IYAD Allawi, the former Iraqi puppet prime minister at the time of the US assault on Fallujah, and the leader of the Iraqi List, said yesterday: ‘I fear the situation in Iraq is bad and I fear a further slide towards disaster.’
Allawi is a secular Iraqi politician and in his early days before he defected to the CIA was a leader of the ba’ath party.
He said: ‘As is known, the situation is, naturally, bad and it will certainly get worse for clear reasons: the absence of the state, the adoption of a sectarian and factional policy in running the affairs of what is left of the state in Iraq, and the negative regional interference in Iraqi affairs.
‘More of these factors will lead to a further slide towards the disaster.
‘It will deteriorate into further blood and destruction.
‘The deeper the differences become, the more difficult the correction of the Iraqi situation becomes, and the problem, consequently, will spill out of Iraq and will take roots in Iraq.
‘The forces in Iraq will engage in struggles in the future, entering the frameworks of sectarian fighting that will have a beginning but no end.
‘This is the danger against which we warned when we said that the sectarian quota system would kill Iraq and the region.
‘No one paid any attention at the time. I was the first to warn that there was civil war in Iraq.
‘Some brothers, and even some Iraqi officials, criticised those statements, but the fact is that what we see today is far more serious than civil war.
‘The losses incurred during civil wars are far less than the human losses among the Iraqis today.
‘This is not a national unity government.
‘It is a government of sectarian quotas that does not represent national accord.
‘We reluctantly agreed to join it in the hope that it would amend its course, learn, and really be a national unity government.
‘But after the deadline we gave the government, we now have a different and a new position that we in the national Iraqi List have begun to study, to see whether it is useful for us to remain in the executive power.
‘The Iraqi List has no role in the executive power.
‘I can clearly say that our List and its components, including the Iraqi National Accord Movement, are being subjected to daily attacks and continuous destruction.
‘We have a large number of detainees in the jails of the Iraqi regime. They suffer the harshest forms of torture.
‘Yesterday a National Accord Movement delegation met with officials from Amnesty International in an attempt to obtain the release of the detainees.
‘One of them was placed in a coffin for more than 20 days and was threatened with being buried alive.
‘The members and inclinations of the Iraqi List are targeted.
‘Very regrettably, the Iraqi government did nothing against these practices.
‘It is just watching the arrests, torture, killing, marginalisation and dismissal from work.
‘There isn’t any government measure to stop this hostile episode against the Iraqi List and the National Accord Movement.
‘All the armed militias – Shi’ites and Sunnis – the takfiri forces, the terrorists and those who call themselves resistance – these are the forces that control the Iraqi street today.
‘There is certainly a genuine Iraqi resistance.
‘The Americans held talks with this resistance and with the Ba’athists.
‘This happened in my presence. But it appears that they achieved no results.
‘They talked to the official representatives of the Ba’ath Party.
‘They officially talked with high-ranking officials from the coalition countries, including the Americans, but they did not achieve results.
‘One of the reasons is that one of the coalition countries told the Ba’athists to negotiate with the government, but the Ba’athists said they do not recognise the government because it does not represent the Iraqi reality.
‘Add to this the fact that the brothers in the government do not want to change their policy with regard to the de-Ba’athification.
‘They want to entrench this policy.
‘Indeed, they want to fight all the nationalist inclinations that have nothing to do with the Ba’ath Party, as is happening to us in the Iraqi List or the National Accord Movement.
‘They want to marginalise us for many reasons, including the fact that we differ with them over the issues of militias, the sectarian-sharing system, and the building of the modern state.
‘We also differ with them on the issue of Iraq’s Arab and Islamic affiliation.
‘We believe that Iraq is part of the Arab and Islamic nations.
‘It appears that the government and many other parties do not want Iraq to have an Arab or an Islamic wing.
‘This is why I am surprised that we in the Iraqi List and the National Accord Movement are being treated with such tyranny and persecution.
‘I spoke with the prime minister and with others in the government, but this led to nothing.
‘I sent memorandums to the head of the government and the president of the republic.
‘I wrote to the president about the unfairness shown by the de-Ba’athification committee to colleagues of us in the List who won in the recent elections but were removed, although some of them were not Ba’athists.
‘Indeed, one of them was a communist and was never a Ba’athist.
‘Some people had been plotting against Saddam since the 1970s and 1980s and yet they were removed.
‘It appears to me that this happened against the background of the positions of those people towards Iran and its interference in Iraqi affairs.
‘There has been a great deal of unfairness shown to us, which indicates that there is no genuine desire for national reconciliation, which should begin with the participants in the political process.
‘We are participating in this process and we played a key role in it and in the liberation of Iraq.
‘We were inside Iraq while many of the forces of the coalition came to Iraq at a later stage.
‘We therefore decided to revise our positions and to be clear.
‘If the government is serious about ending the quota system and dissolving the militias and about the issue of reconciliation, then we – as I personally informed Nuri al-Maliki – will be his strategic reserve.
‘If the government is not serious in this approach, then we will see what we will do.
‘Our plan is to build a national front with a presence inside and outside parliament.
‘It will comprise the forces that do not believe in the system of sectarian sharing, along with figures who believe in the building of an Iraq for all the Iraqis, an Iraq free from irregular entities, and in building establishments that are loyal to Iraq, and independent judicial establishments where the law is applied equally on all the Iraqis.
‘This is what we are trying to do.
‘This is in addition to the building of strategic, complementary relations with Arab and Islamic countries.’
