Source:
New York TimesDHULUIYA, Iraq — Iraqi politics has a new catchphrase, the “yes, we can” of the country’s coming parliamentary elections. It is “national unity,” and while skepticism abounds, it could well signal the decline of the religious and sectarian parties that have fractured Iraq since 2003.
“I do believe that there is genuine opportunity for restoring our coexistence, our historical coexistence,” said Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, who broke with the main Sunni party, the Iraqi Islamic Party, this year. “I mean, in the past, we used to live together here. What we need, in fact, is real and genuine reconciliation.”
Provincial elections last January showed diminishing popular support for religious or purely sectarian parties. Mr. Maliki’s coalition, known as State of Law, had the strongest showing after playing down the religious roots of his own Shiite party, Dawa, and promising security, rule of law and a nationalistic government representative of all parts of the country.
“The provincial elections have shown that the Iraqi public is fed up with religiously garbed parties, so these parties are now scrambling to profile themselves as secular and nonsectarian,” said Joost Hiltermann of the International Crisis Group, who met with several party leaders while in Baghdad this week. “But does the leopard change its spots?”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/01/world/middleeast/01unity.html?_r=1&ref=global-home
It won't be easy, but for their sake, I wish the Iraqi people well in rebuilding a society decimated by war.
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