The queues snaking through Najaf’s dusty, broken streets were long and getting longer but no one complained: centuries of waiting were coming to an end.
Iraq’s Shi’ites have at various times tried the sword and the gun to win the political power they saw as their birthright. On Sunday it finally seemed within reach, courtesy of the ballot box.
Despite being a majority, Shi’ites have been history’s underdogs but that began to change in crisp morning sunshine when lines formed outside polling stations for the first democratic election in decades.
For this brand of Islam to dominate a key Arab country is a seismic shift for the Middle East and at its epicentre was Najaf, the spiritual heart of the Shi’ite world, to which the new Iraqi government will have to pay heed.
It did not look or sound like a city being reborn. Rubble and garbage still lay heaped across streets. There were no ululations, no car horns. But by 10am Rabata Street was filled with hundreds of men and women queuing silently to enter a girls’ secondary school which had been converted into a polling station.
As the day progressed and no attacks materialised, the mood lightened, verging on festive, with boys playing marbles and infants snoozing in their mothers’ arms. Shokry Sqhip (71) could no longer walk and relatives wheeled her on an improvised cart: ”I have difficulties but I said I must vote. Today is the first chance I have had to vote properly.”
Her grandson, Geshush (28) said he would vote for the secular Shi’ite Prime Minister, Ayad Allawi, who is tipped by some analysts to retain his job in whatever coalition government emerges from the election. Everyone else interviewed at the polling station plumped for the United Iraqi Alliance, a grouping associated with the top Shia cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, which is expected to dominate the new administration.
”I think this [grouping] will serve the Iraqi people,” said Sheikh Abbas al-Jabri, a cleric waiting in line to cast his ballot. ”I am choosing a government which I expect will ask the foreign soldiers to leave.”
In keeping with their stated intention to keep a ”minimal visible presence”, American and British troops stayed in their base on Najaf’s outskirts, a far cry from last year’s scenes when Shi’ite militias were invovled in fierce battles with US troops around the the gold-domed burial place of Ali, son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad.
The rebellion ended in a truce mediated by the grand ayatollah, a moderate versed in the unhappy history of his sect’s call to arms.
For centuries the Shi’ites, 60% of modern Iraq’s population, were subservient to the minority Sunnis. In 1920 the Shi’ites rose against the British but lost and the Sunnis, with British backing, continued lording it over them. Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated regime aggravated that marginalisation and so in 1991, in the wake of the first Gulf war, the Shi’ites rose again, only to again be crushed.
Resolving not to repeat those mistakes, Ayatollah al-Sistani has cooperated with the US, calmed his supporters after they were targeted by Sunni bombs, and lobbied for elections, knowing the outcome will be a Shi’ite dominated government, albeit in coalition with Kurds and Sunni groups.
This time it is the Sunnis who have rebelled and it is their turn to be marginalised, much to the unease of Sunni-led governments in other Arab countries. ”Sistani has played it brilliantly,” said one western diplomat. ”By reining in his radicals and going for elections, power is falling into the Shia lap.” – Guardian Unlimited Â