Religions of World Current Event for Aug 30
NYTIMES Aug 30
Shiite’s Tale: How Gulf With Sunnis Widened
By DAMIEN CAVE
BAGHDAD, Aug. 30 — Shatha al-Musawi, a Shiite member of Parliament, first encountered the Sunni-Shiite divide on the day the Americans captured Saddam Hussein. Hearing the news with a close Sunni friend named Sahira, Ms. Musawi erupted like a child.
“I jumped, I shouted, I came directly to Sahira and I hugged her,” Ms. Musawi said. “I was crying, and I said, ‘Sahira, this is the moment we waited for.’ ”
At least it should have been: Mr. Hussein’s henchmen killed Ms. Musawi’s father when she was only 13; Sahira, too, was a victim, losing her closest uncle to the Hussein government.
But instead of celebrating, Sahira stood stiffly. A day later, Ms. Musawi said, Sahira’s eyes were red from crying. And before long, like so many Sunnis and Shiites here, the two stopped talking.
Sectarianism, the issue Ms. Musawi said she had wanted to avoid, has instead come to haunt her. She entered politics four years ago, flush with idealism, working closely with Sunnis on Iraq’s Constitution and a draft law that would compensate victims of Mr. Hussein.
Now, even for her, one of Parliament’s most independent figures, the urge to reconcile is being blacked out by distrust, disappointment and visceral anger.
Her disillusionment helps explain why the Iraqi government has missed most of the political benchmarks laid down by Congress, as the Government Accountability Office concluded in a report to be released in coming days.
And her reasons — for defending Shiite militias as a necessary response to Sunni Arab violence, for example — are personal. As with many of Iraq’s leaders, her life has been rubbed raw. After seeing Sunni neighbors kill Shiite friends, and after being pushed out of her own home by violence, Ms. Musawi has struggled to move beyond the pain and anger.
“Many Iraqis are still living in the past, and she too is affected with this predicament,” said Mohammed Mahmoud Ahmad, chairman of the victims compensation committee, where Ms. Musawi is a deputy. For Iraqis of all sects, old offenses linger for decades. And at the simple apartment in the Green Zone that she shares with her second husband (a Sunni Kurd), Ms. Musawi, 40, described a score of abuses.
She grew up in a middle-class Baghdad neighborhood, sharing a large comfortable house with six siblings, uncles, aunts and a brood of cousins.
Then one day in 1980 her father went to work and never came home. She later discovered he had been hit by a car belonging to a government official he had argued with.
Only 13, Ms. Musawi was devastated. One of her prized possessions is a photo album of faded pictures beneath sticky plastic, showing her father happy, with wavy long hair and a child in each arm.
“He was a poet, a great man,” she said. “I loved him and I was really very attached to him,” she said. “His loss made me unbalanced.”
Two years later, with the family living in a smaller house, the government struck again. On Aug. 15, 1982, the police arrested her relatives and threw them in prison because their names appeared on a list of “undesirables.”
Ms. Musawi said she ended up in a dirty cell with her relatives and other women and children. Over the next 38 days, she saw a woman give birth beside her; she heard children promising to kill Mr. Hussein. At one point, the police took Ms. Musawi’s mother away and threw ripped pieces of her son’s shirt on the floor to suggest (falsely) that he had been killed.
Captivity shook Ms. Musawi to the core. She did not want to leave when the police tried to release her because “I didn’t think life was a secure place,” she said.
Eventually, she said, she moved on through her faith and obtained a college degree after marriage, divorce and three daughters. When she and Sahira found out about Mr. Hussein’s capture, they were waiting for class at Baghdad University.
At the time, she was hopeful. “Mr. Bush promised Iraq would be a democratic and free country,” she said. “And we believed that.”
Then she laughed. It did not take long, she said, before Iraq started to fracture. In Ms. Musawi’s mixed neighborhood of Adel, Shiite mosques and religious schools closed by the Sunni-dominated government began to reopen immediately after Mr. Hussein’s fall.
Some Sunni Arabs, she said, felt threatened. Soon, Sunni customers at the tailor’s shop where she worked stopped visiting. Her own dinner guests, she acknowledged, were mostly Shiite.
