Local Iraqi councils struggle for relevance

On a bright afternoon in Baghdad's brief spring, all looks well for the Hay Somer neighborhood council. Four local soccer clubs have gathered at the playground of the freshly painted school that doubles as the council's home to receive free uniforms bought by the council and paid for by the US military.

The street out front is immaculate - a rarity for a city where many basic services have yet to be restored - and there are cheers for the guest of honor, former national soccer coach Imman- uel Baba Dano, an Assyrian Christian who's a particular hero in this neighborhood, which is about half Christian.

But the peace and progress on the surface in Somer, one of the Baghdad neighborhoods most comfortable with US occupation and home to one of Iraq's most successful local councils, conceal big problems for the grass-roots institutions that US officials had hoped would be the building blocks for an unprecedented democratic culture inside Iraq.

A second look at two Iraqi councils the Monitor first wrote about at the end of January - Somer and a second council in the poorer Baghdad neighborhood of Sheikh Maruf - finds them, if anything, struggling for legitimacy against the tide of violence and political instability that has been sweeping Iraq.

"We're trying to do everything we can,'' says Abdel Rahim, the energetic and bald-pated former Iraqi army colonel who is one of the driving forces on the Somer council. "But we have limited funds and almost no formal authority. And there's been no progress on security.

Without security, we have nothing."

The councils were originally envisioned by the US as democratic training wheels, a first taste of political participation for ordinary Iraqis. Under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, speaking up about even seemingly innocuous neighborhood matters like schooling was dangerous, and citizens were conditioned to accept passively whatever the regime offered, for good or ill.

When they started, US soldiers led the meetings, and council members seemed uncertain of their roles. But over time, the councils have been encouraged to get involved in decisions that affect their lives - be they building health clinics, providing subsidized cooking fuel or setting up US-style neighborhood watches against crime - and some progress has been made. Councilors across Iraq have taken more initiative while their US facilitators have grown more passive by design.

But in recent months, the pendulum has swung back toward more active US involvement, driven by the growing dangers of political organization inside Iraq.

Councilors across the country have been assassinated. An official at the Baghdad City Council says 52 neighborhood and district councilors have been killed since the middle of last year - among them Mohammed Munther, a Sheikh Maruf councilor who was gunned down outside his small shop in mid-February. The uprising led by Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's militia, which began at the start of April, caused many neighborhood councils in Baghdad to briefly suspend operations.

Somer's council worked through most of it, though its home was covered in insulting graffiti by Sadr militiamen and the police station narrowly escaped an attack in April, when a rocket-propelled grenade misfired, killing the attacker.

The Tissa Nissan district council, which represents Somer, was closed for most of April after its building was hit by an RPG. Even when not touched by violence, neighborhood councilors have continued to struggle for power in a system that has left them with only an advisory role.

Successful councils like Somer's get things done because of the muscle the US military gives to their requests, not because of any authority of their own.

By now, the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and the Research Triangle Institute of Durham, N.C., which has a contract worth up to $460 million to help build "local governance," including the local councils, had hoped the councils would be getting things done on their own.

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