BAGHDAD, Feb 12: Iraq’s Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari, nominated on Sunday to stay on as premier, is credited with bringing on board disenchanted Sunnis but accused of failing to bring security during his 10 months at the helm.
The former medical doctor whose Dawa party battled Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime for decades, Jaafari has promised to pacify the country and revive a long-debilitated economy, but both peace and prosperity remain elusive.
Seen as a religious Shia, Jaafari, 57, has lacked the clout to convince Sunni insurgentsto lay down their arms despite his calm authority and appeals for unity.
Critics such as Iyad Allawi, his predecessor as prime minister, have raised doubts whether a leader of the Dawa can hold moderate views on religion.
Jalal Talabani, Iraq’s Kurdish head of state, publicly slammed Jaafari for taking unilateral decisions in 2005 after he donned the mantle of commander-in-chief following an offensive against insurgents in northwest Iraq.
Born in Karbala, Jaafari studied at university in the northern city of Mosul and joined Dawa, the oldest political party among Iraq’s Shia majority, in 1966 after finishing his medical studies.
Dawa started carrying out attacks against Baath officials in the 1970s but only fully embarked on an armed struggle in the early 1980s, when Jaafari fled to Iran before moving to London in 1989. His five children live in Britain.
Today the softly-spoken Jaafari heads the party, which has become an advocate of Islamic reform and modernising religious institutions.
After several weeks of wrangling, Iraq’s dominant Shia political movement on Sunday voted for Jaafari as their candidate for prime minister in the country’s first permanent post-Saddam government.
He beat Vice President Adel Abdel Mahdi by a single vote, after the
conservative United Iraqi Alliance failed to reach an agreement by consensus. When the alliance won a sweeping majority in January 2005 polls, Jaafari was made prime minister for the first time after previously serving as vice president in a caretaker government.
Jaafari has played a prominent role in the new Iraq, having been one of the first to return from exile after the 2003 US-led invasion.
The task at hand over the past year has been to rein in the insurgency that has already killed thousands of people, most of them civilians, in post-Saddam Iraq.
Bolstered Iraqi forces and frequent targeted campaigns have however proved unable to rid the systemic violence from a country that had hoped to return to normalcy with the
emergence of a moderate leadership under Jaafari.
Under US pressure, he acquiesced to last-minute changes to the constitution to persuade Sunni voters to approve the charter, including provisions for further amendments by the parliament.
Having voted in an October 15 referendum on the new constitution, albeit heavily against the charter, the main Sunni groups voted strongly in the December 15 election, after boycotting the ballot in January 2005.
During Jaafari’s tenure, relations with his Kurdish government allies have been marred by allegations that he has monopolised power as well as by revolts among Sunni and Shia members of his cabinet.
His party enjoys the prestige of its past resistance to Saddam’s dictatorship inside and outside Iraq and was conferred legitimacy by years of oppression it suffered, matched only by that experienced by Kurdish groups in the north.
Perhaps as a consequence he is a hardliner over the question of the dissolved Baath party, which Jaafari says no longer has a place in Iraq.
He has also called for a swift sentence in the trial of Saddam and seven former cohorts who face the death penalty if convicted on charges of crimes against humanity.
Under the former dictator, Dawa membership was punishable by death and the party says no less than 77,000 members were killed under Saddam’s regime, mainly between 1982 and 1984.—AFP
