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The
Independent
August 9, 2004
Summary: This article discusses the possible role
of one of Iraq's only elder statesman, Adnan Pachachi, in the
new Iraqi government. Mr. Pachachi says: "There is
now a real possibility of having credible, fair, transparent
elections that would reflect the desire of the Iraqi people
more than anything that has gone before." He welcomes the
fact that they will use a system of proportional
representation which means that every vote will count.
The Independent
The Monday Interview: Iraq's elder statesman and potential
president
By Donald Macintyre
August 9, 2004
In the league table of highly charged confrontations, the
25-minute meeting that Adnan Pachachi and three Iraqi
colleagues had with Saddam Hussein in his prison cell last
December ranks pretty high.
When Saddam was caught, Mr Pachachi, a leading member of the
Iraqi government before the Baathist coup in 1968, was phoned
by Paul Bremer. The Americans' administrator in Iraq invited
him, as the acting chairman of the Iraqi Governing Council, to
gather a few members together and visit the prisoner "so
the Iraqi people could see that it was true, that it wasn't
propaganda."
"Of course, the temptation was too great," Mr
Pachachi recalls. "Who could give up a chance like
that?" Mr Bremer and the US military commander, General
Ricardo Sanchez, had suggested they might want to stare at
Saddam through a window or via a television camera. But of
course, the group, all former opponents of Saddam, wanted to
talk to him; or at least three of them did.
For while the fourth, Ahmad Chalabi, the Pentagon's favourite
Iraqi until the CIA accused him earlier this year of being an
Iranian spy, later talked a great deal about the meeting, he
was silent while it went on. When Saddam, who was sitting in
black slippers on his steel US Army cot with his beard freshly
trimmed, saw the four come in, Mr Pachachi said: "He
asked the Americans: 'Who are these gentlemen?' Chalabi
immediately pointed to me and said: 'That's Adnan Pachachi'."
Whether or not Mr Chalabi had taken sudden fright at Saddam in
the flesh, however haggard, Mr Pachachi adds with an
infectious laugh: "These were the only words [Chalabi]
uttered during the entire meeting."
"Then [Saddam] said: 'Oh yes, of course we know you; you
were the foreign minister. What brought you with these
people?' And I said: 'Well, we are trying to create a
democratic Iraq.'
"Then I asked [Saddam] why didn't he withdraw from Kuwait
[after the invasion in 1990] when he could have done. He would
have saved Iraq all its problems: sanctions and the ravages of
war. He said that he was prepared to withdraw provided all the
problems of the Middle East could be settled. I said: 'You
must have known that was never going to happen, that it was a
non-starter.'
"I then asked him why did he kill so many people, why he
had been such a ruthless ruler. And he said: 'Iraq needs a
just but firm ruler.' I said: 'You were not a just ruler. You
were in fact an oppressive ruler, an oppressive tyrant over
the Iraqi people.' And he said: 'You know, sometimes one has
to use force in order to keep the peace and unity and
integrity of the country'."
Mr Pachachi says thoughtfully now that these exchanges -
including Saddam's breathtakingly hubristic self-justification
- were conducted in a "very civil way". He added
that his other colleagues - the Governing Council member
Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a victim of Saddam's torturers in 1979,
and Adel Abdel Mahdi, of the Shia Supreme Council for the
Islamic Revolution in Iraq - had been "more abusive. And
he replied in kind". This is an understatement; when Mr
Rubaie accused the former dictator of cowardice, because he
had had two AK-47s when he was run to ground by US forces but
did not shoot a single bullet, Saddam replied with the full -
and ample - range of Arabic swear-words favoured in the Iraqi
street.
But the conversation he recollects in such detail also says as
much about Mr Pachachi as it does about Saddam. The man who
can have a "civil exchange with even a tyrant he has
every reason to hate - one who put tens of thousands of his
fellow Iraqis into mass graves, and caused his own exile for
more than a generation - remains by instinct the diplomat he
once was - as a pre-Saddam ambassador to Washington.
One question about the future Iraq is how pivotal a role a man
as internationally experienced, but also as fastidious and
undemagogic, as Mr Pachachi, will play in it. What is clear is
that Mr Pachachi, at 81 the nearest Iraq has to an elder
statesman, is ready and eager to try. Sitting behind his desk
in the spacious house he has rented as his headquarters in the
upmarket Mansour neighbourhood of Baghdad, he is seeking to
maximise the support in the coming elections promised by the
end of January for his party, the Independent Democrats. Like
its leader, the party is nationalist, but also secular and
liberal in outlook. The elections will choose the national
assembly entrusted with drawing up a new constitution.
