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| Iraq |
| Al-Maliki appears ready to compromise |
| 2006-04-26 |
| Jawad al-Maliki, Iraq's prime minister-designate, said yesterday he hoped to form a government in two weeks, a move that would bring to a rapid close the political crisis that has paralysed government decision-making for almost five months. It would also mark a swift return on the decision to elevate 55-year-old Mr Maliki, who until last weekend was better known by the outside world as a spokesman for the Daawa party of Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the man he replaced as prime minister. His confidence that a national unity government can be formed speedily stems from his involvement in the intense negotiations of recent weeks. "We have prior agreements . . . that makes our work easier," Mr Maliki said, referring to the joint statements worked out with Sunni and Kurds on the mechanisms a national unity government would use, and the policies it would apply. Mr Maliki helped craft these agreements, marking himself in the eyes of many Iraqis as a practical negotiator very different fromMr Jaafari, although both hail from the same Shia Islamist political party. While Mr Jaafari was known primarily as a Daawa ideologist, for over two years the somewhat unkempt and outspoken Mr Maliki has been the voice of the party, a functionary and spokesman who is more comfortable in the public eye than Mr Jaafari. A western diplomat said Mr Maliki's reputation was of one who was "very Shia but also pragmatic''. He has pledged to fight rampant corruption and, unlike many politicians, his reputation is untainted by personal corruption, adds the diplomat. Mr Maliki, who studied Arabic language and literature and who fought the Saddam Hussein regime from exile, first in Syria and later in Iran, is considered a true believer in Daawa's Islamist ideology. Formed in the seminaries of Najaf, it argues that Shia Islamic jurisprudence should guide the government in everything it does. As a result, Shia Islamists have clashed with the Kurds over regional autonomy, with the Sunni over excluding former members of the Ba'ath party from public life, with secularists over whether religious or civil law should govern family life, and with everybody over the extent to which the majority in parliament should dominate decision-making. Yet Mr Maliki has been broadly welcomed by Kurd and Sunni politicians. He is emphatically not a Washington-friendly politician in the mould of Adel Abd al-Mahdi, who opposed Mr Jaafari for the Shia coalition's nomination in February and whose Islamism often seemed a populist gloss on freeÂ-market federalist ideas. While Mr Maliki believed in the Islamist centralism of the Daawa, which the more secular-leaning and federalist Kurds in particular believe is hostile to their interests, he also recently helped write several key policy papers which represent significant compromises and which diplomats say will greatly smooth the creation of government. Mr Maliki's language since becoming prime minister has apparently been aimed at Sunni worried that Shia militias, including the Mahdi army of radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, have been engaged in a campaign of sectarian violence against them. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |