March 12, 2010Allawi courts regional leaders in power bid
Iyad Allawi, the former Iraqi prime minister whose coalition narrowly won the most seats in last month’s election, will reach out to regional leaders this week by sending a delegation on a tour of the Middle East.
Mr Allawi wants to seize back the premiership from the incumbent, Nouri al-Maliki, whose alliance of parties came second in the poll. But no group won an overall majority in parliament, and hard bargaining is now taking place to form the next government.
Mr Allawi, who has warned against outside interference, hopes the nation that probably wields the most influence in Iraq – neighbouring Iran – will receive his representatives.
Officials of Mr Allawi’s Iraqiya alliance on Monday said they had received a formal invitation from Iran, and a meeting was scheduled with the alliance’s delegation in Tehran on Wednesday.
The fact that Shia Iran took time to extend an invitation is not surprising as Mr Allawi is a pro-American secular Shia and Iraqiya is dominated by Sunni Arabs. His Shia Islamist rivals, as well as Kurdish politicians, all headed to Iran almost as soon as the last votes were counted.
“We hope Iran will extend an invitation to our team,” Mr Allawi told the AP. “But for us it is quite worrying, the interferences of regional powers ... we hope nobody will interfere.”
Last Saturday, the Iranian ambassador in Baghdad, Hassan Kazemi Qomi, sent a conciliatory signal to Iraqiya, saying their delegation would be invited to Iran. He added that Sunni Arabs – who overwhelmingly backed Mr Allawi – should be included in Iraq’s next government.
Mr Allawi’s supporters are concerned that Iran will try to push the main Shia alliances into forming a coalition that would probably deny him a return to the premiership.
These groups – State of Law, led by Mr Maliki, and the Iraqi National Alliance, which brings together the Sadrist Movement of Moqtada al-Sadr, the anti-American cleric, and the Islamic Supreme Council in Iraq (ISCI) – won 159 seats in the 325-member parliament. This would be just short of an overall majority, but comfortably ahead of the 91 seats won by Iraqiya.
Mr Allawi diplomatically avoided saying that Iran aimed to unite the Shia parties against him, but he insisted: “Iraq has to choose their own.” He also warned that any revival of the Shia Islamist alliance that dominated Iraq’s government after the last election in 2005 would be a move back to “square one”, stirring up sectarianism and threatening more violence.
“It will be quite devastating for the country,” he said. “It will ruin the national fabric.”
Mr Allawi dismissed suggestions that he has also courted the support of outsiders, notably Saudi Arabia, Iran’s leading regional rival. “We have not been supported by anybody,” he said. The aim of his delegation’s tour was to “explain to the region that the stability of Iraq is the stability of the region”.
Mr Allawi added: “We are very keen that the neighbours do understand what is going on in Iraq.” He stressed that they had a “responsibility, especially in this transitional period, to keep the borders safe, quiet and to help Iraq to pass through this very difficult phrase”.
Analysts believe Iran wants Iraq to be weak enough not to be a threat – the two fought a war in the 1980s – but strong enough to avoid instability. Arab states want a strong, nationalist Iraq that would resist Iranian encroachment but not strong enough to repeat its invasion of Kuwait in 1990, according to Joost Hiltermann, at the International Crisis Group, a body committed to resolving conflicts.
But Mr Hiltermann cautioned against over-estimating the strength of Iran’s ties with Iraq’s Shia parties. “None of these groups are Iranian proxies, but they are potentially Iranian pawns simply because they are so weak and divided.”
AP
