British occupation forces here tried to put a new local governing council in place on Sunday, but residents who were angry that it was handpicked by the British poured into Basra's streets by the thousands in protest.
"We can manage ourselves, by ourselves," read one of the banners carried by demonstrators.
PHOTO:AP
To prepare for the unveiling of the new government, British forces refurbished a building and turned it into Basra's city hall. They drew up an elaborate flowchart.
And they had sent out invitations to two dozen men who they decided had the wherewithal to help restore the city's power grid, its pumping stations and its other infrastructure.
But governing Iraq's second-largest city has proved as much a challenge as seizing it was, and the process has become embroiled in how much control religious leaders of the country's Shiite Muslim majority will assume.
The same soldiers who fought their way into the city and worked for weeks to suppress former president Saddam Hussein's loyalists hidden in the population are now struggling to devise a governmental structure that will stick.
"It's like trying to nail jelly to the wall," one official said. "If you want military precision on this, you ain't going to get it."
Basra, a city of 1.3 million people, is nowhere near as chaotic as Baghdad, and expectations were that Basra would serve as a model for how to rebuild a metropolis in the new Iraq. British soldiers here say they have not been fired upon like their US counterparts farther north, and that they have been able to devote more attention to getting the area back on its feet.
Still, ruling Basra has proved vexing. The new body that the military attempted to put into operation on Sunday was supposed to have replaced an interim council set up after the war and then disbanded because it was found to include people with ties to Hussein's Baath Party.
Officials also said that every time they completed some improvement for the city's infrastructure, looters managed to chip away at the progress.
The new council was to be headed not by an Iraqi but by Brigadier Adrian Bradshaw, who commands the 7th Armored Division, which is in charge of Basra. Ole Wohlers Olsen, a Danish diplomat who is the Basra representative for the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, a Pentagon division, was to play a major role as well.
The Iraqi participants were to be technocrats selected by the military: a water specialist, an engineer with the power company, a health official, a banker and the like.
The body was supposed to shield itself from politics and focus instead on the area's many woes.
But at the opening meeting on Sunday, the carefully laid plans began to fall apart. Several thousand protesters denounced the new setup as antidemocratic.
They were not assuaged by the military's creation of a separate civic forum to allow those interested in local issues to hold discussions without any decision-making authority.
When British military police tried to block the demonstration from approaching city hall, the protesters would have none of it. "This is an Iraqi road," one said. "We want to use it."
The military, eager to be flexible, allowed the demonstrators to march on.
The British also decided to select an Iraqi to serve as co-chairman of the body alongside Bradshaw. A chair was left open for that person at the meeting Sunday.
But no Iraqi chose to fill it. The two Shiite sheiks who led the protest, Ahmed al-Maliky and Khazal al-Saedy, were invited into the meeting. But they convinced the other Iraqis at the table that the British should not be selecting Iraqi representatives.
Eventually, the Iraqis walked out and said they would reconvene the meeting only after they had the backing of other Iraqis.
Despite attempts by Bradshaw to proceed with the agenda, which dealt with topics such as getting the city's power grid running, the group did not get very far before it broke up.
"This process is unpredictable and uneven, and sometimes we're finding that we take one step forward and two steps back," acknowledged Ronnie McCourt, a spokesman for the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance.
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
A US YouTuber who caused outrage for filming himself kissing a statue commemorating Korean wartime sex slaves has been sentenced to six months in prison, a court in Seoul said yesterday. Johnny Somali, 25, gained notoriety several years ago for recording himself doing a series of provocative stunts in South Korea and Japan, and streaming them on platforms such as YouTube and Twitch. South Korean authorities indicted Somali — whose real name is Ramsey Khalid Ismael — in 2024 on public order violations and obstruction of business, and banned him from leaving the country. “The court has sentenced him to six months in
The death toll from a shooting in western Afghanistan rose to 11 on Saturday, after gunmen targeted civilians at a picnic spot in Herat, the provincial authority said. Bullet marks were visible on a wall of the Sayed Mohammad Agha Shia shrine, while bloodstains marked a blanket abandoned at the scene. “Eleven people have been recorded dead and eight others wounded from Friday’s incident, with the condition of two of the wounded reported as critical,” Herat’s information office said in a statement. The update raises a toll of seven killed provided on Friday by the Afghan Ministry of Interior Affairs
RSS