Press for unity is mired in a history of mistrust

BAGHDAD -- After a year of divisive and often deadly sectarian politics, two new coalitions have launched election campaigns that emphasize Iraqi unity and vow to focus on issues, not religious and ethnic identity.

Those platforms appeal to anyone wary of a sectarian, Islamist Iraqi state, from US officials who want a pro-Western government to Iraq's secular-leaning professional elite. But both of the new coalitions face an uphill battle in the real world of Iraqi politics.

They are led by politicians who spent decades in exile and came to prominence with the US invasion -- men who became household names without proven support from ordinary Iraqis. Both leaders must overcome strong negatives in the eyes of many Iraqis, even as they attempt to run on platforms of national unity. And as they compete for seats in a new parliament to be elected Dec. 15, the coalitions are swimming against a tide of mistrust and self-protective instincts among Iraq's diverse ethnic groups.

Leading the Iraqi National List is Iyad Allawi, who has longstanding CIA ties and who last year, as the interim prime minister appointed under the US occupation authority, approved US attacks on insurgents in Fallujah, Najaf, and Samarra.

At the helm of a rival coalition, the National Congress for Iraq, is Ahmed Chalabi, who before the US invasion helped the Pentagon build its now-discredited case that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Chalabi later placed new emphasis on his Shi'ite Muslim identity and sailed into the interim parliament in January as part of a victorious coalition of religious Shi'ite parties that opponents now view as too sectarian and too close to Iran. Now he's attempting another about-face by breaking with the Shi'ite coalition and trying to add Sunnis and secular voters to his supporters.

''The last election was about identity politics," Chalabi told a small group of reporters at his family's estate in Kadhimiya, the heart of Baghdad's Shi'ite establishment, where his aides served boiled lamb to dozens of potential supporters to break the Ramadan fast.

''There is now a move away from identity politics toward emphasis on common ground between communities," he said before launching into an energetic recital of policy proposals that he says will benefit all Iraqis, such as scrapping the food rations the government gives families every month and replacing them with more versatile cash payments.

Despite the pan-Iraqi rhetoric, the motifs of Chalabi's campaign event were Shi'ite. Guests sipped tea in a hall roofed with arched bundles of reeds, built in the style of the Shi'ite tribes of Iraq's southern marshes. When Chalabi officially unveiled his new coalition a few days later, he listed no prominent Sunnis among his running mates.

Meanwhile, Allawi's coalition has yet to demonstrate widespread support, despite its appeal to Western audiences.

His candidates wear business suits, stress women's rights, and call for a separation of state and religion. But in January's elections, candidates from Allawi's bloc finished behind those from Shi'ite and Kurdish coalitions, then refused to join a national unity government despite holding about 20 percent of the National Assembly's 275 seats.

His finish disappointed supporters who expected more from a US-backed incumbent with a massive advertising budget. Yet he far outstripped secular rivals, including US favorite Adnan Pachachi, who split the secular vote and failed to win a single seat.

This time, secularists such as Pachachi agreed to unite behind Allawi. They include communists, Arab nationalists, urban professionals, former Ba'athists, and others who have little in common but their desire to identify themselves primarily as Iraqis.

''We want one army, one police force, one foreign policy, one currency," said Omar Farouk al-Damluji, a professor of engineering at Baghdad University who served as Allawi's housing and construction minister. ''It is a nationalist coalition."

Damluji and others in Allawi's pro-US coalition see a contradictory twist: The people most likely to respond to their call for a strong, centralized nation are Iraqi nationalists and the secular professional elite -- many of them members of the disaffected Sunni minority that was dominant under Hussein.

Those voters could be turned off by Allawi's strong US ties, his supporters acknowledge. Those ties were on display last month when Allawi's coalition met at Baghdad's posh Alwiya Club, guarded by a dozen US Humvees, four of which arrived with Allawi's own heavily guarded convoy.

Supporters also worry that Shi'ite parties will try to brand Allawi, a secular Shi'ite, as an apologist for Hussein's Ba'ath Party.

Allawi has pushed to soften policies banning high-level Ba'ath members from state jobs. He has drawn support from Hussein-era professionals who see themselves not as an unfairly privileged group, but a meritocracy under threat from newly empowered Shi'ite parties that hand out patronage jobs to compensate people persecuted under Hussein's government.

Differences over the Ba'ath Party prevent Chalabi and Allawi from joining forces, because Chalabi favors strong ''de-Ba'athification" measures.

Meanwhile, the other major parties are making the opposite bet: that Iraqis will keep voting their ethnicity and religion.

Shi'ite Arabs, Sunni Arabs, and Kurds voted almost entirely along sectarian lines in January and again in last month's referendum on a new constitution, which was backed by Shi'ites and Kurds but rejected by minority Sunnis.

The new parliament will have the power to amend the constitution and will face a new round of divisive questions about how to share Iraq's territory, identity, and resources.

Sunni groups who boycotted January's elections recently formed their own coalition. They urge Sunnis to vote to defend what they see as their interests -- from preventing oil-rich Shi'ite and Kurdish regions from increasing their autonomy to ending what they call government-sanctioned revenge killings of Sunnis by Shi'ite militias.

Most parties in the Shi'ite governing coalition, which won last year with the endorsement of Iraq's most respected Shi'ite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, are once again running together as the United Iraqi Alliance.

Vice President Adil AbdelMahdi, an Alliance candidate for prime minister, said that in the current violent climate it could take four, eight, even 12 years for Iraqis to vote outside their ethnic groups.

''Now they have to defend themselves," he said in an interview last week.

Sa'ad Asim Janabi, a Sunni ally of Allawi's, is gambling that many Iraqis -- Sunnis and Shi'ites alike -- are disgusted by religious politics. Sunnis, he said, realize they lost out by listening to their clerics' call to boycott January's vote, and Shi'ites are disappointed by slow progress under the current government. ''Those are the votes we want," he said in an interview at his palace by the Tigris River, which Hussein built on land confiscated from him. Janabi reclaimed it after the war.

A former Ba'athist who fled to California after falling out with Hussein, Janabi said the current focus on ethnic identity is foreign to most Iraqis. To bolster his case, he said Shi'ite claims of persecution are exaggerated, brandishing a spreadsheet that he said showed Shi'ites were well represented in past Iraqi governments.

Such arguments may not fly with Iraqis who lost family members in the massacre of tens of thousands of Hussein's political opponents.

Janabi's wealthy family had the clout to take back their land from Hussein, but less powerful victims are still seeking justice -- among them many Shi'ites and Kurds who believe their best hope is in ethnic solidarity.

A similar tribal instinct among Sunnis gives Shi'ites like Chalabi little choice but to appeal to fellow Shi'ites, said Francis Brooke, an American adviser to Chalabi.

''Sunnis have a hard time voting for Shi'ites," he said. ''That's something we're just going to have to deal with."

Correspondent Sa'ad al-Izzi contributed to this report.