'Disillusioned' peacemaker quits Iraq mission

Arab diplomat Mokhtar Lamani has resigned, disillusioned and nearly drained of hope, after spending months in Iraq trying to coax Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish leaders into peace.

“I am no longer going to stand and watch Iraqis’ bodies being taken to the cemetery,” he said, after arriving in Cairo from Baghdad last week to tender his resignation.

The 54-year-old Moroccan’s mission was the Arab world’s main communal effort to try to help solve the turmoil in what was once one of its most powerful members - a response to criticism from Iraq and the US that Arabs were not doing enough.

But it was a failure, and Lamani blames feeble support from Arab countries, US policies and the unwillingness of Iraq’s deeply divided leaders.

“The help that (Iraq) should get was out of my hands,” Lamani said recently during an interview at a Cairo hotel. “I have no desire to lie to myself or to Iraqis” – confessing that he had “nothing to give.”

From the start of his eight months in Baghdad, Lamani struck a different approach. He chose not to live in the city’s heavily protected Green Zone - where the US and British embassies are and where many diplomats stay.

He said he wanted to have “contact with all levels of Iraqis.”

Distancing himself from the Green Zone also would boost his credibility with Sunnis, who view the district as a symbol of American domination of Iraq.

But it meant he was in constant danger. With no security team for the villa where he lived and worked, he depended on Kurdish guards assigned to protect the Foreign Ministry next door. He moved in an unarmed car – “many were calling me suicidal for that,” he said – until the Arab League provided an armoured one seven months into his mission.

He would hear mortar shells exploding at the nearby Alawi bus station – a frequent target of militants – and, when Haifa Street became a battlefield last month, he went up to his roof to watch the US and Iraqi troops fighting insurgents.

Throughout, Lamani was working on the main goal of his mission, which was little noticed in the West: to convene a national reconciliation conference between Iraq’s fractious parties and sectarian groups, a favoured project of the league’s secretary general, Amr Moussa.

The conference was first scheduled to be held in June, the month that Lamani arrived in Baghdad. Then it was moved to August. Then indefinitely as, with the violence escalating, the factions could not agree on who should be invited, since Shiites opposed any Sunni groups with links to the insurgency.

Lamani – who worked previously for the United Nations in Afghanistan and Africa - met repeatedly with all of Iraq’s main leaders. He conferred with the senior Shiite leaders, such as Abdulaziz al-Hakim and Muqtada al-Sadr – and travelled to the holy city of Najaf for talks with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s top Shiite cleric. He went to the northern city of Irbil to meet Kurdish leaders.

He wanted to go to Anbar province, the Sunni Arab heartland and a main stronghold of the insurgency. But he was told it was too dangerous, so Sunni political and religious leaders came to Baghdad for talks. He met with members of Saddam Hussein’s ousted Baath Party and even representatives of some Sunni insurgents, hoping to persuade them to compromise.

But the attempts for a conference “were all nonsense,” he said, though he said leaders from all sides warmly welcomed him. The average Iraqi “does not need conferences, producing polite and beautiful, political or religious statements ... that, regrettably, would have no impact on their daily security and personal life,” he said.

Iraq lacks a key requisite for reconciliation – trust, he said. In his meetings with Iraqi officials, it was painful to “hear what each Iraqi faction wants to take from Iraq. I never heard them talk about what they have to give Iraq,” said Lamani.

In his resignation letter he wrote: “I did my best to communicate with all the Iraqi parties and to develop sincere and good relations. ... My only problem was their own relations with each other, their strong feeling that each is a victim of the other.”

He first tried to resign in September but then retracted it in hopes there was a chance of the sides reconciling.

Lamani said he ultimately blames the US for Iraq’s deterioration.

“Its (the US) ways of dealing with the Iraqi problems, including the Iranian intervention, are not right. ... They need to change their policy in an urgent way,” he said.

Lamani also faulted the 22 nations of the Arab League for failing to give Iraq “the necessary priority or seriousness.” Arab governments were so detached from Iraq it was “as if it were on the moon”.

Arab nations have stumbled over how to deal with Iraq. For much of the time since the April 2003 fall of Saddam, they shunned any involvement, not wanting to imply approval of the US-led invasion. Lamani’s mission was an attempt to overcome the image they were doing nothing.

Now as Iraq’s sectarian violence has deepened, mainly Sunni nations like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have grown increasingly concerned over killings of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs by Shiite militias and over the influence of their regional rival, mainly Shiite Iran.

Lamani says he hopes his resignation would be a wake-up call for Arab governments.

If Iraq falls into outright civil war: “it will burn down everything and not only in Iraq. God alone knows how far it will go,” he said. “This is the time to take an effective position, otherwise we ... will all be burnt and it will be too late.”