Iraq’s political crisis escalates with calls for Maliki to go

A series of intertwined political crises that began with accusations that Iraq’s prime minister was consolidating power have escalated into calls to unseat him, and paralyzed the country’s government. The protracted drama has seen Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s deputy revert to decrying him as a “dictator” and the leader of the autonomous Kurdish region call for him to go on one side, while the premier insists he has sufficient backing to stay on the other. “The political crisis has reached its highest level since its beginning, but it is still running within the framework of the democratic game,” Iraqi political analyst Ihsan al-Shammari said. “The country is paralyzed on all levels; there is a clear political paralysis paralleled by governmental negligence and a failure of the legislative authority, while the people are disappointed and afraid of the security consequences,” Shammari said. The trouble began in mid-December, when the secular Sunni-backed Al-Iraqiyya bloc began a boycott of parliament and the cabinet over what it said was Maliki’s centralization of power. For his part, Maliki sought to sack Sunni Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlak, an Al-Iraqiyya member who had labeled the premier “worse than Saddam Hussein.” That month, an arrest warrant was issued for Sunni Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi, also of Al-Iraqiyya, for allegedly running a death squad. Hashemi fled to the autonomous Kurdistan region in north Iraq, which declined to hand him over to Baghdad and then permitted him to leave on a regional tour that took him to Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. He is now being tried in absentia in Iraq. Kurdistan further entered the fray when its chief, Massud Barzani, launched a series of attacks against Maliki. In April, the region stopped oil exports, claiming Baghdad has allegedly withheld more than 1.2 billion euros ($1.4 billion) that Kurdish officials say is owed to foreign oil companies working in the region. Maliki’s opponents have now moved from merely criticizing the premier to talk of actually removing him from office. Al-Iraqiyya, which eventually returned to parliament and the cabinet, has sought to convince President Jalal Talabani to initiate a vote of no confidence in the premier in parliament, while Barzani has said he cannot work with Maliki. Yesterday, Mutlak repeated his claims Maliki was a “dictator” and called for the country’s political blocs to “stand together” to no-confidence the prime minister. However, a top Shiite cleric has issued a ruling forbidding voting with secular individuals, an apparent statement of support for Maliki. “It is haram [forbidden by Islam] for any part of Iraq’s ruling [authorities] to vote on the side of a secular person,” Grand Ayatollah Kadhim al-Hairi said in a written answer to a question from one of his followers about voting with secularists amid the current political crises in Iraq. Significantly, Hairi, an Iraqi who is based in Iran’s holy city of Qom, is the main cleric followed by supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr, the head of a powerful parliamentary bloc who has criticized Maliki as a “dictator” hungry for acclaim and accused him of seeking to postpone or cancel elections. Sadr, whose bloc is an important part of Maliki’s coalition government, has said that his MPs would back a vote of no confidence vote in Maliki if they were needed to secure a majority.