In March 1991, after more than 10 years of being locked up by Saddam Hussein, a small, bearded figure escaped from his cell. He was Iraq’s most famous nuclear scientist.
Helped by the man who brought him his food, Hussain al-Shahristani jumped into a car used by the Mukhabarat, Saddam’s feared secret intelligence agency, and drove out of Abu Ghraib prison. He fled north, across the mountains of Kurdistan, and into Iran.
A decade after his dramatic flight, Dr Shahristani — who famously refused Saddam’s request to build a nuclear bomb — has been tipped as a possible prime minister in the caretaker government to assume power on June 30.
The appointment is by no means a foregone conclusion. Shahristani (61) is a highly reluctant candidate. UN special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi said on Wednesday night that he had made it perfectly clear that he ”would prefer to serve his country in other ways”. Shahristani himself was somewhat hesitant when asked about his credentials as a putative prime minister.
”I personally prefer to serve the people of Iraq in humanitarian fields as I have done since my escape from Abu Ghraib,” he said.
But in separate remarks to the Washington Post, he added: ”If they consider my participation essential, I’ll try to convince them otherwise. But if they’re not convinced and they ask me to take a role … I cannot refuse. I must serve my people.”
Shahristani, whose 1999 autobiography was fittingly titled Escape to Freedom, has impeccable anti-Saddam credentials. In 1979, as chief scientific adviser to the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission, he was summoned by Saddam to a meeting to discuss a secret plan to develop nuclear weapons.
Shahristani, who is an expert in nuclear chemistry, with a PhD from the University of Toronto, refused. ”We have signed the non-proliferation treaty and we cannot engage in non-peaceful uses of atomic energy,” he told the dictator.
To no one’s surprise, Shahristani was arrested, tortured for 22 days, and taken to Abu Ghraib, the notorious prison west of Baghdad, where he remained in solitary confinement for a decade until his escape during the chaotic aftermath of the first Gulf war.
As well as his opposition to the old regime, Shahristani is, crucially, a member of Iraq’s majority Shia population. He was born in the holy city of Kerbala in 1942, and his family has ancient Iranian roots. He is also close to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most significant and politically adroit Shia cleric.
During his time in Abu Ghraib he became friends with another of Iraq’s leading grand ayatollahs, Sayed Mohammad Hussein al-Hakim, who shared a neighbouring cell.
Earlier this year he endorsed Sistani’s unsuccessful demand for early direct elections.
The US failure to embrace Sistani’s plan raised the ”disturbing question of whether Washington truly understands the Iraqi reality”, he wrote in the Wall Street Journal.
Friends say that last year he turned down a post on the US-appointed Iraqi governing council, fearing he would be regarded as an American stooge.
”People were saying how the governing council had been brought in on American tanks,” Sami Mudhaffar, a scientist who has known him for 30 years and now serves as Iraq’s deputy education minister, told The Guardian.
He added: ”It was a wise decision. He is wise in politics as well as science.”
This time, friends say, with the prospect of a degree of real sovereignty in Iraqi hands, things are different.
But Shahristani’s candidacy for a post that is supposed to disappear when elections are held next January is not without its drawbacks. His wife is Canadian. Although she converted to Islam over 30 years ago, her nationality is likely to be a liability at a time when the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq is more hated than ever.
Shahristani has also spent much of the last decade abroad, including long spells in London, only returning to Iraq last April after the war.
Inevitably, should he reluctantly take up the post, Iraq’s resistance will try to kill him. Last week it assassinated Izzedin Salim, another moderate Shia leader and president of the governing council.
Nevertheless, friends say he is selfless and incorruptible.
”If he is made prime minister it will be the best thing the Americans have done. At least they will leave in power someone who is clean,” Mudhaffar said. – Guardian Unlimited Â