Petrolio, Politica e stragi avvelenano una città
irachena
SABRINA
TAVERNISE e QAIS MIZHER
-
A
tre anni dall’invasione Americana, Basra è lacerata dai partiti sciiti che vogliono
controllare la regione e il suo petrolio; il numero degli assassini è in forte
crescita, 85 nel solo mese di maggio, quasi il triplo di gennaio. Per tre anni
Baghdad ha combattuto contro i ribelli del Centro e dell’Ovest, abbandonando
gli sciiti del Sud al loro destino. -
Il vuoto nelle strutture statali creato
dalla destituzione di Saddam Hussein è stato riempito da un miscuglio di partiti
politici con le loro milizie ed etnie, che hanno occupato posizioni di potere
nella statale Southern Oil Company che controlla l’industria di lavorazione del
petrolio e la sua rete di trasporto. -
È in corso uno scontro all’interno
delle istituzioni di Basra, che il nuovo primo ministro Nuri Kamal
al-Maliki faticherà ad arrestare, come dimostrato da un attentato in un
mercato, con 27 vittime, avvenuto a tre giorni dall’imposizione dello stato d’assedio.
Il partito
Fadhila è attualmente al comando, tra i suoi membri il governatore e il
presidente del consiglio provinciale. Fadhila ha stretti contatti con Moktada
al Sadr, le cui milizie sono tra le più potenti. Fadhila controlla la forza di guardia della Southern
Oil Company, per la quale è in corso uno scontro tra i partiti con una
serie di omicidi.
-
La polizia di Basra è composta da
uomini affiliati ai vari partiti, e quindi non è in grado di far cessare il
conflitto e il furto; il caos di cui è preda Basra è dovuto anche alla creazione della nuova forza di polizia,
di 37 000 agenti, il 50% in più di quanto autorizzato centralmente,
sparse nelle 4 province sotto il controllo dei britannici nel Sud-est.
La polizia non è intervenuta contro gli assassini di arabi
sunniti (o secondo i sunniti è lei l’autrice della maggior parte degli omicidi),
la cui quota sulla popolazione totale è calata velocemente negli ultimi anni.
Il
governatore della provincia non è riuscito ad allontanare il capo della polizia,
generale Saad; l’ha tentato anche il consiglio provinciale, senza raccogliere
i necessari 2/3 dei consensi; il governo centrale non ha il potere di rimuovere
funzionari provinciali.
Una questione
di disaccordo tra Fadhila e i due partiti concorrenti, il Consiglio
supremo della Rivoluzione Islamica in Irak e il partito Dawa, è quella del federalismo e della sorte della
regione sciita meridionale.
Secondo Fadhila
la provincia di Basra, con 2 mn. di abitanti, un aeroporto e il petrolio,
dovrebbe essere autonoma. I campi petroliferi della provincia sono i più
ricchi del paese, il greggio che forniscono rappresenta tutto l’export attuale
dell’Irak che serve a pagare i salari dei pubblici dipendenti.
Il governo centrale di Baghdad accusa i partiti di Basra con
le loro milizie di contribuire a stornare una parte del petrolio:
-
tra
la produzione per l’export e l’export reale c’è una differenza di 6000 barili/g,
che rimpinguano i signori della guerra con le loro milizie, il crimine
organizzato e i partiti politici.
I partiti della provincia si accusano a vicenda di essere manutengoli
iraniani, 190 “pellegrini” (o agenti dell’intelligence?) giungerebbero quotidianamente
dall’Iran. Abbondano armi che non si vedevano più dalla guerra Ira-Irak, come razzi
russi katyusha e missili russi anticarro.
Nyt 06-06-13
Oil,
Politics and Bloodshed Corrupt an Iraqi
City
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and QAIS MIZHER
BASRA, Iraq
— Politics, once seen as a solution to the problems of a society broken by
years of brutal single-party rule, has paralyzed the heart of Iraq’s south.
