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Iraqi party for Shiite 'revolution' changes name
SCIRI drops ‘revolution’ from name to distance party from sponsors in Tehran ahead of elections. BAGHDAD - One of Iraq's most powerful Shiite political parties dropped the word "revolution" from its name on Saturday in an apparent attempt to distance itself from its ties to the Iranian government. The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) will henceforth be known as the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq. Party leader Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, a top Shiite cleric, announced the name change at a news conference called to confirm his re-election at the head of the party, which is part of Iraq's ruling coalition. "Revolution means change. This is what we sought from the creation of the Council," Hakim told reporters, explaining that the fall of former president Saddam Hussein had made the revolutionary tag obsolete. "The council participated in realising political changes in Iraq, the most important of which was regime change. So this word became unnecessary," he said, flanked by Vice President Adel Abdel Mahdi, a SCIRI member. Hakim and his brother, the late Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim, founded SCIRI as an opposition movement in exile in Iraq's Shiite neighbour Iran in 1982, under the protection of Tehran's revolutionary Islamic regime. Tehran sheltered SCIRI -- whose name was a direct reference to Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution -- during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and used it to recruit Iraqi rebels to fight against their own country. The party returned to base itself in Iraq after the US-led invasion of March 2003 and moved quickly to insert its cadres in the new Shiite-led government and security forces established after Saddam's fall. But the party continued to maintain close ties with Tehran. Last December, US forces raided a party compound in Baghdad to arrest an alleged Iranian secret agent. The troops found an inventory of weapons to be supplied by Iran to the party. Some observers see the dropping of the "revolutionary" label as an attempt to distance the party from Iran at a time when many Iraqis and US military commanders accuse Tehran of fomenting violent unrest in Iraq. "It's normal. It was the revolutionary council and now there is no more revolution," Kurdish legislator Mahmud Othman said. "Maybe it's part of distancing themselves from the past. They were founded in Iran after the revolution there and the situation has changed a lot since then," he explained. Joost Hiltermann, Iraq analyst at the International Crisis Group, said: "Despite being the largest Shiite party, SCIRI has always been unpopular. It has never had much popular support because of its past. "It was created by the Iranian secret services in the 1980s and so it has a lot of political baggage. It wants to disassociate itself from Khomeini's revolution and from Iran in general," he explained. Party leaders called for the creation of a coordination centre bringing together Sunnis and Shiites, but some experts doubted whether the party could effectively participate in political reconciliation. "I don't think SCIRI can effectively push for reconciliation when they have an explicitly sectarian outlook," Hiltermann said. "They may have changed their name, but they have not changed their political philosophy, their ideology." Saturday's party statement also praised the role of Iraq's top Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and his religious school in Najaf for their attempts to bring peace to an Iraq driven by violence. Sistani's school supports a strand of "quietist" Shiite thought that would keep the clergy separate from everyday politics. Many Iraqis associate SCIRI's brand of political Islam with the "velayat e faqih" or "rule of the jurist" tradition of Iran's late leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei, who put the clergy at the head of his theocratic state. The Supreme Council has 30 members in the Iraqi parliament and is one of the most powerful blocs in Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's ruling coalition, with particular influence in the Shiite cities of south and central Iraq. The party's feared armed wing, Badr Organisation, has semi-official sanction and wields great influence within the Iraqi security services, to the dismay of Sunni leaders and the party's rivals within the country's Shiites.