In November, Patriarch Mar Emmanuel III Delly, the Baghdad-based head of the Chaldean church, was ordained into the College of Cardinals by Pope Benedict in the Vatican. The event was broadcast live on Iraq's national television station, Al-Iraqiya, for over an hour, under the rubric "the symbols of Iraq."
It was heartening to find Iraq's state media highlighting the ceremony and describing the patriarch as a national "symbol." The channel even skipped the Muslim midday call to prayer to keep showing the proceedings, which were translated from Latin into Arabic by the presenter. An Iraqi government delegation accompanied the patriarch to the Vatican—in contrast to a few years ago, when the Greek Orthodox patriarch of Istanbul visited the Vatican. Turkey officially ignored the event, and the patriarch travelled economy class.
The call to prayer on Al-Iraqiya alternates between the Shia and Sunni versions. Iraq is the sole Arabic-speaking country to do this; in Saudi Arabia, transmitting the Shia call, which is longer and more politicised, would be tantamount to blasphemy. Al-Iraqiya has also taken to showing mass on Sundays, even though less than 3 per cent of Iraq's population are Christians. This would be unimaginable in Egypt, where around 10 per cent of the population are Christian Copts.
Al-Iraqiya's programming is diverse. It airs live coverage of the regional parliament in the Kurdish capital Irbil, with simultaneous translation. (In Turkey, the letters "w," "x" and "q" are banned from public use because they are only used in Kurdish words and names.) The channel then switches to the national parliament in Baghdad, screening the heated debates on terrorism and the new bill calling for the reintegration of Baathists into the state service. Also televised are the trials of leading Baathists responsible for putting down the 1991 Shia uprising, featuring tearful testimonies from the victims.
There are phone-in programmes, such as You and the Official, in which citizens berate sheepish officials over lack of services, or complain that no tea was distributed with this month's food ration in some tiny rural enclave that no one's heard of. Young officers are drafted in to explain the minutiae of the current Baghdad security plan. In other shows, intrepid female reporters without hijabs conduct on-the-spot interviews with Iraqis returning from Syria, intruding on their happy reunions with relatives at the bus depot. Wedding convoys are flagged down so the couple can be asked if their marriage was arranged or a love match.
These images show that life in general is resuming in Iraq, but with the potent symbols of a professional army, a rambunctious democracy, the rule of law, and religious and ethnic tolerance. Al-Iraqiya is denounced by some people as an organ of the state: it is funded and managed by the prime minister's office, which placed a political acolyte, Habib al-Sadr, at its head. Yet this channel is radically different from the rest of Arab media, which is also for the most part owned by states or by businessmen toeing the palace line. Al-Iraqiya is a revolutionary television experience for a region where monopolising minorities write the script and set the tone.
2007, 2008 and beyond
The year 2007 will be remembered as the one in which the Sunni and Shia insurgencies collapsed. After marshalling their strengths to wipe each other out, they broke apart internally when their prospects grew dimmer and internal acrimony set in. In early 2006, al Qaeda blew apart a Shia shrine, and the Mahdi army visited terrible retribution on the Sunni masses that had tolerated al Qaeda in their midst as shock troops in a potential civil war. Al Qaeda wanted a civil war, but found that the Sunni community was too exhausted and, after the Shia backlash, too frightened to go all the way.
The US military surge provided cover for those few Sunnis who had always fought al Qaeda and the many more who signed on after realising that the battle for dominating Iraq had been lost. For the Shias, the Mahdi army had delivered what one middle east expert called a "balance of terror" against the Sunnis. But once the Sunnis abandoned the contest for power, the Shias had no more use for the Mahdi army. The Sadrist movement broke apart into feuding warlords and gangsters, who were easily picked off by a resurgent Iraqi army—better armed, better managed and better guided.
The Iraqi government has a $42bn budget for 2008, which will be remembered as the year when the Sunnis sobered up, the Kurds were placated and the Shias turned magnanimous in victory. All these groups will have to find ways of healing the pains of the Saddam era and those of the multiple insurgencies that followed. This is what ordinary people are demanding, and if their demands are not met, there will be a steep price to pay in the 2009 elections.
Iraq is stabilising, and hence its story will be far less gory or interesting. Global audiences will tune out. But a rich, successful and democratic Iraq will shatter the prevalent order of the middle east over the next couple of decades.
This is the last "Rivers of Babylon." Nibras Kazimi blogs at talismangate.blogspot.com
