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Al-Ahram Weekly 28 Oct. - 3 Nov. 1999 Issue No. 453 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 28 Oct. - 3 Nov. 1999 Issue No. 453
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Profile Study Special Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Grey cloud over New York meeting
By Salah HemeidAmerican-backed opponents of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq intend to gather during the weekend of 29-30 October in New York for talks designed to forge an umbrella organisation that would work to remove the Iraqi leader from power. But whether this round of talks can create the unity that has eluded the fragmented Iraqi opposition groups for the past 10 years remains unclear.
Even before the meeting gets off the ground, for example, the opposition has disagreed considerably over its participants and agenda, not to speak of the strategy that should be adopted to overthrow Saddam. While the organisers, the Iraqi National Congress, say they aim to reinvigorate the broad-based opposition movement set up in 1992 by Shi'a, Kurdish, and leftist groups to encourage a popular uprising against Saddam, rival groups feel the US-sponsored meeting will only deepen rifts in the opposition.
The meeting, which has developed out of the Iraq Liberation Act, an ambitious American bill designed to publicise support for anti-Saddam dissidents and to provide them with US funding and weapons, follows an April meeting of Iraqi dissidents in Windsor, England. This meeting also came under pressure from Washington to try to rebuild the fractured Iraqi political opposition, which, if successfully unified, will be given the $97 million the US Congress has allotted to Iraqi opposition groups in their attempts at bringing down Saddam.
Over the past six months, the Clinton Administration has made intensive efforts to lure the major Iraqi opposition groups into participating. US officials say that the groups would be required either to work to oust Saddam or to foster an orderly transition to democracy, should the Iraqi leader unexpectedly fall.
However major groups such as the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, an umbrella organisation for Iraqi Shi'a, pan-Arabist and other leftist parties, has rejected the American plans as self-serving, accusing Washington of trying to recruit stooges instead of helping the Iraqi people topple Saddam's regime.
This response is not unfamiliar, since it comes from groups who have traditionally distanced themselves from American plans. However other groups that have been closer to Washington in the past have joined in criticising the New York meeting. The Iraqi National Accord Movement, for example, has accused the organisers of "manoeuvering and procrastinating" efforts to unify the opposition. In a 24 October statement, the movement denounced organisers for "adopting the American Iraq Liberation Act as an alternative to a national programme" for change in Iraq.
Ali Abdel Aziz's Islamic Unity Movement in northern Iraq, a group listed as an opposition movement eligible for US financial aid, also said that "the Americans are either tampering with the feelings of the Iraqi people, or they are incompetent and unable to implement what they say." In addition the leader of the Iraqi Free Council, Saad Saleh Jabr, another long-time American ally, said recently that his group would not participate in the New York talks, describing the participants as "weightless and powerless personalities trying to make political and material gains."
The organisers of the New York meeting, however, seem unfazed by the criticism and dismiss it as these groups' attempts at increasing their delegates to the meeting, which will be held at a luxury Manhattan hotel and will include some 170 exiled dissidents taking part at a cost of $1 million.
The organisers want to elect a new leadership along ethnic and sectarian lines that will develop plans to topple Saddam in coordination with the US. Such a move will inevitably further split the already divided and discredited Iraqi opposition, disrupt their efforts to get rid of Saddam, and raise fears among Iraq's neighbours, who are already suspicious of any American-inspired plan to take over and fragment Iraq.
US officials have remained tight-lipped about why the Clinton Administration is determined to hold the meeting in New York despite the considerable opposition from Iraqi groups, saying only that the US seeks a unified opposition as a democratic alternative to Saddam.
On the other hand, members of the interim leadership of the Iraqi National Congress, which has pushed hard for the meeting, see in it an American attempt to bulk up its commitment to removing Saddam from power. Several delegates attended a May meeting where US National Security Advisor Sandy Berger expressed US determination to eliminate Saddam's regime before the end of Clinton's second term as president, and they say that American plans announced during Secretary of Defense William Cohen's visit this week to the Middle East to expand bases in the Gulf and to send in more troops are further signs that the administration wants to recompense for its past failures with Saddam.
Many, however, still doubt American policy on Iraq and say that holding show-case meetings in New York will do more harm than good to Iraqi opposition groups, since such moves will depict them as manipulated by Washington.
Observers say that if the administration is serious about unifying the Iraqi opposition and assisting it in becoming a more workable and credible alternative to Saddam's regime, then it should provide the opposition groups with the protection necessary to hold meetings inside Iraq, as the major groups had proposed.
For now at least analysts say that US officials have been unwilling to listen to advice on developing a clear policy on Iraq, one that would address concrete issues, rather than dealing in the grey areas of Gulf diplomacy and American domestic politics.