This once-quiet city of riverside promenades was among the most receptive
to the American invasion. Now, three years later, it is being pulled apart by
Shiite political parties that want to control the region and its biggest prize,
oil. But in today’s Iraq, politics and power flow from
the guns of militias, and negotiating has been a bloody process.
"We’re into political porridge,
that’s what’s changed," said Brig. James Everard, commander of the British
forces in Basra. "It’s mafia-type politics
down here."
Police reports from the past five months
read like war chronicles: Eight
oil company employees murdered. Twenty caches of Russian rockets
discovered, including a pile in the back of an ambulance. A tank of stolen oil
found in a fake mosque. Shootouts reported between a politician’s militia and
the police, and between police officers.
Now, after two years of relative calm, Basra has a soaring murder rate (the 85 killings
in May were nearly triple the number in January), a tattered oil industry and a
terrified population.
"I cannot talk with you," said
Sajid Saad Hassan, a professor at Basra
University’s agriculture
college. "I haven’t joined a party and no militia is protecting me."
The story of Basra’s descent traces the arc of the war
itself. People here, mostly
Shiites whom Saddam Hussein oppressed, embraced the invasion. But for the next
three years, Baghdad put its resources into
fighting insurgents in central and western Iraq, leaving the quiet Shiite
south to find its own way.
But the rules have fallen away along
with the end of Mr. Hussein’s rule, leaving a broken landscape of empty state
institutions.
"So much of the state melted
after Saddam fell," an American official said. A primordial soup of
political parties, their militias and tribes filled the void. They formed morals patrols at the university, commanded entire
units of the flimsy police force, and moved into positions of power in the company that controls the vast
oil-processing and transportation network.
Now, with provincial elections still
many months away, a bloody power grab has ensued. It is a battle being waged from inside Basra’s institutions and will be particularly difficult for
the prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, to stop. Indeed, three days after he vowed to crack
down with an "iron fist" and imposed a state of emergency, a bomb
killed 27 in a market here.
In the shadowy world of Shiite politics,
the fight is over power. One
party, Fadhila, is currently on top. Its members include the governor and the chairman of the Provincial
Council. Fadhila has close ties to Moktada al-Sadr, the anti-American
cleric whose grass-roots militia is among the most powerful here.
Aqeel Talib, a senior member of the
party, argues that a disagreement
over federalism is one of the issues dividing the parties.
– The party and its two main competitors — the Supreme
Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Dawa Party — all had different
visions for a southern Shiite region.
– In Fadhila’s model, Basra Province,
the only one it controls, would stand on its own.
"We as Fadhila, we want to make our province our own region," Mr.
Talib said. "We have two
million people, an airport, a port and oil — everything we need to be a
state."
Qadim al-Muqdadi, a professor in Baghdad University’s media college, explained:
"Each political party believes he is better than the other at running the
country. They don’t rely on the power of thought; they rely on the power of the
gun and the tribe."
– At the heart of much of the fighting is oil. The fields in this province are the richest in Iraq, and the crude oil they pump makes up all
of Iraq’s
current exports, which in turn pay civil servants’ salaries. Officials
in Baghdad say
the parties and their militias play a major role in rampant theft.
"If you don’t understand what’s
happening there, follow the dollar sign," said Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the
national security adviser.
– "There is a
6,000-barrel-per-day difference between the level of production for export and
the level of actual export. It goes into the pockets of these warlords, militias,
organized crime, political parties."
– Fadhila, the dominant
political party, controls the guard force that protects the vast network run by
the state-owned Southern Oil Company.
Fadhila says it has helped keep the oil
flowing in hard times; its political opponents argue that it is perfectly
positioned to profit. A senior party official in Baghdad denies any profiteering.
The guards "have weapons,"
said Hassan al-Rashid, the former governor and an opponent of Fadhila, and
"these weapons are not in honest hands."
Few in Basra
would agree to speak openly about oil, and the industry has been impenetrable to Western officials in Basra, who said they could
not even identify the major players.
"It’s not just one party, so everyone keeps silent,"
said a provincial council member, who asked for anonymity out of concern for
his safety. "If you tell about me, I tell about you."