Violence followed. In late 2003, Ms. Musawi said, she saw two cars of men abduct an official at a Shiite mosque near her home, tie him to a car and drag him through the streets. Some of the attackers were young men she had known as boys.
“Are you crazy?” she shouted. “Have you lost your mind?”
She said she began looking to politics as a way to restore some sanity. After starting a popular women’s group, she became one of only two women elected to her neighborhood’s district council. She said she enjoyed the work — until her Shiite colleagues started to die. In 2004 and 2005, five Shiite council members were killed, most of them assassinated.
Around the same time, gunmen killed the Shiite mayor of Baghdad, Haider Ali, who lived two houses away from her. She said another neighbor, a Sunni and one of Mr. Ali’s guards, was probably responsible.
“We were shocked, really,” she said. “We used to have friends, neighbors. In every moment, when you met a person, you didn’t think: Is he Shia or Sunni? Of course you’d notice, but it didn’t matter.”
Then at some point, she said, it switched; sect became the defining characteristic for Iraqis. Her Sunni friends told her she did not understand. Being Sunni used to count for something, they said.
But what, Ms. Musawi thought, of the Shiites, who never counted before and were viciously oppressed?
Ms. Musawi said she left Adel secretly in 2005, when she joined the National Assembly, the precursor to the Parliament. One of her daughters was still in high school, and she feared an attack.
Despite such concerns, she resisted the more extreme elements in Iraqi politics. Turning down invitations from other Shiite parties, she joined a group of moderates in the Solidarity bloc and was elected to Parliament in 2005.
Only one Sunni sits with Ms. Musawi on the victims committee, Khalaf al-Maula. In an interview, he described Ms. Musawi as open-minded.
“She respects other people’s opinions and listens to them even though she has a different viewpoint,” he said.
Ms. Musawi says she shares the Sunnis’ opposition to splitting the country into autonomous sectarian regions, and understands elements of the Sunni position. “Some of it is this feeling of patriotism, and a sense of how you should act in a fight against occupation and foreign forces on your land,” she said.
But her own positions and comments are now cut with a sharper sectarian edge.
In Parliament three months ago, she shouted down her colleagues for standing by as Sunni extremists in Diyala Province killed hundreds of Shiites. When the speaker, a Sunni, smirked, she screamed: “Why are you laughing, Mr. Speaker? I want to know why you’re laughing.” (He waved her away: “Leave it to the women,” he said.)
Ms. Musawi, though loyal to the more moderate Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, also now defends some actions of the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, the anti-American cleric, saying that it has filled a necessary void.
“The government couldn’t protect the people,” she said. “They couldn’t save them. The Sadrists did that.”
When asked about accusations that the Mahdi Army forced innocent Sunnis out of the Hurriya neighborhood, which borders Adel, she said Shiites had no time to sift the innocent from the guilty because Sunnis were killing Shiites.
She says the basic problem is that too many Sunnis will never accept Shiite rule. Just as galling, she said, they refuse to accept responsibility for the sins of Mr. Hussein, the Baath party or today’s extremists.
“The Sunnis never felt how much we suffered,” she said.
Sunnis say they, too, were victims of Mr. Hussein’s tyranny and are even now being pummeled by Shiite death squads or American soldiers. Asmaa al-Dulaimi, a member of Parliament and the daughter of Adnan al-Dulaimi, who leads the main Sunni bloc, said Ms. Musawi and her Shiite colleagues exaggerated their own victimhood for political gain.
“All of these claims are part of the fake oppression they pretend they endured,” she said.
Statements like these leave Ms. Musawi seething, and she says she has come close to quitting several times. When she is asked what it would take for Shiites to reconcile with Sunnis in government, a mix of anger and hurt can be heard as the current leaders suddenly seem to merge in her mind with the Baathists of old.
“I can’t stand seeing them controlling things again,” she said. “I can’t stand seeing them in power.”
If her opponents reach out a hand to shake on a deal, she said, “I think the other hand is hiding a dagger.”
Diana Oliva Cave, Wisam A. Habeeb and Khalid al-Ansary contributed reporting.
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