NIQASH: How do you feel about the current relationship between the Shiite Muslims of Iraq and Iraq’s Kurdistan people?
Bashir Adel Gli: The relationship between Iraq’s Shiite Muslims and the Kurdish people is a historic one. It goes back to the time that [religious leader] Grand Ayatollah Muhsin al-Hakim [the grandfather of Ammar al-Hakim, current leader of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council] issued a fatwa [religious edict] in 1965 that forbade Shiite Muslims to fight with the Kurdish.
This decree was copied and distributed all over Iraq and it had a big impact on Shiite Muslim soldiers.
He issued that decree after some Sunni Muslim clerics issued a totally different fatwa saying that their followers were allowed to kill the Kurdish. The [Sunni Muslim-dominated] authorities were trying to find some way of justifying their ethnic cleansing and killing of the Kurdish people. And what al-Hakim said at the time made them very angry.
As a result, 70 members of al-Hakim’s family were arrested and later killed.
Basically Shiite Muslim ideology says that Shiites must support the oppressed at all times; and that they must not support the dictator, no matter who that dictator is.
NIQASH: So how do you see the current problem between Erbil and Baghdad: is it a Shiite Muslim-Kurdish problem?
Bashir Adel Gli: No, it is the problem between the Dawa Party [headed by Nouri al-Maliki] and the government of Iraqi Kurdistan. It is not a problem between Shiites and Kurds in general.
Intelligent opinion or very clever. But make a reality check first. Who is the master and who is the slave in Iraq? The Cabinet or the Parliament?
What about law enforcement? What does matters if Parliament legislates laws and the Cabinet do not support, nor implement them?
Does democracy a chance in Iraq with Maliki?
No pain, no gain.