IRAQ: Nomination of secularist Ayad Allawi as deputy premier adds fuel to fire, writes Michael Jansen
Shia and Sunni blocs in Iraq's parliament seemed to be on a collision course yesterday after the United Iraqi Alliance, a coalition of Shia religious parties, proposed Ayad Allawi, leader of the Iraqi National Party, for the post of deputy prime minister.
Mr Allawi, who served as prime minister in the interim regime appointed by the US in June 2004, is a secular politician who began his career as a Baath party member and a loyal follower of Saddam Hussein. In the late 1970s he changed course and became an opposition activist and CIA asset. In 1996 Mr Allawi organised a military coup against Saddam Hussein, which failed because the plotters were infiltrated by the Iraqi government's intelligence agents.
Sunni fundamentalist politicians from the Iraqi Islamic Party, who are involved in consultations with the Kurdish bloc and the Alliance, objected doubly to Mr Allawi because he is both secularist and Shia. Awarding him the position, would, in the view of the Iraqi Islamic Party, deprive Sunni fundamentalists of their rightful post under the sectarian system adopted by the US occupation administration in 2003.
Having been, belatedly, offered a seat far below the salt at the negotiating table, Sunni fundamentalists are simply not prepared to give up a post they consider rightfully theirs.
Iraqi government positions are being allocated in triumvirates. The president is a Kurd with two vice-presidents, a Shia fundamentalist and a Sunni fundamentalist. The speaker of parliament is a Sunni fundamentalist with deputies from the Kurdish and Shia fundamentalist blocs.
Therefore, according to the logic of the system - and of Sunni fundamentalists - the Shia fundamentalist prime minister Nuri Kamal Maliki should have Sunni fundamentalist and Kurdish vice-premiers.
The nomination of Mr Allawi would also introduce a fourth element, secularists, into the equation with the object of promoting the idea that the coalition would be a "national unity government". This could provide a precedent for the division of posts four ways rather than three. Sunni fundamentalists would object as vehemently to the nomination of Mr Allawi's Sunni equivalent, Saleh Mutlaq, who heads another secular party, the Iraqi National Dialogue Front.
Unless the Sunni fundamentalists relent it is unlikely that either of the two secular parties, which control 36 seats in the 275- seat parliament, will gain an influential role in government, although the secular constituency comprising middle-class businessmen and professionals from all ethnic groups and sects is the glue that held the Iraqi state together after it was created in the early 1920s.
But since the overthrow of the Baathist regime in 2003, secularists have been relegated to the sidelines, while Kurds and Shia fundamentalists, and recently the Sunni fundamentalists, have pursued divisive communal agendas: the Kurds independence; Shia fundamentalists a Shia Islamic republic and Shia autonomy in the south; and Sunni fundamentalists a Sunni-style Islamic state.