Armed Conflicts, Headlines, Human Rights, Middle East & North Africa, North America, Religion

IRAQ: Kurdish Leader Voices Indirect Support for Mutlak

Mohammed A. Salih

WASHINGTON, Jan 27 2010 (IPS) - The president of Iraq’s Kurdistan region, Massoud Barzani, has expressed indirect support for the removal of Salih al-Mutlak and possibly other Sunni Arab politicians from a list of candidates banned from running in the March parliamentary elections.

Barzani’s comments came two days after the Accountability and Justice Commission (AJC) in Iraq announced it had removed 59 names from a list of over 500 candidates barred from running in the elections.

However, Ali al-Lami, the AJC’s head, rejected the idea that the move indicated a softening of the body’s stance and said it was done because there had been mistakes and confusion over similar names.

Barzani said he was not consulted about the decision to exclude the candidates from participating in the elections.

“I haven’t heard that Salih Mutlak has been involved in killing people. And even if he was a Baathist but states his commitment to the constitution of Iraq today, I personally have no problem with Salih Mutlak or anyone else like him to participate in the elections,” Barzani said during an event Wednesday at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank.

The candidates were allegedly excluded from the vote on the ground of their past or present connections to the outlawed Ba’ath Party of former President Saddam Hussein. The identity of the 59 candidates is not known yet, but Salih al-Mutlak and current Defence Minister Abdulqadir Jassem al-Obeidi are the two most prominent Sunni Arab politicians banned from elections by the AJC.

Asked if he thought Iran had any role in the AJC’s ban on candidates, Barzani gave an ambiguous answer, neither acknowledging nor ruling out Iranian involvement.

“All of our neighbouring countries have their own agendas in Iraq, and among them Iran might have the broadest one. Certainly each of these neighbouring states prefers certain individuals to come and go or be eliminated. This has become something natural in Iraq,” he said.

Earlier, the country’s president, Jalal Talabani, also a Kurd, had expressed his objection to the AJC decision and said he had sent a letter to the head of Iraq’s Federal Supreme Court inquiring whether the AJC was a legitimate entity and if its decision was legal.

Barzani’s public stance on the ban is likely to increase the pressure on the AJC and some of the Shia figures and parties that are believed to stand behind the controversial decision and have been Kurds’ allies in the government since 2003.

It is not clear yet whether the Kurdish leaders oppose the ban on all of the disqualified candidates or only some of them, since a number of the individuals on the list are former Kurdish supporters of Hussein’s regime with whom Barzani and Talabani are known to have longstanding hostilities.

With the majority of Kurdish and Sunni Arab leaders standing against the AJC’s decision, all eyes are now on Shia parties who dominate the government – the Dawa Party led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraqi led by Ammar al-Hakim – to see if they will support the removal of the ban, at least on certain high-profile candidates like Mutlak and al-Obeidi.

Maliki had endorsed the AJC’s decision last Sunday following his meeting with U.S. Vice President Joe Biden.

“I think the issue of Ba’athism is a winning card for the Iraqi Shia parties. So for them, they would not come out publicly and say we want these candidates to be back, for any reason. They need it very much to mobilise their base and especially given the fact that they cannot play the anti-Kurdish card now prior to the elections,” said Ahmed Ali, an Iraqi analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP).

The Iraqi government is reportedly considering new appointees to run the AJC following widespread criticism over the very legitimacy of the body and its current board of administrators. The AJC is run by Ali al-Lami, a close confidant of Ahmed Chalabi, a one-time favourite of Washington who is now part of the National Iraqi Alliance, a Shia electoral coalition dominated by religious parties.

Chalabi used to run the de-Ba’athification committee that was slammed for its dismissal of many Ba’athists from public service without proper investigation or evidence. The de-Ba’athification law passed under the U.S. civilian administrator of Iraq, Paul Bremer, barred officials at the top four of the six levels of the Ba’ath Party from joining the political process and public service.

With pressures mounting from different sides, it remains to be seen how the AJC, the government and Shia parties would respond to an aggravating crisis that many see as threatening the credibility of the legislative elections and deepening the sectarian gap in the country.

Ali of WINEP believes if the Shia parties decide to allow more candidates back in the polls, they will try to do it “in a way that will not make them lose any credibility.”

“In a way that doesn’t show them as following advice or bowing to pressure from the U.S. or Arab countries,” he said. “They want to do it on their own terms. They want to do it in a way as if they have followed the rule of law.”