Corruption pervades government in Basra
Islamists faulted amid killings
BASRA, Iraq -- The insurgency roiling much of Iraq has not taken hold in this southern metropolis, where Shi'ite Arabs hold sway and religious law is firmly ensconced. Basra is facing a different threat: pervasive, murderous, gangland-style corruption.
News of unsolved killings and vanished public funds vie for attention in the conservative Shi'ite Muslim heartland, where three rival Islamist religious parties -- all of which ran for office on a platform of using Islamic values to root out corruption -- dominate the provincial government.
On Tuesday night, American journalist Steven Vincent was kidnapped and killed after he wrote a series of articles denouncing corruption and accusing police hit squads controlled by Islamic clerics in a rash of unsolved slayings. Two weeks ago, the deputy governor was killed; the rumor on the streets of Basra was that he was about to expose financial improprieties on the provincial council.
''You can't describe it with words, they are so corrupt," said Dr. Adel Makee al-Yassiry, a cardiothoracic surgeon and deputy director of Basra's 10-story teaching hospital, describing the Islamist political parties in the provincial government. ''They have militias, and they will kill those who show documents exposing corruption," he said. ''People are afraid they will be murdered if they expose corruption."
Yassiry is an Islamist, and he supports the ideals of the parties in power. But like many in Basra, he is dismayed by the corrupt bureaucrats in the civil service who have gutted Basra's public service budget, undermining the rule of the Islamic leaders he calls ''respectful and honest men."
Corruption is so rife that even though the government has awarded new contracts to collect garbage, there is more trash on the streets of Basra now than at the end of the punishing three-week siege of Basra during the US-led invasion in March 2003.
The killings may also rival those from that period. But instead of war or insurgency, the homicide rate is driven by almost-daily assassinations. According to Basra politicians, many of the homicides are tit-for-tat killings of Islamist party officials; some hit squads target Ba'athists, and another fraction of the killings seem to be part of continuing tribal feuds that predate the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime.
According to coroner's records, 1,176 homicides were committed in Basra in the past nine months. Witnesses say many of the killers are wearing police uniforms and driving police cars, and they often assassinate their targets in broad daylight.
Most of the assassinations remain unsolved, and a majority of the police force (one-half to three-quarters, the police chief recently estimated to reporters) are actually Islamist militia fighters loyal to their sponsoring political party, rather than to the government.
Governor Mohammed Musabah al-Wa'eli played down the number of slayings in Basra. ''These are tribal killings," he said, dismissing the coroner's figures.
''I think the correct figure is more like 100" over the past year, he said, citing no evidence and defending the city's police force as mostly effective.
Wa'eli took office after the January elections on a platform of sweeping out rampant corruption. The previous governor, from the dominant Islamist party in Iraq, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, presided over an oil-smuggling boom and a collapse in the few public services still functioning in Basra after the US invasion.
Wa'eli, from the Fadhila Party (the name means virtue), is an Islamist whose political platform is indistinguishable from that of the Supreme Council, the Da'wa Party, or any of the other Shi'ite Islamists who hold nearly every seat on the provincial council. But his anti-corruption rhetoric has struck a chord, wresting power from the once-dominant Supreme Council. But his effort has barely begun to chip away at the web of smuggling, kickbacks, and embezzlement that has alienated much of Basra.
He blames Hussein's legacy and the ineptitude of his predecessors in the governorship, and also Baghdad for not sending more federal money to the province. If there were more money, he asserts, public services would not be in such appallingly short supply and the bad apples in government would not have such disproportionate impact.
That explanation does not fly on the streets of Basra.
''They just want more money to steal," said Abu Ihab, a well-off dealer in air conditioners.
Debate in Basra takes a very different form than it does in Baghdad, where secular and religious politicians are fighting over the role of Islam in a new constitution, while Kurds, Shi'ites, and Sunnis are jockeying to maximize their share of power in the new Iraq.
In Basra, most of the Shi'ite majority subscribe to varying shades of fundamentalism. The major debate among the political elite is whether to force or persuade the public to live by the dictates of Sharia, or Islamic law.
The province's Sunni minority (estimated at 25 percent of the 2 million population) has kept a low profile since leading Sunni academics and former Ba'ath Party officials began to fall in an assassination campaign last year.
Women like Anwar Mohammed Ridha al-Jabor, director of a public radio station, said she faces continual harassment for such activities as driving, which many of Basra's leading imams believe should be forbidden for women.
''It's already an Islamic republic here in Basra, but no one wants to say it out loud until the constitution is written," Jabor said.
The faithful have taken Islamization seriously: Liquor stores have been firebombed, almost no women dare go out without the veil, and restaurants have stopped playing music or serving beer.
Reconstruction has lagged. Rusted Iraqi Army tanks line many roads in and out of the city, memorials of the 2003 invasion. Warehouses and office buildings bombed and looted during the invasion (and some from as far back as the 1980-88 war with Iran) lie in shambles.
Weeds and garbage clog the open sewage-filled canals and ditches. Basrans have to buy drinking water from the ubiquitous stalls along the main roads.
Hundreds of squatters swelter in the 120-degree summer heat in an abandoned Labor Federation office building near the Shatt al-Arab waterway, still waiting for the public housing promised them by the government. Electricity and gas are in short supply, even though 80 percent of Iraq's oil production comes from the province's Rumaila oil field.
Bribes are a standard part of doing business at the six ports in Basra Province, which contain Iraq's only ports. Corruption has also allegedly deeply penetrated the police force. The police chief declined to be interviewed last week, while he faced a weeklong probe by a delegation from the Ministry of the Interior in Baghdad.
One of the province's rare secular politicians, Mufeedh Abdulzahra Mushaashie, 41, openly criticizes the Islamic leadership of the province and the police, but has maintained close personal ties with them.
''The people voted for the Islamists as an expression of their religious spirit, but the Islamists have not achieved anything for Iraq," Mushaashie said over lunch recently, as four of his bodyguards hovered in the background. ''If we wanted to have an Islamic state in Basra, we should not be smuggling gas and oil and killing people in the streets."
Mushaashie interrupted the interview several times to intervene in an unfolding but typical crisis: A powerful sheik had been slain in June, and his relatives had now taken revenge by assassinating a police officer they accused of the killing.
Without disputing the facts of the case, the police had surrounded the sheik's house and taken the women as prisoners until the men, who were in hiding, surrendered.
''You have to order the police to free the women," Mushaashie shouted to the governor over a cellphone. ''Otherwise this situation could explode."
He then called an influential member of the sheik's family and chided him for resorting to assassination. ''We are not living in the jungle here. We must operate under the law," he said. Ultimately the women were released, and the police and sheik's family agreed to discuss matters after a three-day cooling-off period.
All the parties with a share of power agree that Basrans are losing patience with the parade of political parties, all of them swearing to the same values, which seem incapable of changing their economically dismal lot in life.
''We cannot create miracles," said Ali al-Kana'ani, the political director of the Supreme Council, the Islamic party that governed Basra from April 2003 until February and that still has the largest bloc of voters and political leaders.
Corruption, he said, was the cornerstone of Hussein's rule, and no new party, Islamic or not, can change that in just a few years, he said. ''Before, administrative corruption took place behind a curtain. Now that curtain has been lifted," Kana'ani said.
Thanassis Cambanis can be reached at tcambanis@globe.com. 