At the end of the Iraq-Iran war, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) realized that the Iranian decision-makers had no intention of adopting the demands and slogans used by the Council for strategic purposes over a considerable period of time.(1) The events following the Kuwait invasion, with the accompanying construction of strategic relationships between SCIRI and the Gulf governments, particularly with Kuwait, led the Council to recant its demands for an Islamic government, particularly since this irked several Gulf governments, especially Kuwait which had supported the council for a while. These two factors led SCIRI to substitute its earlier demands for an Islamic republic with an alternative slogan, “Oppressed Shi'ites”.

Once SCIRI reached Basra to continue on its way to Najaf (after the 2003 War), Muhammad Baqr al-Hakim announced to the people of Basra that he had no intention of establishing an Islamic government on Iraqi soil, as he had done when in Iran. The slogan brandished throughout the 1980s, about the necessity of creating an Islamic republic in Iraq following an Islamic revolution, via a revolutionary government that answered to its ‘ulama leaders, had been replaced.

The concept of the Islamic government was one of the founding principles of the Supreme Council in Iran, but that did not apparently guarantee its longevity - as Baqr al-Hakim’s statement shows - since it has now become more appropriate to denounce the oppression of the Shi'ites in order to win seats in a post-Saddam government or parliament. Most southerners were astonished by Baqr al-Hakim’s speech as he placed the ball of picking their own government firmly within the Iraqi people’s court, reminding the Shi'ites of their right to be compensated for what had been taken from them. The Council is now one of the most vocal parties for the political sectarianism on the basis of religious sect.

Dependence upon an Iranian Spiritual Leader

Because of the difficulty of separation from the Iranian organization politically, the Council swapped one Iranian spiritual leader (Khamenei) for a symbolic one, Sayyid Ali al-Sistani, an objective historical equivalence. The reason for this exchange was that depending upon Al-Sistani is an investment in the Shi'ite majority that follows his teachings, whether in Iraq or elsewhere.

It is difficult to geographically locate the Shi'ites loyal to Al-Sistani’s teachings in Iraq, but it is possible to say that the majority of the rural populations of the South and the central Euphrates areas follow this religious leader. The reason for such regional loyalty is the vast authority that Al-Sistani’s agents have as a result of their hegemony over the social and religious landscape. These agents have spending privileges over the money coming in for religious purposes from believers. In addition to the rural population, older generations of city dwellers, both urbane and unsophisticated, are also loyal to Al-Sistani, and had not transferred their loyalties to the other spiritual leader, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. (This can be determined from a simple, unofficial survey of those attending Friday prayers; it is obvious that, whereas urban youth generally support Sayyid Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, older generations do not.)

Sectarian Presence, Political Withdrawal

The Higher Council is in charge of all shi'ite religious events, turning this into political and electoral opportunities, which is the most crucial aspect of the matter for it. This is apparent in the Council’s slogans during the election campaign, such as “Islam and Religion in 555” (seen painted upon a clay wall in a village on the road to Mudayyina district). The politicians on the Supreme Council employed the figure of Sayyid al-Sistani as a campaign device to great success, turning the spiritual leader’s image into an endorsement of their program, while simultaneously keeping the decision-making to the politicians, not to the spiritual authority as it was made to appear to the general public. The Supreme Council’s political agenda is replete with economic and development programs, but these are kept from the public eye and not marketed the way that sectarian slogans are. To be more specific, the Shi'ite street only experiences the Council’s sectarian practices, with a noticeable absence of economic and development programs and practices.

Khamsil in southern Iraq is an example of a Shi'ite area in the region of opposition to Saddam, truckloads of condemned people and missing corpses. Its streets are flooded in winter, but banners praising the Supreme Council or advertising ‘Ashoura rise like thickets on each side of the water-drenched streets, reminiscent of the recent past, when during the Ba’th’s April and July celebrations, walls would be festooned with pictures and slogans, and colored lanterns would be strung up. This was a Ba’th rite, paying homage to Arab nationalism and its embodiment in Saddam. Today the same methods are being used in order to bolster Shi'ite presence, and to demand that the due rights be accorded this oppressed people. It is here that the Supreme Council reaps the benefits of its choice of Al-Sistani as religious authority to fill the vacuum left after it stopped calling for an Islamic government; after all, one slogan must be replaced by another and one totem by a similar one in order to achieve equilibrium in a political party with religious characteristics.

The political crisis felt in the Iraqi street today is immense; and is tangible when one measures the interest of the Supreme Council in using Shi'ite sectarian discourse to oppose an antagonistic Sunni discourse that uses similar standards. As much as this discourse attempts to compensate the Shi'ite majority for their marginalization from power in the past, it also undermines the Council’s power in cases where its slogans and content do not appear to many Shi'ites to be in their own interest. Undoubtedly, Shi'ites implicitly reject this policy that is far removed from their loyalties, moods and ambitions. Iraqi Shi'ites do not have the sectarian impulses that the Council works hard to promulgate, and if they do take up religion, it does not interfere with their everyday practices, which remain non-sectarian. The sectarian propaganda broadcast on the Nakhil radio and Furat television stations, which follow the Badr Corps, is alien to southern residents, and makes political subjects more distant to them.

One of the consequences of such policies is that now Shi'ites fear that the Supreme Council will lead them to the same problem they already faced at the foundation of the modern Iraqi state in 1921, or to the creation of a Shi'ite government surrounded by hostile Sunni governments, a Shi'ite government that will follow Iran, the only potential savior and guarantee of such a presence. In all cases, this will be short-lived as long as the Supreme Council is content to let the discourse of sectarian revivalism be its only slogan.

(1) Sayyid Muhammad Baqr al-Hakim’s statement to the Iranian newspaper Kayhan on 17 November 17 indicates that, “the Iraqi people will not choose a regime other than the Islamic republic.”
(2) These two stations have obviously focused upon Southerners’ demands for a federal state unendingly, as well as the subject of forced migration for sectarian reasons.


Al-Sadiq Muhammad

11 June 2007