PROFILE:Iyad Allawi has earned a chance to form an Iraqi government, writes MICHAEL JANSEN
IYAD ALLAWI, whose Iraqiya bloc won most seats in Iraq’s March 7th parliamentary election, represents the “old Iraq”, where members of different sects and ethnicities lived together, mixed easily and intermarried. His Iraqiya coalition aims to reassert the social ethos of the “old Iraq” and rebuild ties among communities.
Allawi approaches governance differently than any of his sectarian rivals because he was nurtured by an inclusive Iraq.
He was born in 1945 to a Shia family – Iraqi father and Lebanese mother – that belonged to the country’s wealthy commercial class. His grandfather had taken part in negotiations with Britain that led to Iraq’s nominal independence in 1932. His father was a physician and legislator.
Like many boys of his class and generation, Allawi studied at the Jesuit-run Baghdad college, which opened its doors to youths of all faiths and backgrounds. As a teenager, he joined the Baath, a revolutionary party founded by Syrian Christian intellectuals who advocated Arab independence, unity, the renewal of Arab culture, and socialism. He went on to study medicine at Baghdad university, where teaching was in English, and married an Iraqi Catholic. His sister wed a Sunni.
In the “old Iraq,” it was common for Iraqis of different sects to intermarry and intermarriage was encouraged between Shia and Sunni as a means to forge peaceful relations.
During 1968, the Baath party seized power in a coup. When he stood against Saddam Hussein’s rise within the party, Allawi was forced to flee to London, where he carried on with his medical studies, specialising in neurosurgery. In 1975 he quit the party and in 1978 he was attacked and badly wounded by an axe-wielding assailant believed to have been dispatched by Saddam Hussein. While in hospital recovering from his injuries, Allawi began to organise opposition to Saddam Hussein, who became president in 1979. Allawi travelled throughout Arab countries and the West, building up networks of dissident Iraqis determined to oust the regime.
Following the 1991 US-led war, he proclaimed the Iraqi National Accord, a clandestine group that recruited army officers who had defected but retained ties to comrades in service.
A 1996 coup attempt, backed by the US, ended in disaster. After the fall of the Baath in 2003, Allawi returned to Iraq, joined the interim governing council set up by the US, and took over as caretaker prime minister until an elected government was formed. His Iraqiya party ran in the 2005 election but won only 25 seats.
The performance this year of the expanded Iraqiya bloc, which took 91 seats in the 325 assembly, shows that nearly one-third of Iraqis seeks a return to the tolerant, multi-confessional, unitarian “old Iraq”. This does not mean Allawi or Iraqiya seek the resumption of Baathist rule, an accusation Shia and Kurdish rivals level against them.
Iraqiya constitutes a strategic challenge to the three other leading blocs, which are headed by men rooted either in political Shiism or Kurdish separatism.
The more moderate Shia State of Law bloc of prime minister Nuri al-Maliki, the fundamentalist Shia Iraqi National Alliance (INA) and Kurdistania secure and maintain power by exploiting rather than reconciling differences between communities.
If these entities succeed in denying Allawi his chance to form a government and reconstitute the flawed and faltering Shia-Kurd partnership that has run Iraq over the past four years, they could deepen divisions between Sunnis and Shias, secularists and sectarians, Arabs and Kurds, undermine the unity of the “new Iraq” and put an end to its experiment with democracy.