The Puzzle of Sunnis' Leadership Vacuum
BAGHDAD — Iraq's Sunni Muslim Arabs don't lack leadership qualities. They once filled the upper ranks of Saddam Hussein's officer corps and government ministries, and now some of them are running an increasingly sophisticated insurgency.
But in the search for prominent politicians who can unite the fractious minority and secure its members' place in rebuilding a nation, the pickings are slim.
"No one represents the Sunnis," said Talat Wazan, the head of the Mosul-based Iraqi National Union Party, a Sunni Arab group. "Many of these people act like they are talking on behalf of the Sunni people and are a hero to them. But let me tell you that the Sunni people are divided into many branches and subgroups, so nobody can say that [they] can represent them."
As the country's politicians craft a constitution that will lay the groundwork for Iraq's future, most Sunnis appear to have no unifying leadership or cause, other than resistance to the U.S. presence and anger at a government led by Shiite Muslims and ethnic Kurds.
Some Sunnis deny they are a minority, and even endorse goals such as a return to dominance -- something neither Shiites nor Kurds nor their American patrons would accept.
"There are some voices who say that Sunni Arabs are a minority," Adnan Dulaimi, head of the Sunni Waqf, or religious endowment, said to a crowd of Sunnis gathered for a political conference Monday in Baghdad. "We want to prove to them that we are not a minority. We are the sons of the country. We are responsible for the history of Iraq."
Iraq's other major communities can point to strong authority figures: Shiites have Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who has led the long-repressed majority down the road to democratic power. And Kurds have two authoritarian leaders whose political organizations have run a quasiindependent state in the north since 1991.
But Sunni Arabs have no one legitimate to speak for them in sight, and the vacuum continues to hamper efforts to defuse the armed rebellion.
Hussein was "their only leader," said Ali Dabagh, an important member of the Shiite coalition that triumphed in the Jan. 30 elections. That comment has become a common refrain among Iraq's political players. "Now that he's gone, they have no one else."
