Vote in Basra could take secular turn
BASRA, Iraq -- Residents of this southern city of 1.8 million have learned over the past two years not to criticize the Shi'ite Islamic parties that have controlled its government -- at least, not out loud.
But many Basra residents say they plan to cast votes for secular political parties Jan. 30, defying the omnipresent shadow of the religious figures who claim primacy here. And others who do support the religious parties say practical needs take precedence over doctrine.
The election debate in Basra, taking place mostly in private, gives a strong signal about the surprising range of opinions within Iraq's Shi'ite majority. That could provide a major boost to candidates such as Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, a secular politician who is considered acceptable to the Shi'ite religious establishment.
On a crowded market street in the Tanounia district, hand-printed cloth banners and sleek posters trumpeted the front-runner Shi'ite slate of candidates commonly known by its ballot number, 169.
"The Islamic list, 169, has the most propaganda and biggest organization," said a schoolteacher who gave his name only as Abu Ali, wheeling his bicycle on the crowded market street. "But when you come to the inside of people, they will say, 'We are free; we don't have to choose this list.' "
Compared with Baghdad and the center and north of Iraq, Basra has witnessed a much lower level of violence. The relative calm in the Shi'ite south has afforded residents the opportunity to discuss who they will vote for, rather than whether they will have to brave an expected torrent of car bombs and attacks to vote at all.
More than any other city in Iraq, Basra is a living test lab of Islamic rule in Iraq. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, two Islamic parties have controlled the provincial government: the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI, and the Da'wa Party. Both are traditional Islamist parties that fought the Ba'athist regime from bases in Iran.
When the Ba'athist ruling class fled Basra after the US invasion in March 2003, Islamic parties quickly came to power on a popular wave of belief that religious parties would be less corrupt and power-hungry than secular political parties.
The provincial governor is a veteran of the Badr Brigade, the military wing of SCIRI, who spent years in exile in Iran.
Traditional Islamic values have reshaped the dynamics in Basra, which a decade ago hosted a decadent array of bars, casinos, and brothels that attracted visitors from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, where alcohol, gambling, and prostitution are major crimes.
On the streets now almost no women are visible. Those who venture out are veiled with the all-covering black garment called the abbaya.
Basra's liquor stores all closed down last summer when vigilantes began firebombing them.
Openly, the fiercest power struggle is between two kinds of Islamists -- the established exiles in SCIRI and Da'wa versus the young followers of firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who are thought to be responsible for the liquor store attacks.
"Don't listen to what people tell you -- look at what they do on the ground," said Anwar Mohammed Ridha al-Jabor, 40, director of Al-Nahrain Radio in Basra.
She believes, based on her call-in radio show and polling conducted by her station, that people in the southern provinces are fed up with authoritarian rulers and are not impressed with a year and a half of Islamist rule.
"People just got rid of Saddam. Now they want to be free, and not be threatened by anyone, including the Islamic groups."
How peaceful is Basra? There were no car bomb attacks between April and December. So far this month, three suicide car bomb attacks have occurred, on Jan. 10 and 11, targeting Iraqi police and provincial government officials.
British soldiers patrol Basra with a considerably lighter profile than their US counterparts farther north, walking the streets without helmets and dismounting from vehicles when they get stuck in traffic jams to walk among the stalled cars.
Attacks against military targets here are measured in the single digits, with fewer than a dozen roadside bombs a month. Attacks in Baghdad regularly number in the dozens every day, with nationwide figures hovering around 50 to 70 attacks per day.
Even at the height of the Mahdi Army uprising in the holy city of Najaf and Baghdad's Sadr City slum, Basra escaped with a comparatively low-key confrontation: Sadr followers took over several government buildings in August and backed down after a monthlong standoff with police.
Last weekend, Sadr's followers staged a noisy protest along the main canal of Basra, now filled with garbage and greenish sludge. Perhaps because the city is almost entirely Shi'ite, when talk turns to politics and the Islamist parties, the people of Basra focus on prosaic, tangible concerns, such as basic services and corruption.
For example, Ali Abd Abdulamir, 47, a butcher, said he will vote for the Da'wa Party, whose name means "Islamic Invitation," not because he considers himself particularly pious, but because he thinks the Da'wa slate will not be as corrupt as other politicians.
"We want all our rights: electricity, water, and security," Abdulamir said, wearing a smudged blue robe with a paring knife tucked in his belt. "We hope the good people of the Da'wa Party will bring us a good government finally."
Local leaders, too, have largely avoided political debate over highly charged religious issues, and instead focus on ways to rejuvenate the moribund regional economy. Earlier this month, the governor took a delegation to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates to study the thriving Gulf state as a model trading port. "They didn't go to Qom," the spiritual capital of Iran's ayatollahs, a Western official in Basra noted. "They're focusing on pragmatic issues."
For the national election, almost all the Shi'ite Islamic parties have joined forces in the United Iraqi Alliance known as 169.
Those who fear Iranian influence or the imposition of strict religious law in Iraq point to 169 as a band of religious extremists with unseemly ties to Iran's ayatollahs. But its supporters note that the list's candidates range from clerics wearing the black turban reserved for direct descendants of the Prophet Mohammed to politicians with a secular orientation, such as human rights lawyer Mansour Abdulrazzaq al-Tamimi, 37.
Mansour is a member of Basra's provincial council and spent five years in prison during Hussein's rule. He is not interested in bringing sharia, the Islamic code, formally into the legal system; he is much more concerned with garnering a steady stream of money for long-neglected southern Iraq, which for years watched the profits of its Rumaila oil fields hauled north and invested in Baghdad and the Sunni Triangle.
"Baghdad takes the money of Basra and spends nothing here," Mansour said, making the case for a federalist government in which semiautonomous regions in the Shi'ite south, Sunni center, and Kurdish north control their own budgets. He warned, "If the Constitution does not give us the right to autonomy, we will mobilize our people in the south to oppose the Constitution and the new government."
But when asked to describe his views on Islam in government, Mansour shrugged. "Islam decries dictatorship. Islam depends on consultative decision-making in Shura councils," he said, referring to the traditional consensus- building methods senior clerics use to reach agreement on official religious policy, or fatwas. "In that sense, all the political parties are Islamic."
Although the debate between secularists and Islamists has taken center stage, security concerns persist even here.
The violence that has gripped the Sunni Triangle and Baghdad has trickled into Basra, though on a much smaller scale. Mansour and Anwar both have received threats against their lives, and one of the suicide attacks at the main government building in Basra this month wounded a candidate.
The Islamic parties have militias and private intelligence networks at their disposal, left over from decades of guerrilla war against Hussein. Some wealthy Ba'athists still live in Basra, too, exerting influence behind the scenes in the new political parties -- even joining forces, some locals say, with Islamist groups including Sadr's Mahdi Army.
Last week, British military commanders held a series of intensive planning meetings with Iraqi police and Army officials, deciding how to guard the city's 159 polling centers on election day and protect the ballot boxes as they are transported to counting centers.
"We'll see how many police will be killed on election day," said Captain Ehab Faisal, 31, commander of Basra's police training facility, where officers were getting crash courses last week in marksmanship and stopping car bombers. "Basra is still safer than most of Iraq."
Allawi's secular slate is popular among the law-and-order establishment. Patrolling on the beat and back at the police academy, police officers are quick to declare support for the prime minister.
"Iraq needs a strong leader right now to bring security," said Sergeant Hussein Ali Hussein, 35, patrolling outside a butcher shop. "We don't need any imams. Religion should stay outside of government."
Thanassis Cambanis can be reached at tcambanis@globe.com 