Iraq, and they will not be able to resist."
Full-fledged civil war, with widespread ethnic bloodletting and mass migrations, has not yet come to Iraq. But a week's worth of conversations with ordinary Iraqis leaves one wondering if the government, even with American help, can any longer prevent this from happening. In casual discussions, Iraqis already express the view that their country will be split three ways, with a Kurdish state in the north, a Sunni one in the west, and a Shiite one in the south. The Tigris River would form the border where the new Sunni and Shiite states would meet in central Baghdad, and the capital's mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods would be cleansed on each side of the river.
"There are things that have happened in this country that are irreversible," said Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Iraq's national security adviser. "It will take a lot of time, and the government will need to do a lot to bring the communities together."
And if drawing the Sunnis into the democratic process, which began last autumn with the drafting of the Constitution, was supposed to begin to defuse the insurgency, that hasn't worked, either. In the first four months of 2006, at least 217 American soldiers have been killed and 1,127 wounded.
At this stage, very few Iraqis, even those of good will, have many fresh ideas about stopping the country's disintegration. One of the more ambitious plans is to disband the private militias, which generate much of the mayhem. Yet even after Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani called on them last week to disband, that prospect seemed a long shot.
Indeed, in these bleak days most solutions tend toward sentimental, vague and nostalgic pleas for an Iraq where Sunni and Shiite live together without strife.
Mahmoud Mashhadani, the new speaker of the Parliament, recalled his days as a prisoner in Saddam Hussein's jails from 2000 to 2002. Mr. Mashhadani, a Sunni Islamist, said that in the cells, religious zeal took a back seat to helping one another stay alive.
"Sunni, Shiite, Communist, Kurd — we all cried together," he said in his office. "Prison was a very good school."
Khalid
[Edited by - marv on 04-30-2006 12:18 PM]
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