Whatever the case, violence has spilled
into the industry. From May 5 to May 9,
two oil company officials and a harbor official were killed, according to the
police reports. In early March a bomb exploded in the office of Aqil Abdel
Samad, a senior oil company official, wounding him.
"The violence we’re seeing on the
street, it is a big turf war," said a Western official, who asked not to
be identified because he was not authorized to speak with the media.
– Basra’s police have been
unable to separate the warring parties or stop graft because the force, stacked
with men who are affiliated with the parties, is part of the problem.
The city’s current chaos, in fact, can be traced in part to the formation
of the new police force. British military officers
acknowledge that the early background checks, which they oversaw, were poor to
nonexistent, and the major political parties took the opportunity to pack their
people onto the force. A
weak-willed police chief allowed himself to be bullied into accepting party
loyalists, the current chief said.
"The parties embarrassed him,"
said the chief, Maj. Gen. Hassan Swadi al-Saad. "Everyone came to him with names and he employed
them."
– One result is a
force that has 37,000 members, 50 percent more than authorized, spread across the four provinces
patrolled by the British in southeast Iraq, according to Col.
Sundey Sunderland, who is in charge of logistics planning for the British
military. (Also, the Facilities Protection Service, which guards schools, oil
rigs and mosques and has been heavily infiltrated by militias, numbers 25,000.)
There have been skirmishes among corrupt police units, particularly those dealing with major crimes, internal affairs and
criminal investigations.
Some of those forces captured and held
two British officers last fall, and the British military has begun to purge
them. "They were assassins going around killing people," said Laszlo
Szomoru, a British senior police adviser in Basra.
The police reports are illustrative. On
May 22, officers from the intelligence unit, one of the more heavily political
divisions, raided a Southern Oil Company building, and on April 25, two guards
from the oil protection force were charged with breaking into an auto store,
killing a guard there, and stealing two cars.
– The police have also
apparently done nothing in the face of sectarian killings of Sunni Arabs, whose
portion of the population has shrunk rapidly over the past year. Some Sunnis
suspect the police of carrying out most of the killings.
The parties’ power inside the police
complicates law enforcement for the British. In January, for example, they
identified several men suspected of running death squads, siphoning oil and
shooting at British soldiers. Soldiers arrested them, and for the next three
months, the local government refused to speak to the British.
"You arrest someone, and the next
day you’re on the phone to the governor, to the chief of police," said
Brigadier Everard. "We say, ‘We know he’s yours, but we did it for the
following reason.’ "
The province has also sunk into political paralysis as the governor,
Muhammad al-Waeli, tried but failed to fire General Saad, the police chief. The
provincial council has tried, also unsuccessfully, to remove Mr. Waeli, but has
not been able to garner the two-thirds majority it needs. The only thing they could all agree on, it seemed, was to refuse
all contact with the British.
Baghdad is also powerless to
remove provincial officials, who are protected from the central government
under Iraqi law.
Basra’s troubles would be fewer were it
not for the influence of neighboring countries, particularly Iran.
Although the British military is
skeptical, General Saad says many of the parties derive their strength from Iran.
The parties themselves accuse one another of being Iranian stooges.
"Every day I have reports of 190 pilgrims coming from Iran,"
he said. "Are they pilgrims or are they intelligence officers?"
Illegal crossings appear to be common.
On Feb. 1, the Basra
border police arrested 23 Iranians who said they were pilgrims crossing
illegally at Chlat, according to a police report. Just five days later, they
arrested a man whom they identified as Hadi Dalqi Bukhtyar, a colonel in the
Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Weapons that have not been seen since the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980’s
abound, and local police officials say they believe many are coming from Iran.
The police noted finds of 106 Russian-made Katyusha rockets and 35 antitank
missiles, also Russian, over five months beginning in
January.
"Most people here are asking
themselves, is this Basra?"
Professor Hassan said helplessly.
James Glanz contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article, and an Iraqi employee of The New
York Times from Basra.
New York Times