Baghdad mayor sacked by armed Shiites

Elected city council chief leads ouster as storm swirls outside municipal building

James Glanz, New York Times


(08-10) 04:00 PST Baghdad -- Armed men entered Baghdad's municipal building during a blinding dust storm Monday, deposed the city's mayor and installed in his place a member of Iraq's most powerful Shiite militia.
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The deposed mayor, Alaa al-Tamimi, who was not in his office at the time, recounted the events in a telephone interview Tuesday and called the move a municipal coup d'etat. He added that he had gone into hiding for fear of his life.

"This is the new Iraq," said al-Tamimi, a secular engineer with no party affiliation. "They use force to achieve their goal."

The group that ousted him insisted that it had the authority to assume control of Iraq's capital city and that al-Tamimi was in no danger. The man the group installed, Hussein al-Tahaan, is a member of the Badr Organization, the armed militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, known as SCIRI.

The militia has been credited with keeping the peace in heavily Shiite areas in southern Iraq, but it also is accused of abuses such as forcing secular women to wear the hair coverings demanded by conservative Shiite religious law.

"If we wanted to do something bad to him, we would have done that," said Mazin Makkia, the elected city council chief who led the ouster Monday and who had been in a lengthy and unresolved legal feud with al-Tamimi.

"We really want to establish the state of law for every citizen, and we did not threaten anyone," Makkia said. "This is not a coup."

Makkia confirmed that he had entered the building with armed men, but he said that they were bodyguards for him and several other council members who accompanied him. Witnesses estimated that the number of armed men ranged from 50 to 120. Makkia is a member of a Shiite political party that swept to victory during the across-the-board Shiite successes during January's elections.

Al-Tamimi, the deposed mayor, was appointed by the central government and held ministerial rank. He was originally put in place by Paul Bremer, the top American administrator in the country until an Iraqi government took over in June 2004.

Baghdad is the only city in Iraq that is its own province, and the city council had previously appointed al-Tahaan as governor of Baghdad province, with some responsibilities parallel to al-Tamimi's. But the mayor's office was clearly the more powerful post.

Makkia provided a phone number for al-Tahaan, but the phone did not appear to be turned on. A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad said that he was aware of the developments but that he had no immediate comment.

When asked whether Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a politician with another Shiite Islamic party, Dawa, was concerned about developments at the municipality, a spokesman, Laith Kubba, said, "My guess is, yes, he is."

Weeks ago, al-Tamimi had offered to resign or retire, saying that the budget he had been given was not adequate. For a city of 6 million people, the central government had given him a budget of $85 million; he had requested $1 billion.

"It's more or less a fait accompli that he's not going back to office," Kubba said. He added that al-Tahaan would be considered an interim mayor until the prime minister settled on someone to take the post permanently.

Leaders of the country's major political parties, meanwhile, resumed a summit meeting to break the deadlock over Iraq's new constitution, which was delayed by the same sandstorm Monday.

The deadline for the constitution is next Monday, and the parties have so far failed to resolve several crucial issues -- including the role of Islam in the government, the future of the ethnically mixed and oil-rich city of Kirkuk and the scope of self-rule for regions outside Iraqi Kurdistan.

After the meeting, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said discussion focused mainly on the issue of autonomy and the distribution of oil revenues. He expressed confidence that the group would complete the constitution on time, but added, "As the English people would say, the devil is in the details."