Former guerrillas now hope to make mark at ballot box
BAGHDAD -- These days the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq is talking less and less about Islam and not at all about revolution.
The former guerrilla movement once dedicated to Saddam Hussein's overthrow has now trained its sights on the democratic elections scheduled for January. The party's intellectuals are training young volunteers not to bear arms but to run polling stations, spot voter fraud, and sign up new members.
It's part of the transformation sweeping Iraq's political parties, forced for the first time to compete for votes. The eight major parties all developed as opposition movements in exile, run by unelected leaders; now they have less than four months to build a popular base, before Iraq's first contested national elections in two generations.
Some parties, such as interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's Iraqi National Accord, are borrowing a page from the Ba'ath Party playbook, building a cult of personality around Allawi, requiring members to sign loyalty oaths, distributing membership cards, and holding exclusive party functions to build esprit de corps.
Others, such as the Islamic Da'wa Party, have combined a religious appeal with tried-and-true patronage tactics, offering members jobs in government ministries controlled by the party. When the interim government was named in June, control of the ministries was divided among the major political parties.
None of the parties disclose the source of their funds, but the top exile parties seem to open offices and distribute favors with ease, apparently drawing on donations from the diaspora and wealthy Iraqi businesspeople.
Founded as a guerrilla movement headquartered in Iran and led by the Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr al-Hakim, SCIRI was once feared and renowned for its Badr Brigade militia, formed around a core of Iraqi Shi'ite soldiers who defected during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, returning after the fall of Hussein's regime.
Most Badr fighters are in their 40s now and have become party apparatchiks. Hakim was killed in a bombing last August, and his younger brother, Abdulaziz, assumed party leadership.
Officially, the SCIRI party, which claims less than 1,000 full members, has scrapped Islamic revolution from its platform, and instead preaches secular democracy -- an interesting tactic for a party still led by an unelected hereditary leader who wears a turban and says he is a direct descent from the Prophet Mohammed.
The party leadership includes clerics such as Hakim and politicians with secular backgrounds, such as interim finance minister Adel Abdelmahdi, the former SCIRI representative in Paris who started as a communist and projects the air of a left-bank intellectual.
When Abdelmahdi, a top SCIRI official, was passed over for interim prime minister, he was given the finance portfolio. His appointment prompted a torrent of Iraqis applying for finance ministry jobs -- at SCIRI offices. SCIRI has also packed former Badr militia fighters into the Iraqi police, national guard, and army.
But it has also put together an academy, called the Center for National Institutions, in Baghdad, where it is training a cadre of election workers to scatter across Iraq in the lead-up to the January ballot.
A four-hour session at the party's academy showcases SCIRI's main anxieties about January's election, which is supposed to be Iraq's first free vote in half a century. A national assembly will be elected to write Iraq's new constitution.
''In areas where we know we will win, opponents will try to cause problems to minimize the number of voters. If we are not intelligent, we will be deceived," Abu Ahmed al-Khafaji, 50, a SCIRI course instructor, told two dozen party volunteers at the opening session of a week-long training course.
The party volunteers sat at folding tables raptly taking notes as ceiling fans squeaked intermittently whenever the municipal power supply would come online.
Fearful of losing the influence they consolidated through the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council and now the interim Iraqi government, the exile parties are trying to forge a nationwide cross-party alliance, allocating the share of power for each party in advance and effectively presenting voters with a single slate.
''It's really challenging to explain to people the concept of political choice," said Khafaji, a former health ministry worker who spent two years in Hussein's jails and tried unsuccessfully to flee to Iran. ''People in the street do not understand when we discuss the political process."
Surveys cited by US officials indicate that more than two-thirds of Iraqis do not support a political party, and fewer than one in 10 admit membership in any party.
Many Iraqis dismiss the electoral process, dominated by exile parties such as SCIRI that have worked closely with the United States before and since the April 2003 invasion. Khafaji exhorted his workers to overcome this distaste with a message to Iraqi Shi'ites.
''You must explain to them that voting is a spiritual act, a religious act, and every faithful Muslim must do it," said Khafaji, who repeated the mantra several times during the day-long workshop. ''Tell them we will manage to get rid of the occupiers through elections."
But the general distaste for political parties on Baghdad's streets goes beyond SCIRI.
''None of the parties stand out. None of them has stood with the victims of injustice," said Husain Aadil Mohammed al-Hakim, 30, owner of a shop that sells parts for appliances. ''Before, the Ba'ath Party used to try to recruit me all the time, but strangely, no one has approached me now. Maybe they have enough members."
The Iraqi National Accord, Allawi's party, has made a quiet recruiting push across the country, but for the most part has opened local offices in advance of the elections, said Kamal al-Bassam, a party official in Baghdad.
''In some places like Sadr City, we cannot go knock on doors because we might get beat up," he said. ''So we knock on public doors -- mosques, churches, schools, cafes, government office, factories, farms, to spread our message."
Other parties are experimenting with newspapers and radio shows to make a name for themselves.
In his office, Khafaji elaborated on the delicate balance the exile parties are struggling to maintain. They avoid the label political ''party," because of the association with the Ba'ath Party, instead calling themselves a ''movement" or ''popular current."
He is also wary of how newcomers will react if their party loses in the first election.
A senior American diplomat who has worked with the emerging Iraqi political parties said recently that the country stands at a critical juncture. Either the exile parties will make ''a deal in a smoke-filled room" to keep a hold on power in January, or new political movements will emerge that offer a ''real choice."
''Some of the political figures are saying it's still too early to open the way to a completely open democracy," the American diplomat said. ''These parties are more concerned with their relative share of power than with any outreach."
In recent weeks, a dozen Iraqis interviewed at public gathering places in Baghdad, including mosques, restaurants, and markets, said no one had spoken to them on behalf of any political party.
For Mohamed Sadoom Abbas, 23, a student at Mamoon University, that's just as well. ''The leaders of these parties haven't lived among us for a very long time," Abbas said.
But even worse than their parvenu status, those who came to Iraq after the invasion face questions about their track record since Hussein's fall.
''They have not embraced change," Abbas said. ''They have put their grip on government institutions, bringing in their relatives just like in old times. I don't trust them."
Thanassis Cambanis can be reached at tcambanis@globe.com 