IRAQ:The increasingly anarchic situation in Iraq shows no sign of settling down, writes Michael Jansen
The national reconciliation conference that took place at the weekend in Baghdad has not improved the country's chances of attaining communal coexistence and stability.
Analysts suggest that prime minister Nuri al-Maliki agreed to hold the conference under strong pressure from the Bush administration, which is determined to demonstrate progress on the increasingly anarchic Iraqi scene.
Mr Maliki, however, remains too dependent on Shia allies to deliver on pledges to disband Shia militias and bring former army officers and men into the post-war Iraqi armed forces. The Iraqi press reported that the sole achievement of the conference was an agreement that former soldiers should be granted generous pensions.
The venue of the repeatedly postponed gathering was not propitious. It was held in the fortified "Green Zone", the walled and fenced-off area in central Baghdad where the Iraqi government has its offices, parliament meets, and the US embassy is located.
Holding the conference there sent a message to Iraqis that the "Red Zone", the cities, towns and villages where they dwell, remains too dangerous for a such a high-profile event.
The choice of venue also meant that leaders of the Iraqi national resistance could not be invited. They would court arrest and imprisonment by entering the zone.
Since Mr Maliki had promised to engage the insurgents in dialogue when the conference was originally proposed months ago, his refusal to do so at this juncture shows that he and his Shia allies are simply not prepared to draw into the circle of power genuine Iraqi nationalists fighting the US occupation.
The meeting was boycotted by other key players, including the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars, the fundamentalist Congress of the Iraqi People, headed by the influential Adnan Dulaimi, Salih Mutlaq's secular National Dialogue Front, former prime minister Ayad Allawi's secular Iraqiyya Party, rebel Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and opposition figures living abroad. This deprived the gathering of representivity.
The absence, in particular, of Mr Sadr, whose faction holds the largest number of seats in parliament and whose militia is the largest in the country, suggests that he opposes the agenda Mr Maliki is trying to set ahead of a promised cabinet reshuffle.
Mr Sadr's antagonism towards Washington was also deepened by a raid coinciding with the conference by US troops on Sadr City, the district housing 2.5 million poor Shias who follow the cleric.
The kidnapping on Sunday of 30 people from the Iraqi Red Crescent Society and abductions at the dentistry faculty of Baghdad University were blamed on Sadrist fighters wearing the uniform of the forces of the Shia-run interior ministry. The Sadrists and death squads deployed by the Shia Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) are largely responsible for the sectarian warfare that has overtaken the insurgency and attacks by foreign fighters allied with al-Qaeda as the main threat to Iraq.
University of Michigan professor Juan Cole argues that during its long history, Iraq did not suffer "the kind of sectarian fighting we're seeing now . . . [ it] is new in its scale and ferocity, and it was the Americans who unleashed it".
By putting off until the new year the announcement of new strategies to tackle violence, the administration has postponed the day when US forces in co-operation with loyal Iraqi military units will have to tackle the Sadrist and SCIRI militias generating the sectarian strife.
Until these militias are disbanded, at least 100 Iraqi civilians will be tortured and killed daily, the exodus of thousands more will continue and Iraq will remain ungovernable.