Iraqi Assembly members balance death, democracy

BAGHDAD -- Every day, Telba Attia used to drive through the heart of the insurgency to her job teaching agriculture at the university campus in Abu Ghraib, shrugging off with the aplomb of an academic the violence that might kill her at random.

Now, however, Attia, a member of the National Assembly, has joined the ranks of citizen-legislators surprised to find themselves at the helm of Iraq's sometimes bewildering progression to democracy -- and directly in the crosshairs of an assassination campaign against members of the government.

She has discarded her casual habits and now moves around Baghdad in a convoy of two sport utility vehicles with a team of bodyguards, machine guns ever at the ready. On July 6, her guards killed one attacker during a half-hour shootout on her way home; Attia is convinced that the same insurgents are still watching her and the other legislators.

''If I stay alive, I will run again in the next elections," she said. ''There's no guarantee, but this is my responsibility."

Iraq's Transitional National Assembly has 275 members (minus two who were murdered, one who died of natural causes, and an unspecified number of no-shows), most of whom, like Attia, are newcomers to politics.

The mostly Shi'ite and Kurdish Assembly members are grappling with monumental challenges -- drafting a constitution, learning from scratch the still-foreign art of parliamentary debate, and publicly questioning the government leadership -- under absurdly difficult circumstances.

The legislators' predicament can simultaneously strike awe and provoke ridicule.

In the chamber, the members comport themselves self-consciously like people inventing a government. They invoke the pomp of a founding political dynasty when they challenge government ministers or weigh in on matters such as the referendum planned in October to approve Iraq's still-unwritten constitution.

Just outside, they more often evoke the spirit of a high school cafeteria, sometimes literally.

One recent day, so few legislators showed up that the meeting was canceled, while what looked like a quorum of members queued up for the free lunch -- for lawmakers only -- in the atrium cafe next to their meeting room.

There, legislators tend to sit in social and political cliques: turbaned men with turbaned men, veiled women with veiled women, and the occasional secular table with a mix of genders, traditional robes, and modern suits.

Assembly members must run a gantlet to get to work. They must enter the Green Zone through a 10-foot-high concrete blast barrier past a checkpoint guarded by Iraqi soldiers who early last month shot dead two walk-up suicide bombers. The guards are still so jumpy that they regularly draw their weapons and scream at overweight men to untuck their shirts, fearing their bulk conceals a bomb.

The legislators pass through four more checkpoints to get into the Convention Center, a three-story modernist complex built by Saddam Hussein to project Baghdad's aspired role as the center of the Arab world.

They take tea beneath an enormous four-panel mosaic that portrays heroic Iraqi soldiers, wielding swords while peace pigeons perch on their shoulders, repelling fire-breathing American soldiers from the 1991 Gulf War, who have dragon heads and are protected by F-16 fighter jets.

Underscoring their uncomfortable position as a bridge between the US occupation and a future government that will be fully independent, the National Assembly shares a wall with the headquarters of the US military's public relations headquarters in Iraq.

Photographs hang everywhere of the Sheik Dhari al-Fayadh, the oldest member of the Assembly, who was assassinated in early July. Dozens more say they have survived assassination or kidnapping attempts.

Because of a Sunni Arab boycott of the January elections, there are barely any Sunnis in the Assembly, even though they account for as much as a third of the population.

But among the Sunnis is the body's president, Hajim Hasani, a contrarian politician who defied his original political party's order that he resign from Iraq's interim government a year ago and now functions as an independent. He presides over the sometimes unruly and often contentious body with the stern air of an elementary schoolteacher.

As an experiment in burgeoning democracy, the National Assembly tries hard to hold the government accountable. Members of the Shi'ite and Kurdish coalition that controls the government chided the Foreign Ministry at a recent session for failing to purge Ba'athists from its ranks.

''We must remove all the Ba'athists from the embassies!" shouted one legislator.

The female legislators, who make up about a quarter of the Assembly, talk nearly as often as the men, at a time when some religious leaders are seeking to curtail the role and rights of women.

One woman demanded that her colleagues on the Foreign Affairs Committee stop wasting public money on useless international junkets that have nothing to do with their job overseeing the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Baghdad.

Candor, on the other hand, is sometimes in short supply. On July 24, legislators fiercely debated whether exiled Iraqis who hold Iranian passports should be allowed to vote in the upcoming constitutional referendum. The question is particularly sensitive because of charges that neighboring Iran has far too much influence over the dominant Shi'ite Islamic parties.

''We must discuss some things in a polite way," Attia explained after the vote. ''We cannot say this applies to Iranians, for example, because that would hurt our friends."

Attia is a member of former prime minister Iyad Allawi's secular party, whose representatives in the National Assembly include both Sunni and Shia Muslims. Attia, a Sunni Arab, identifies herself as an Iraqi first and decries the new trend of identifying by sect or ethnicity.

Ultimately the measure was defeated without a single legislator saying the word Iran or talking about the measure's actual impact, which would be to enfranchise as many as 2 million exiles.

Because the conference hall is not wired with microphones, a sweating man in a bright red tie runs and hands a cordless microphone to each legislator given permission by Hasani to speak.

The sessions are televised in an effort to inspire public faith in the government. But the most important political debates, like those of the Constitutional Committee, occur in closed meetings.

Similarly, most of the real politicking takes place just outside the Assembly door, near the cafeteria.

Yonadam Kanna, a Chaldo-Assyrian Christian from one of the few small minority parties that won seats in the National Assembly, lobbied furiously in the hallway outside the Assembly room.

''As Chaldo-Assyrians, we are trying our best," he explained. His constituents fear an Islamic system of government that might marginalize Christians, but they are caught in the middle of debates between larger, more powerful forces.

On the fringe, more marginal debates rage, such as the one over Iraq's tourist infrastructure. Mufid al-Jazairi, chairman of the committee on culture, media, and tourism, declared that he was tremendously busy with his portfolio and proudly displayed a newly printed card with his title.

''Of course there is no tourism; everything is frozen right now," Jazairi said, dashing off to a committee meeting that turned out to be a laugh-punctuated lunch of chicken curry in the cafeteria. ''But we have to look to the future."

Thanassis Cambanis can be reached at tcambanis@globe.com.