For Iraqis, it was a grim fact of daily life. As a crowd of men, most of them impoverished Shia construction workers gathered after dawn on Saturday at a food stand in Sadr City in the hope of picking up a day’s labouring from the city’s gangmasters, a powerful bomb ripped through the crowd. Half an hour later the bodies — a dozen of the 19 killed — were laid out in a garden of the Imam Ali hospital nearby, their faces covered with cardboard.
‘When will this stop? Where is the government?’ a teenager sobbed as he stood amid pools of blood. A man beat his face with his hands and hugged his dead brother. Survivors rushed the wounded to hospital. Another day, another terrible death toll across Iraq.
In the border town of Qaim, close to the Syrian frontier, a suicide bomber killed five people in a police station. In Musayib, south of Baghdad, 15 bodies of men who had been tortured and shot were dumped in the street.
There are now two interlinked wars in Iraq: the insurgency against the United States-led occupation, or rather two insurgencies, one Sunni, largely in the north, and the other a Shia rebellion whose targets are coalition troops. Then there is a sectarian war between Sunni and Shia, characterised by bombs and death squads.
On Saturday as Iraq’s Parliament finally approved a new government of national unity, the first intended to serve for a full term, ending months of deadlock and fighting, the question was whether it could make any difference to the violence tearing Iraq apart. How much has been settled after five months of tortuous negotiations that have seen one candidate for Prime Minister, Ibrahim al-Jafari, withdraw under US pressure, and endless horse trading, was far from clear.
As the new Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, stood to present his government, it was amid complaints about how the negotiations had been conducted and with the three key posts — defence, national security and interior — over which Iraq’s political factions have been fighting, still effectively unfilled. Maliki himself, a tough-talking Shia, will ”temporarily” take charge at the interior ministry, implicated in running torture centres and death squads.
Maliki, a defender of Shia interests since his return from exile in 2003, has won praise from Sunnis for his willingness to seek consensus. As part of the 11th-hour temporary deal, the defence ministry will go to Deputy Prime Minister, Salam Zobaie, a Sunni.
”We will work within a framework that will preserve the unity of the Iraqi people,” Maliki told Parliament as he listed 34 policy priorities. He said he would personally supervise security and improving services such as electricity and water. But the announcement was greeted with turmoil. Before Maliki could begin naming his team, the leader of the Dialogue Party — the smaller of two main Sunni factions — grabbed the microphone to denounce how posts in the 37-member government had been distributed.
Maliki’s Cabinet was approved by a show of hands, minister by minister, after a turbulent start to the parliamentary session, when some minority Sunni leaders spoke out against the deal and several walked out. The main Sunni Arab leadership, which controls the bulk of the Sunnis’ 50-odd seats in the 275-member chamber, held firm. ”It is an historic day for Iraq and all Iraqis,” said Shia deputy speaker Khalid al-Attiya. ”For the first time a permanent national government is formed after the toppling of the regime.”
Crucially, Maliki said he will lay out an ”objective” timetable for the transfer of security responsibilities to Iraq forces, opening the way for US and British troops to begin withdrawing by the end of the year.
As London and Washington hailed ”the historic deal”, Iraqis were divided over whether it would do anything to change their lives. Ahmad Kareem (24) a Shia from Baghdad, studying marketing at the university, is sceptical. ”I am not optimistic about this new government,” he said. ”They will never be able to control the security situation or the state offices. Things will not settle down. They simply shared the posts to enjoy the privileges and will leave the suffering to us. It won’t be anything like the government under Saddam, that was a real government.”
It is not a view shared by Basman Al-Ubedy, a 37-computer teacher from Mosul and a Sunni: ”I believe in the saying: ‘The optimistic see a chance in every crisis.’ I have hope in God that he will change everything. The negotiations about the posts in this government have been going on for a long time. The demands of Iraqi citizens are quite simple. We want security and economic prosperity. We want electricity and water in the summer and fuel in the winter. If the political sides decide to work together, they should be able to achieve that.” – Guardian Unlimited Â