All week Siham Hattab had been planning to stand in the latest council elections, but at the last minute she had nagging doubts. ”No, no. I’ve changed my mind,” she told her astonished colleagues at the council meeting. They were taken aback.
After all, everyone thinks of Ms Hattab (33) as a natural leader.
That in itself is rare enough in post-war Iraq, a country where 30 years of repressive dictatorship stamped out any political aspirations.
It is even more unexpected in a young woman from a conservative Shia Muslim family who represents one of the most deprived districts of Baghdad.
Hattab, a lecturer in English literature at the Mustansiriya University in the capital, was chosen shortly after the war to be one of the few women on the American-created neighbourhood council in Sadr City, a Shia suburb in eastern Baghdad. Soon she was selected to a seat on the larger district council, and then on the more important Baghdad city council.
Last week she had been planning to contest for a seat on the Baghdad provincial council, the highest tier of the newly-installed local government system. In the end she chose not to.
”I know, everyone is surprised,” she said. ”I just thought it’s better to keep my seat on the city council for the time being. I have never thought of myself as a political leader.”
Hattab, who wears a purple and white hijab scarf over her hair and a dark mauve jubba cloak covering her from head to foot, is younger and better educated by far than most of the men on her councils. She speaks eloquently and with confidence in both Arabic and English and has no qualms about standing up to the men around her in an intensely patriarchal society.
But she does not disguise the ambivalence with which she sees her work on the councils and her cooperation with the American civil and military officials who guide them. She was relieved to see the fall of Saddam Hussein but has been deeply disturbed by the US military occupation that followed.
”These are two evils and we have to choose one of them,” she said.
”It is very difficult that the Iraqis have had to suffer all these years and now they have to suffer more. People really feel upset because they don’t see any change in their lives.”
She is still considering whether she should stand for election to the transitional authority that will take over from the Americans in running Iraq in July. In particular she is concerned that the new government, which will be selected by indirect elections, will have no legitimacy.
The dilemma faced by a woman like Hattab, who is so obviously the kind of figure the new Iraq desperately needs to foster, underlines the difficulties the country faces in filling the enormous political vacuum left by the collapse of the Ba’ath regime.
When does cooperation with the American authorities become collaboration with an unloved occupation? How does Iraq nurture a generation of politicians at a time of frustration, violence and disillusionment with reconstruction?
Hattab had always wanted a professorship at Mustansiriya University.
It was there that she took a BA and then an MA in English literature, writing her thesis on the significance of travel in the novels of EM Forster. But under Saddam it was never going to happen.
Not only was she a Shia, the religious sect most persecuted by Sadda, not only did she refuse to join the party; in 1983 her brother Karim, then 19 and a veterinary student at Mustansiriya, was executed on suspicion of being a member of the Dawa party, an underground Shia opposition movement.
From that day her family was under surveillance and the careers of her four other brothers and two sisters in jeopardy.
In 1998 another brother, a poet who refused to meet the official demand to write eulogies to Saddam, fled Iraq for Phoenix, Arizona, where he lives today with his wife and three children. He has never returned to Baghdad.
”It seems in our family we had a reaction, which was to go forward and to gain what we could in the future, to gain personal glories not public ones,” Hattab said.
She was chosen as early as last May to take part in the local councils and was one of five Iraqi women who were flown to Washington in December, where they met George Bush.
She says she is unperturbed by the risks she takes in being a member of the councils, although she admits that her mother is concerned about her safety. Policemen and Iraqi civilians working on American bases have been targeted in recent months, apparently as ”collaborators”.
As a daily reminder of the risks, her Sadr City council office is surrounded by low concrete blast walls and layers of barbed wire fencing.
An armoured Humvee is parked in the drive and several American troops and Iraqi security guards are posted to protect the squat concrete building.
”I don’t work for the coalition forces, I work for my people. I have to,” she said. ”I can’t just hide myself and say I will not deal with them because then nobody will care about our society.”
Nevertheless, she is still one of only six women on the 37-member Baghdad city council.
”The women have been very brave and courageous standing up,” said Leah Cato, a state department diplomat with the coalition administration in Baghdad who works with the Sadr City council.
”It is not a very easy process if you are the only one standing up in front of a group of men,” she said. ”It is not what used to happen here and I think they have done an absolutely phenomenal job.”
Like many, Hattab is uneasy about the process of selection through complex regional caucuses that will choose the new Iraqi government.
Like many others, she would rather have direct elections, however difficult that may be to organise, and is wary of taking a seat in a new government that lacks legitimacy.
”We need some kind of election. It may not be a real one but we have to make the public participate,” she said.
”They have a right after all these long years. It is very important to give the national assembly legitimacy for being there.
”It if doesn’t have this there will be a gap between the population and the government. This is one of my greatest apprehensions.
”We have to show the Americans that the Iraqis are eager for elections. This is their first right if they are to be free men and women.”
She brushes aside securityproblems, but says she is worried that the councils are struggling to answer the concerns of the local community.
”It is very difficult to get what we really want,” she said. ”We try hard, but it doesn’t gratify our ambitions.”
Most people who come to see her complain about basic problems.
Several weeks ago there was a crisis in the supply of propane and kerosene, for heating and cooking.
The council helped curtail the black market and introduce rationing, which went some way to solving the problem. Yet many people still complain about the appalling sewage problems in Sadr City.
She has asked the American officials repeatedly about solving the problem, but has been told it will take a major overhaul of the city’s drainage system – an expensive and long-term project.
It is the difficulty of solving these apparently straightforward problems that has made her so reluctant to stand for a position in the new government. The selection process is due to be finished by the end of May, so she must make her decision soon.
”We can’t fulfil the ambitions of our people,” she said.
”Because of the injustice and the tense atmosphere we lived in we imagined that with the fall of the regime we could have a very different life.
”But things didn’t turn out like this. No one has a magic stick to turn things over. It will take a long time and this will make people even more frustrated.” – Guardian Unlimited Â