Stirrings Of Political Life Evident In Baghdad Monday

BAGHDAD (AP)--Angry, chanting men shouted their disgust with the U.S. Religious and civilian leaders jammed tables together for a first makeshift meeting on Baghdad's problems. Radio and television geared up to go back on air.

Amid midnight gunbattles and midday looting, political life was stirring at last in the Iraqi capital Monday, five days after U.S. tanks took control. Grassroots clerics, returned exiles and the U.S. military began to piece together the first elements of a civil administration to replace the ousted Baath Party regime.

There will be "no Sunni, no Shiite, one Iraqi nation," Shiite Muslim clergyman Ayad al-Musawi said in opening the improvised political meeting. "God willing, we will be one hand, one voice and won't betray each other."

An official of the Iraqi National Congress, a coalition of opposition groups, called for Baghdad's policemen to return to their jobs, something a handful had already done. The first patrols, at least four combining U.S. Marines and Iraqi police, cruised through Baghdad Monday.

In northern Baghdad's Shiite district formerly known as Saddam City, neighborhood clerics organized security networks to guard against the looting that has wracked the city for a week, leaving the skyline marred by towering pillars of black smoke from arson fires.

Any efforts to restore law and order in Baghdad would please the men - mostly businessmen and professionals - who began gathering Saturday in a plaza beside the Marines' headquarters hotel to protest the electricity and water outages crippling this war-battered city, and especially the collapse of law and order. "We want security!" they chanted Monday.

They held the U.S. invaders responsible for the pillaging of Baghdad that followed the Baath government's fall. Rather than blame fellow Iraqis, rumors spread among the scores of protesters that the U.S. brought in Kuwaitis or Iranians to wreck the city's universities, museums and hospitals.

The swift disintegration of President Saddam Hussein's government under a three-week assault by U.S.-U.K. forces left Iraq with a power vacuum filled only by those same military forces.

Opposition political factions, coordinated by the Iraqi National Congress, are planning a meeting Tuesday in the southern city of Nasiriyah to lay the foundations of what could become a provisional government. The small, informal Baghdad gathering, in a hastily mopped-up coffee shop at the city's dust-coated Palestine Hotel, beat the Nasiriyah session by one day.

Mohammed Mohsen al-Zubaidi of the Iraqi National Congress led the gathering of some 20 clerics, police officials, electricity and water board representatives and others, who crowded their molded plastic chairs around assembled restaurant tables.

The few reporters aware of the gathering circled them and listened in, in a meeting so last-minute that the U.S. Marine civil affairs operation on the other side of the Palestine Hotel didn't know about it beforehand.

"We have chosen a head of the police," al-Zubaidi said, announcing designation of a police major general, Zuair al-Nuami, as chief. He was said to have previously held a senior position in the police.

"Who do you represent?" an Arab reporter asked al-Zubaidi, whose group has little following inside Iraq. "I represent the people," al-Zubaidi replied.

The INC representative then told the others that Iraq's national radio would resume broadcasting "within hours" and national television within two days.

They also heard from the power and water board representatives that electricity is expected to be restored to east Baghdad in three to four days, and in west Baghdad within a week, and clean water should soon be pumped everywhere.

Outside the Palestine Hotel, the anti-U.S. demonstrators, who insisted their protest was spontaneous, demanded that Washington hand over control to Iraqis and withdraw its soldiers. Their rancor suggested Baghdadis' patience was running out as the electricity and water shortage wore on.

"I've seen lots of children that are already sick because there's no clean water," chemical engineering student Hassan Handal, 28, told a reporter. "People are having to pull dirty water up from wells in their backyards."

Handal said his small group had come to the U.S.-occupied hotel to find a humanitarian organization to help Baghdad's children. No one offered to listen, he said. "Where is the organization?" he demanded.

I wonder if these folks have any idea of the chaos that would ensue if the Americans did as they asked, and withdrew today.

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3 posted on 04/14/2003 11:20:39 AM PDT by Support Free Republic (Your support keeps Free Republic going strong!)

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