Iraqi Shiites urging partition

BAGHDAD, Iraq – They have a new constitution, a new government and a new military. But faced with incessant sectarian bloodshed, Iraqis for the first time have begun openly discussing whether the only way to stop the violence is to remake the country they have just built.

Leaders of Iraq’s powerful Shiite Muslim political bloc have begun aggressively promoting a radical plan to partition the country as a way of separating the warring sects. Some Iraqis are even talking about dividing the capital, with the Tigris River as a kind of Berlin Wall.

Shiites have long advocated some sort of autonomy in the south on par with the Kurds’ 15-year-old enclave in the north, with its own defense forces and control over oil exploration. And the new constitution does allow provinces to team up into federal regions. But the latest effort, promulgated by Cabinet ministers, clerics and columnists, marks the first time they’ve advocated regional partition as a way of stemming violence.

“Federalism will cut off all parts of the country that are incubating terrorism from those that are upgrading and improving,” said Khudair Khuzaie, the Shiite education minister. “We will do it just like Kurdistan. We will put soldiers along the frontiers.”

The growing clamor for partition illustrates how dire Iraq’s security, economic and political problems have come to seem to many Iraqis: Until recently, Iraqis shunned the idea of redrawing the 8 1/2-decade-old map of Iraq as seditious.

Some of the advocates of partitioning the country are circumspect, arguing that federalism is only one of the tools under consideration for reducing violence.

But others push a plan by Abdel Aziz Hakim, head of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a political party. Hakim advocates the creation of a nine-province district in the largely peaceful south, with 60 percent of the country’s proven oil reserves.

Sunni leaders see nothing but greed in the new push – the Shiites, they say, are taking advantage of the escalating violence to make an oil grab.

Iraq’s oil is concentrated in the north and south, with much of the Sunni west and northwest desolate desert tundra, devoid of oil and gas.

“Controlling these areas will create a grand fortune that they can exploit,” said Adnan Dulaymi, a leading Sunni Arab politician. “Their motive is that they are thirsty for control and power.”

Still, even nationalists who favor a united Iraq acknowledge that sectarian warfare has gotten so out of hand that even the possibility of splitting the capital along the Tigris, which roughly divides the city between a mostly Shiite east and a mostly Sunni west, is being openly discussed.

“Sunnis and Shiites are both starting to feel that dividing Baghdad will be the solution,” said Ammar Wajuih, a Sunni politician.

Critics scoff at the idea that any geographical partitioning of Sunni and Shiites will make the country any safer than it is now. In fact, some observers warn that cutting up the country’s Arab provinces into separate religious cantons would be as cataclysmic as the partition of Pakistan and India in 1947.

Although growing numbers of Iraqis acknowledge that their country is in the throes of an undeclared civil war, a partition would “actually lead to increasing violence and sectarian displacement,” said Hussein Athab, a political scientist and former lawmaker in Basra.

Critics of partitioning note that rival Shiite militias with ties to political parties in government not only appear to be responsible for as much of Iraq’s violence as Sunni insurgents, but have been known to turn their guns on each other.

“They’re always talking about reconciliation and rejecting violence, but in truth they’re not serious,” Wajuih said. “Whenever there is a security escalation or violence, they bring the issue of federalism up again.”

One Western diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity, suggested that the Shiites were using the prospect of a southern mini-state to gain other political concessions from Sunnis, “a threat that they wouldn’t want to have to exercise” because tearing the country asunder would be so traumatic.

A U.S. Embassy spokesperson declined to comment publicly on an issue so volatile. But U.S. policymakers have also begun to warm to the idea. Sen. Joseph Biden, of Delaware, one of the Democratic Party’s leading voices on foreign policy, began openly advocating such a move this year.

“I think it’s the only way out,” says Ivan Eland, a former Congressional Foreign Affairs Committee staffer who is now an analyst at the Independent Institute, an Oakland, Calif., think tank. “Iraq is already partitioned. Kurds don’t want to be part of it. And any central government controlled by one group, the other groups are going to be afraid of being oppressed by it.”