The secretary-general of the Central Council of Arab and Iraqi Tribes talks to Mohamed Al-Anwar in Baghdad No observer of the Iraqi scene can ignore the impact of the tribes on events in the country. As the date set for the elections draws ever closer -- 30 January -- the number of violent incidents skyrockets. The tribes -- some of whom are boycotting the voting while others have agreed to take part -- are demanding that the elections be delayed. To shed light on the tribes' positions on a number of issues, Al-Ahram Weekly interviewed Sheikh Ali Faris Al-Duleimi, the secretary-general of the Central Council of Arab and Iraqi Tribes, and one of the elders from the Al-Duleim tribes who recently announced that they would boycott the elections. How large are the Al-Duleim tribes? Are they all Sunni, and do they all want to delay the elections? Al-Duleim is composed of a number of tribes, the most numerous of which, off the top of my head, are the Abu Assaf, the Abu Dhiyab, the Abu Kuleib, the Bahazeen and the Abu Alwan. Altogether they number about four million. The vast majority of them are found in Western Iraq (i.e. Al-Anbar governorate), but they're also in Salaheddin, Diyali and Mosul, not to mention Najaf, Omarra and Basra. Around 20 per cent of the tribes are Jafari Shia (the rest are Sunnis) and a full 99 per cent of the Al-Duleim tribes support delaying the elections. Some are acting in their own interests, not in the name of the council. As for us, we're for the elections, but in their current form and with things being as they are we can't agree. The council includes both Sunni and Shia members. As tribes we stand together: any split along religious or ethnic lines just won't happen. Unfortunately, I'm pretty disappointed with the Shia and Sunni religious authorities who should be educating the people about the need to reject sectarianism in order to engage in the political process as Iraqis. The view of the council is that religion is God's business and the nation is for everyone. Everyone has the right to pray in their own places of worship -- Shia and Sunni alike -- and I'm frankly astonished at the divisions and lack of unity displayed by different religious authorities all over the country. There are no arguments here: the tribes are united. It's the responsibility of religious figures to preserve the Iraqi people's national unity. What's your position regarding the support shown by some religious authorities for holding the elections on time? Membership of any religious denomination is a spiritual matter, so obviously Iraqis are heavily influenced by such pronouncements. Yet at the same time there is a number of tribes in the south and the middle Euphrates region -- such as the Abada and the Beni Lam -- who are calling for elections to be delayed for the sake of Iraqi national unity. We also have the support of many members of the Shia religious council in Najaf. Who, for example? If elections were held, how would you regard their results? I can't give their names as it would put them in danger. We'll shortly be meeting with Al-Sayid Ali Al-Sistani to examine the possibility of delaying the elections for three months and we'll ask him to demand that the occupation forces give a deadline for withdrawing from Iraqi towns and villages. The ball will be in his court, then. If he refuses and elections are held as planned, then we'll try and use the interim law to get our way. There's a paragraph in the law that says any referendum on the constitution must be ratified if first, a majority of voters agree on it, and second, if two-thirds of voters in three or more governorates do not reject it. We'll refuse to recognise the results of the elections since our demand was ignored. We also won't accept any other solutions such as appointing people by quota. I hope they don't force us to take such measures, as it can only raise tensions between the people. Is your boycott of the elections final, or would you participate if some of your demands were met? What do you say to those who claim the Al-Duleim tribes benefited greatly from the former regime and have lost out since it fell? It's not so much a boycott as a series of conditions for entering the political process. We're an occupied country, ruled by the Americans. How can you call any elections free and fair when the "independent" Supreme Electoral Commission was created by the occupier. If they want the elections to be free and fair and recognised by the Iraqi people then they must be overseen by the United Nations, the Arab League, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference and the European Union. This international participation would guarantee both the safety of Iraqis and ensure people abided by their results. If they're held as planned, they'll happen for sure, but in the long run they'll be a failure, since they're founded on the sectarianism and ethnic divisions of the Governing Council and its branch organisations. Any sectarian Iraqi government would be fatal blow to national unity. We are demanding that elections be delayed for three months, and that the American forces withdraw from Iraqi towns and villages. However we're not asking for a complete withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, since we don't yet have an army capable of protecting our borders and internal security. But we can protect our towns and villages, and we're ready to give the army 500,000 fighters from the council's tribes, without any conditions about party loyalty or anything like that, to ensure the army is an independent and loyal institution. If they do leave, then we'll withdraw our support from the armed resistance, since we need these same occupying forces until we manage to create our own army. When we do, then it will be up to our elected government to ask them to withdraw. So you disagree with the Association of Muslim Scholars who are demanding a timetable for the occupation's withdrawal from all Iraqi lands? Despite my greatest respect for the association and its opinion, our council is of the view that a total American withdrawal is not in the interests of the Iraqi people. My reasons are as follows: we don't have an army that can stop our borders from being infiltrated, or curb the ambitions of our neighbours; the country is full of armed militias, and we are worried by the prospect of a bloodbath inside Iraq (we demand that these militias surrender their weapons and join the Iraqi army); we are unable to guarantee Iraq's internal security; finally, any decision about complete withdrawal should be left to a government that has been elected by all Iraqis. What are you asking Egypt to do at this time? My main problem with Egypt is its silence in the face of events in Iraq. We need a solution, and the Sharm El-Sheikh conference didn't do anything except support the legitimacy of the occupation. What we'd like is an Egyptian initiative to delay the elections and set a timeframe for the withdrawal of occupation forces from Iraqi towns and villages. The Arab League is another matter. Four months before the Sharm El-Sheikh conference we sent a message to Amr Moussa in which we outlined our political programme and asked to attend. He responded positively and asked us to send the names of our delegation. A month later we sent him 18 names representing all of Iraq's provinces. He never replied. I called his adviser, Hisham Youssef, and told him we still hadn't received permission to attend the Arab League, and that we had a political programme that we wanted to show to the League, the European Union and the UN. He told me that the League wasn't able to afford the cost of the delegation, and I said that we were willing to pay for our own costs and that all we wanted was for the League to adopt our proposal. It never happened. They didn't accept our programme, and the tribes never made it to Sharm El-Sheikh.
