BAGHDAD, Sept 4: Iraq’s parliament criticized fellow Arab states on Sunday for failing to mourn 1,000 Shia pilgrims crushed in Baghdad last week, while some had found time — and money — to help Americans hit by Hurricane Katrina.

With the chamber, dominated by majority Shias and non-Arab Kurds, clad largely in funereal black, the undertone of sectarian and ethnic tension with the US-backed government’s Sunni Muslim-ruled Arab neighbours was evident.

Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari stepped into the fray later by holding up the sympathy expressed by Iraqi Sunnis for the disaster during a Shia religious ceremony as a lesson to Arab governments whose relations with Baghdad remain cool.

“Qatar felt sorry for those who were killed by Katrina, which is indeed sad, and sent them $100 million. Other countries did so too. But why is it that the Iraqi people are getting killed everyday but none of these countries says a word,” Jalal al-Deen al-Sagheer, a cleric and prominent Shia member, said.

“Why would Spain and other countries send us their condolences while these so called Arab countries did not even say a word?” he told the National Assembly, before adding that in any case words of sympathy from Arab states would be hollow.

“We know they would be lying because they are liars.”

A number of other speakers from the Shia-led coalition voiced similar sentiments.

The outspoken language echoed criticism from Iraq of fellow Arab governments’ failures to halt Muslim militants flowing into the country or staunch funding for the Sunni insurgency against the administration that replaced former military dictator Saddam Hussein.

Other Arab leaders have indicated some unease at the close relationship the new Iraqi authorities have with the United States and their ties with Shia, non-Arab Iran.

The Arab League, which Iraq helped found, criticised a draft constitution which, in deference mainly to Kurdish concerns, has hedged the extent to which Iraq is part of the “Arab nation”.

Iraqis were shocked and devastated by the stampede on a bridge over the river Tigris in which 1,005 people were confirmed to have died, the greatest loss of Iraqi life in a single incident since the US invasion of 2003.

In a country riven by sectarian tension, grief and shock has brought both some Sunnis and Shias closer — a point Jaafari stressed in a later news conference and contrasted with what he said was the attitude of neighbouring states:

“What Iraqis have shown ... is a transparent, great and clear message to some Arab countries who did not stand by us.”

State-run Iraqiya television also orchestrated an angry response to the Arab reaction; among other items, it interviewed children who expressed their sadness over the response:

“Where are our smiles? We are deprived of them,” chanted one of the four Iraqi children on television.

“Where is your conscience, you Arabs? Has it died?”

President Jalal Talabani’s and Jaafari’s offices have said they had received condolences from across the globe, though it seems few came in from the Arab world.

“If a whore were killed and had some link to one of their fat-bellied countries they would have erected their funeral tents,” said Sagheer, who wore his white clerical turban.

“I call on the foreign minister to consider this disaster a turning point in Iraq’s policy toward Arab nations.”—Reuters