Tribal Councils, what are they good for?

Posted on July 1, 2008 by Sappho

Why the name “Tribal Coun­cil” in this report sounds famil­iar to my ears when I was in Iraq?

Yes…that was Ali Has­san al-Majid’s idea in 2003 before the inva­sion, and before that the name was “The Iraqi National League of Tribal Chiefs”, and the one before that was “The Tribal National Coun­cil”, led by Hus­sein Shaalan, as far as I can remember.

So, why Maliki uses old Saddam’s tac­tics, form­ing “Tribal Sup­port Coun­cil” [and “Awak­en­ing Coun­cils], while few months ago, Maliki and his gov­ern­ment rejected the idea in the Shi­ite major­ity South Iraq?

Accord­ing Al-Zubaidi:

Maliki and his party lost their pub­lic sup­port, after Maliki’s mil­i­tary cam­paigns, in Basra, Mosul and Baghdad.

Maliki emerged from these cam­paigns empty-handed, while Al-Hakim’s “Supreme Islamic Coun­cil” is the biggest win­ner [by elim­i­nat­ing their rivals the Sadrists].

Form­ing the “Tribal coun­cils, is Maliki’s last card to retain his pop­u­lar­ity in the Iraqi street and among the Americans.

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5 Responses to Tribal Councils, what are they good for?

  1. Pingback: missing links: What's up with Maliki's latest tribal-council proposal

  2. NDHF Net says:
    July 2, 2008 at 14:47

    §1. On sun­day, there was a “tribal” meet­ing of Al-Maliki with the tribal chiefs and nota­bles of al-Jubur clans

    http://www.aswataliraq.info/look/english/article.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=4&NrArticle=84012&NrIssue=2&NrSection=1&search1=search

    Maliki’s office state­ment quoted the al-Jubur chief­tains as express­ing “sup­port for the government’s efforts to real­ize secu­rity, sta­bil­ity and wel­fare all over Iraq and to apply the law and main­tain the state’s power and national reconciliation”.

    It seems that such ideas dis­ap­pointed some­body, since

    §2. On thus­day there was a car bomb explo­sion tar­get­ing the house of tribal chief­tain Abdel Razaq al-Wakaa in al-Kayara dis­trict, 60 km south of Mosul.

    Al-Wakaa, the tribal chief­tain of Jouburi tribe, a mixed Sunni-Shiite Arab tribe extend­ing over most Iraqi provinces, and his wife were wounded in the blast

    http://www.aswataliraq.info/look/english/article.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=4&NrArticle=84258&NrIssue=2&NrSection=1

    NDHF Net
    27.U.N.J.B.
    United Nations (Finland)

  3. LadyBird says:
    July 2, 2008 at 21:05

    NDHF

    Thank you for the links, it is good to see here again

  4. NDHF Net says:
    July 3, 2008 at 12:59

    Thanks, no prob­lem with the absense, the NDHF build-up’s been the pri­or­ity: we antic­i­pated that the Google Corporation’s next move — tak­ing place now — would be to fil­ter all the head­lines of the inde­pen­dent media, so the NDHF Net site is designed so that this won’t work against us: all our head­lines are and will avail­able directly on the desk­top (in addi­tion to this, fur­ther desk­tops with links will be pro­vided in our Open Source Cen­ter). As with Finnish and Iraqi lib­er­a­tion war cov­er­ages, and all kinds of stuff, everyone’s been rather busy here in Fin­land, so sorry for not pop­ping in ;)

    As some­what related to that: we’re scout­ing out the width and depth of the Iraq war phony media cov­er­age and related to that would take inter­est whether the Roads to Iraq (with RSS) has requested Google News index­ing for the RtoI headlines.

    You do not need to reply to this, of course, or can do it pri­vately, if pre­fer­ring that. Part of fix­ing the front­line related to a NDHF arti­cle: http://newsdeskhelsinkifinland.net/news/549/oscs_corporate_media_and_google_news_murderers_murderers_murderers___/

    NDHF Net
    27.U.N.J.B.
    United Nations (Fin­land)
    http://newsdeskhelsinkifinland.net

  5. NDHF Net says:
    July 3, 2008 at 17:04

    There are big prob­lems among the friendly sites in the cyberspace:

    §1. Iraqi cov­er­age sites — or those near by, at least NDHF Net & pos­si­bly Roads to Iraq (?) — such as HEYET Net, Voices of Iraq and Islamic Army in Iraq site do not get Google News index­ing for their head­lines. One can­not under­line the mean­ing of pri­mary sources here (thus the new NDHF Net “edi­to­r­ial pol­icy” ;)
    §2. Uruknet’s cut off from the Google index­ing for the head­lines & its arti­cles are becom­ing fil­tered and thus wiped off by the Google “News” Team.
    §3. Iraq-war.ru’s down for the sec­ond day straight (or up with out­dated cov­er­age) with much con­fu­sion among the vis­i­tors already present there
    §4. Many seem­ingly anti-war sites do not pub­lish any­thing that might endan­ger their Google index­ing as well…
    §5. Among the cor­po­rate media there is an all-out media black-out to cover the most recent dep­tions on the ground in Iraq.

    Instead they’re rerolling the phony “Iran war” cov­er­age to hide the oil loot scam…

    NDHF Net
    27.U.N.J.B.
    United Nations (Fin­land)
    http://newsdeskhelsinkifinland.net

    p.s. Among other the NDHF Net pro­vides an all-volunteer mir­ror­ing site ser­vice to HEYET Net so that now that HEYET Net’s under renewa­tion you’ll find the cov­er­age on NDHF Net http://newsdeskhelsinkifinland