KRT/SMH,
They marched by the tens of thousands for hours and hours, waving banners, shouting slogans and proudly carrying photographs of the man they called their inspiration – Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
“All the people are with you, Sayyed Ali,” demonstrators chanted yesterday as part of the rapidly growing movement to reject the US plan to turn over its control to Iraqis on July 1 without direct elections.
The march, stretching for kilometres through crowded Baghdad streets, was the largest demonstration by backers of the 73-year-old religious leader who says the only way to ensure democracy after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime is for Iraqis to promptly elect their own leaders.
The United States and its hand-picked Iraqi Governing Council disagree, saying the situation in Iraq is too chaotic and that there's no system in place to carry out an election.
Several Governing Council members and Paul Bremer, the US administrator in Iraq, met yesterday with UN officials in New York, seeking UN help in convincing al-Sistani and others that direct elections cannot be held any time soon.
Afterward, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he would consider whether to send a team to Iraq to assess the feasibility of early elections.
“I don't believe there may be enough time between now and May to hold elections, but the team will go down and look into that further and then report to me,” he said at a UN news conference yesterday.
Under a complex plan that the United States developed to meet Iraqis' demands for an end to the occupation, a series of caucus-like elections is slated to choose an interim authority that will rule until full elections are held in 2005.
The United States intends to hand over control to the Iraqis by July 1.
But resistance to the US plan has been stoked higher almost daily by Shi'ite clerics and politicians, who say they are speaking on behalf of the reclusive religious leader.
The rally overshadowed the arrival of the first contingent of Japanese forces in Iraq. The 30-person engineering unit crossed from Kuwait to a Dutch military camp about 225km south of Baghdad.
In a controversial decision, Japan's leaders decided to send up to 1,000 soldiers to serve in rescue and humanitarian roles. They are due to be fully deployed by March.
Japan's involvement is a victory for Washington's effort to show that major allies, and not just smaller nations, are taking part in rebuilding Iraq.
Even the lingering violence took a temporary backseat yesterday for many to the fact Sistani has become the most important political player in Iraq.
“Al-Sistani has become chairman of the governing council,” recently said Barham Salih, prime minister of the part of northern Iraq ruled by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. “He's the unelected authority.”
Al-Sistani, a revered Iranian-born Islamic scholar, spent years under house arrest in Najaf in southern Iraq during Saddam Hussein's regime.
He reportedly has not left his house since the regime's fall, and does not meet with the news media.
Through his speeches or spokesmen, the frail, white-haired cleric has not spelled out what kind of government he would like to see in Iraq, except that the nation's leaders must be chosen by Iraqis – “not those who came from abroad”.
