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Baghdad: Standing beside Tony Blair this week Iraq's new prime minister, Nouri Al Maliki, looked every bit the westernised politician wearing a suit and tie and with no sign of a beard. Despite his outward appearance, Al Maliki has never denied that his beliefs are those of a strict Islamist who has strong suspicions about the West and its motives. Deeply religious, he is a follower of the spiritual adviser to the radical Lebanese group Hezbollah, Mohammad Hussain Fadlallah. This did not look like a man who would be able to perform the compromises needed to reunite a country being ripped apart by its spiralling sectarian, religious and ethnic tensions.
Yet there were also positive reasons for Al Maliki's selection, and it is these that hopefully will justify the note of optimism Blair struck yesterday. Born in 1950 in Hindiya, a small town south of Karbala, Al Maliki has been a life-long Arab nationalist. A member of the small opposition Da'wa party, he fled Iraq in 1980 after he was sentenced to death. Although he first went into exile in Iran, he soon moved to Syria after clashing with the regime in Tehran over his refusal to support them in the Iran-Iraq war. It is a snub that Iran has not forgiven. His selection by the Shiites was therefore a gesture of independence, which primarily explains why Sunni groups have acquiesced to his appointment. Though a committed federalist, he wants to keep the country unified and to do this he will need the help of the majority of Sunnis, ensuring that he has to listen to their concerns. The question now is whether his force of character can prove strong enough to stop the sectarian squabbling of the political classes in order actually to implement them.
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