Amir Taheri

Are the Shiites about to commit the mistake they made in 1920 when they excluded themselves from the government of the newly created state of Iraq? The question is not fanciful. At that time Shiite religious and social leaders divided the community in two camps: One camp favoring negotiations with Britain, then the mandate power in Mesopotamia, and the other preaching a boycott of the “Crusading power”. The latter won the day after being endorsed by senior Shiite clerics in both Najaf and Qom.

The British, determined to transform the mandate territory into a new state, ignored the Shiites and shaped the Iraqi state as they pleased. They imported a king from the Arabian Peninsula and set up a bureaucracy based on a few wealthy Sunni families and clans, many with Ottoman antecedents. When the British set up the new Iraqi Army, the Shiites again decided to stay away.

Those early errors meant that the Shiites, though they accounted for more than 60 percent of the population, never received the share of political power they deserved. Of the 24 men who served as prime ministers in successive Iraqi governments between 1921 and 2003 only seven were Shiites. Even then their total period of service did not exceed six years. The Shiites were also excluded from many key positions in the state apparatus and its decision-making organs.

The decision to stay out of the army was equally disastrous. While the bulk of the army consisted of Shiite recruits, Sunni Muslim Arabs and other minorities dominated the officers’ corps.

Under the monarchy Shiites were able to pretty much live their own lives, at least as far as religious rites were concerned. After the 1958 coup however, successive military regimes tried to control all aspects of Shiite life. In the final years of Saddam Hussein, the Shiite community experienced its darkest days. Millions of its members had been expelled from Iraq by Saddam or had fled into exile. Inside Iraq most senior Shiite clerics were either in prison or under house arrest, many of their seminaries disrupted or permanently shut by the Baathist mafia.

It is important for Iraqi Shiites to remember their tragic experience before they are plunged into another historic mistake by shortsighted and selfish leaders. By next month, the American interim ruler of Iraq, Paul Bremer, will convene a constitutional conference to pick a provisional authority, the nucleus of a new state. Bremer also plans to create a new Iraqi Army of some 40,000. If the Shiites stay away from the new army, the American “Pasha” will have no choice but to call on the Sunni professional military elites to do the job, thus perpetuating a tradition under which the Iraqi officers’ corps has always been dominated by minorities.

Iraqi Shiites have just a couple of weeks in which to decide whether or not to take part in the exercise.

What is certain is that some predominantly Shiite political groups, including Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress (INC), will accept Bremer’s invitation. Other Shiite groups, however, are tempted by the idea of boycotting the process in the hope of scoring some cheap nationalistic points. The overwhelming majority of Iraqi Shiites look to their chief “ Marja Al-Taqlid” (Source of Emulation) Grand Ayatollah Ali Muhammad Sistani for guidance. Sistani, however, faces a dilemma. He is opposed to the direct intervention of the clerics in politics and has long criticized the Iranian model under which the mullas control the key organs of the state. For Sistani to step in now and assume a political role would require a major revision of his well-established theological positions with regard to the nature of power and the modalities of its use.

It is time for Sistani to take the full measure of the situation. Whether he likes it or not, he must offer his people with a measure of political leadership. He must call on all Shiite political parties, groups and personalities to join the process organized by Bremer and help create an Iraqi national authority that can seize control of the nation’s destiny as quickly as possible. Because everyone knows that Sistani does not want political power for himself, he would be in a stronger position to encourage the Shiites to play their role in shaping a new Iraqi state. This is no time for personal agendas or demagoguery.

Arab News Opinion 27 June 2003