- BAGHDAD -- He once gave medical
advice to Saddam Hussein. Later he was a coup plotter and secret ally of
the CIA and MI6. After surviving a mysterious assassination attempt, he
set up an organization of Iraqi military defectors for shadowy backroom
games in Washington and London.
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- And now, 33 years after leaving Iraq, the barrel-chested
neurologist and businessman Iyad Allawi has emerged as Iraq's most powerful
leader.
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- At a meeting yesterday at a secret location, the Governing
Council gave its unanimous support to Mr. Allawi as prime minister in the
first sovereign government to take control of Iraq after the U.S. handover
on June 30. A senior U.S. official later confirmed that Mr. Allawi will
be prime minister.
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- A spokesman for UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, who is in charge
of appointing the new government, said the envoy "welcomes and respects"
the nomination of Mr. Allawi and will be working with him to choose the
rest of his government.
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- Mr. Brahimi is expected to make the formal announcement
in the next few days. He must also choose candidates for other key posts,
including a symbolic president, two vice-presidents and a 26-member cabinet.
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- It will be a complex balancing act among secular and
religious leaders, including representatives of the Shia, Sunni and Kurdish
communities and the major political parties.
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- Mr. Allawi, a 58-year-old Shia Muslim, will be a controversial
choice for the prime minister's job. The original UN plan was to appoint
an interim government of neutral "technocrats" who would shepherd
the country until national elections in January. But instead it appears
that the new government will be headed by a veteran politician who has
been one of the most powerful members of the current governing council.
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- Mr. Allawi has also been an outspoken advocate of the
idea that former members of the long-ruling Baath Party, such as himself,
should not be excluded from senior government posts in the new Iraq.
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- He is the head of the Iraqi National Accord, a political
party dominated by exiled military figures who defected from the Saddam
Hussein regime. The INA was a long-time rival to another Shia exile group,
the Iraqi National Congress, headed by Ahmad Chalabi, a distant relative
of Mr. Allawi.
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- While the Pentagon favoured the more flamboyant Mr. Chalabi,
the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department preferred Mr.
Allawi. Last week, when Iraqi police raided the office of Mr. Chalabi and
his Pentagon funding was terminated, it was further evidence that Mr. Chalabi
had fallen into disfavour and his rival was winning.
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- Mr. Allawi, who joined Saddam Hussein's Baath Party while
still a medical student in Baghdad, has told anecdotes about how Mr. Hussein
came to him for medical advice when he was suffering stomach and back pains.
He concluded that the young military officer's ailments were psychosomatic
or the result of poor sanitation.
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- After moving to Britain for medical studies in 1971,
Mr. Allawi reportedly continued to receive payments from the Iraqi embassy
in London and did not quit the Baath Party until 1975. Three years later,
an unidentified assailant broke into his home and tried to kill him with
an axe, leaving him with injuries that required treatment for a year.
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- Others have given less sympathetic accounts of his career.
Dr.
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- Haifa al-Azawi, an Iraqi who attended medical school
with Mr. Allawi in Baghdad in the 1960s, wrote an article in an Arab newspaper
in California that described the politician as a "big, husky man"
who "carried a gun on his belt and frequently brandished it, terrorizing
the medical students."
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- Mr. Allawi is a master of backroom political manoeuvring.
He worked for many years to build up his exile organization and forge close
relations with the CIA and Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, also
known as MI6, along with the regimes of Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia
and Jordan.
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- It was revealed this year that he had spent $300,000
(U.S.) on lobbyists and publicists in Washington and New York last year
to improve his image and his relations with the U.S. administration.
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- In the long years of exile, during debates over how to
get rid of Mr. Hussein, it was Mr. Allawi, with the CIA's support, who
argued for a military coup that would leave most of the Iraqi regime in
place.
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- After joining the Governing Council last year, he adopted
a similar position of support for many members of the old regime. He repeatedly
criticized the U.S. policy of "de-Baathification" which had excluded
Baathists from any positions in the new government. Instead, he called
for the re-establishment of large sections of the former Baathist regime,
including most of the former army, the former police force, and bureaucrats
from the ministries of justice, finance, oil and education ó basically
everyone except "serious offenders" of the former regime.
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- In other developments yesterday:
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- - The U.S.-led coalition battled rebels in the holy cities
of Najaf and Kufa. The fighting, which killed at least four Iraqis, threatened
to jeopardize a day-old truce between the U.S. military and the forces
of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who had reached a ceasefire agreement
with the United States on Thursday.
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- - U.S. authorities released 617 prisoners from the notorious
Abu Ghraib prison, site of sexual humiliation and abuse of Iraqi inmates
by American guards. It was the third and largest mass release of prisoners
since the scandal broke in April.
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- - Two Japanese journalists and their Iraqi translator
were killed in a rocket-propelled grenade attack on their vehicle south
of Baghdad on Thursday, the head of the Mahmudiya hospital said yesterday.
The journalists were named as veteran war correspondent Shinsuke Hashida,
61, and his nephew, Kotaro Ogawa, 33.
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