Mr Pachachi says: "There is now a real possibility of
having credible, fair, transparent elections that would
reflect the desire of the Iraqi people more than anything that
has gone before." He welcomes the fact that they will use
a system of proportional representation which means that every
vote will count.
If they happen. Given the chronic security crisis, does he
really think elections are possible? "They have to take
place. A lot of countries have elections even in time of war
and civil conflict, and the government will be called upon to
protect the voters." He doesn't exclude the possibility
of "acts of violence" designed to undermine the poll
but adds that if there is a reasonable election - covering,
say, 70 per cent of the country - that will have been
"worth its while".
His own party's campaign has almost certainly been boosted by
his decision in June to turn down the position of interim
president which was offered to him by the UN special
representative, Lakhdar Brahimi. There was, he says, a
"vicious campaign" - for which he has personally
blamed Mr Chalabi - to depict him as the Americans' choice
when the truth was the "exact opposite". Unlike the
UN, the US favoured the present incumbent Sheikh Ghazi al-Yawar,
an engineer with no previous political profile. Mr Pachachi
believed acceptance under such circumstances would have
"impaired" his role in elections.
On the performance of Iyad Allawi's interim government in a
"difficult situation", Mr Pachachi is at times a
master of understatement. He points out that little more than
a month has passed since sovereignty was handed over and the
administration needs time before it can be fully judged. He is
an enthusiast for the planned creation - by an Iraqi National
Conference which has already been postponed once - of a
temporary assembly to scrutinise the government's workings
until elections take place.
But he cannot endorse the month-long ban announced on Saturday
on al-Jazeera's journalists in Baghdad. He understands the
anger al-Jazeera provokes among some interim ministers. The
complaint, he says, is not that al-Jazeera shows explosions
and scenes of war - the other networks do that. Rather it is,
he says, that it has been "used" to portray videos
of hostage-takers responsible for "appalling beheadings
and so on" and allowed itself to become the
"medium" of choice for propagating the statements of
insurgents. But he adds: "The way to do it is for the
government to ask al-Jazeera for as much time as they need to
refute the allegations of terrorists and insurgents, and show
the other side." After all, he points out, al-Jazeera
will in any case continue broadcasting into Iraq.
On last week's fighting by Iraqi and US forces with Shia
loyalists of Muqtada Sadr, he says the UN and any other form
of mediation should be tried if at all possible. "I am
very upset at the loss of life in Najaf," he says.
"I would like to see every effort to defuse the crisis
without undermining law and order."
On the insurgency in general, Sunni at least as much as Shia,
he says: "It's a terrible situation. It will prolong the
presence of foreign troops in Iraq and it will adversely
affect reconstruction. They want to destabilise the country,
to make it ungovernable."
As a member of an old Sunni family, he met a wide range of
Sunni tribal leaders last week - a few of whom, he says, may
have at least some indirect contact with some of those
involved in the insurgency, contacts he does not have. He
urged them to participate in the political process - not least
by registering as voters. And he argues that the greater the
security, the faster the Americans will leave.
He is not shy about criticising the US. Paul Bremer's decision
to disband the army was "a mistake, a hasty
decision". So was the "wholesale dismissal of
government employees. What should have been done was to keep
the government structure intact and then gradually remove
officials who were implicated in crimes". And he says the
trickle into Iraq of funds approved by the US Congress last
year - a paltry $458m (��250m) out of $18bn - is a coming
"big issue".
But he retains an unfashionable, if sober, optimism about the
long-term future. "I don't think there will be a civil
war," he says. Iraqis, he adds, are not inclined to kill
each other for ethnic or sectarian reasons. "This isn't
Northern Ireland or Bosnia or Lebanon."
He says his party will be seeking to form coalitions - in
government or in opposition - with other like-minded parties.
And on speculation that he might offer himself as a
presidential candidate to a new assembly, if and when it
happens, he says no decisions have yet been taken by the
party. It is wholly possible of course, that Mr Pachachi will
be drowned out by younger and more strident voices. But if
nothing else, and whatever role he plays in a barely
foreseeable future, Iraq could certainly do with some of his
optimism.
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