By Sabrina Tavernise
The New York Times, 10 June 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 9 — Iraq's new interior minister, Jawad Kadem al-Bolani, is a former army colonel whose knack for quick alliances lifted him from obscurity to the top of Iraq's political elite. But he has remained a political loner, Iraqi leaders said, a quality he will need to apply in his new position, one of the most politically fraught in Iraq.
Mr. Bolani was nominated by Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki on Thursday, and immediately approved by Parliament.
The Interior Ministry is at the heart of the split between Iraq's main sects, with Sunni Arabs claiming that Sunnis have been the victims of torture and other abuses by its largely Shiite forces, and the ability of Mr. Bolani to steer the ministry on an independent course will be central to the success of the American effort here.
Abuses in the ministry, which burst into public view with the discovery of a secret underground prison last fall, opened a more complicated phase in the war. Criminal gangs and militias loyal to Shiite political parties infiltrated portions of the ministry's forces, carrying out political killings, and Mr. Bolani now faces the nearly insurmountable task of purging them from its ranks.
Killings by the militias, Shiite and Sunni, have caused body counts here to soar. In May, the Baghdad morgue counted the highest number of bodies since the American invasion.
American officials had pressed Iraqi political leaders for months to nominate a tough, independent Iraqi whose loyalties lie with the state and not with a political party in order to stand up to powerful Shiites who do not want to relinquish control of the ministry.
Since the American invasion three years ago, Mr. Bolani has worked for a succession of Iraqi political parties, but appears to have remained independent of them, and his supporters say that makes him precisely the man for the job.
"He's not a partisan person," said Redha Jowad Taki, a member of the United Iraqi Alliance, the largest Shiite bloc. "He will work for Iraq and Iraqis, not for the U.I.A."
Adnan Pachachi, an Iraqi statesman and member of the National Assembly, said, "People seem to think he's independent."
Still, it remains to be seen whether Mr. Bolani will be able to strip the influence of political parties and militias.
"I don't know that he can manage this," Mr. Pachachi said. "It's a huge task."
Mr. Bolani is not well known and has never worked in government, but it is those qualities that seem to have been central to his success. The post has been highly contested, and it took nearly seven weeks for all Iraq's fractious religious and ethnic groups to agree on his candidacy.
One former government adviser who knows Mr. Bolani well called him "tough minded" and said he would be willing to stand up to political parties and their militias.
"He says the ministry needs a top-to-bottom cleanout," said the adviser, who agreed to speak on the condition his name not be printed because of the sensitivity of the topic.
Born in 1960 to a middle-class Shiite family in Baghdad, Mr. Bolani studied aviation engineering at a special military school. He graduated as a junior army engineering officer and eventually attained the rank of colonel under Saddam Hussein. He remained in the military until 1999.
Unlike other Shiite political figures, who fled persecution by Mr. Hussein to Iran, Syria and Europe, Mr. Bolani never left Iraq. It was not clear whether he had been a member of Mr. Hussein's Baath Party, though if he had, the Shiite bloc did not raise it as an issue.
Soon after the American invasion, Mr. Bolani plunged into politics. He began in an office of Moktada al-Sadr, the rebellious anti-American cleric, according to a former colleague, and moved on to become a deputy to Abdul Karim al-Muhammadawi, a Shiite from the south, on the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council at the time that L. Paul Bremer was the country's chief American administrator.
He joined Hezbollah in Iraq, but moved on from that party in 2005, said the colleague, who asked not to be identified because he felt it would be betraying Mr. Bolani's trust. In the elections in December, he ran unsuccessfully on a ticket with the former Iraqi exile, Ahmad Chalabi, with whom he traveled to the United States for the first time in his life in November.
In all, he was associated with about six political parties and groups, an unusually large number in Iraq, where tribal and personal connections are central to rising through the ranks.
One of Mr. Bolani's immediate priorities will be untangling the feuding in the southern city of Basra, where Shiite political parties and their militias have been fighting over power and oil since last year. The challenge will be particularly acute for Mr. Bolani, whose political past also includes the Fadhila Party, the main player in Basra.
He helped the party negotiate with other Shiite parties over the choice of prime minister last month, and his handling of its maneuverings in Basra will be an early test.
"Basra will be the biggest challenge," said Matthew Sherman, a former adviser to the Ministry of Interior from the American State Department.
If Mr. Bolani owed political favors, Iraqi leaders could not agree on whom the collector might be. Some said he would be beholden to the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or Sciri, a political party that was central in pushing his candidacy and whose senior member, Bayan Jabr, served as interior minister during the time that many of the abuses are said to have occurred. Such a debt would impair Mr. Bolani's ability to clean up the ministry, where many senior officials are affiliated with Sciri and its militia, the Badr Organization.
Mr. Maliki had preferred a different candidate, Farouk al-Araji, whose longtime membership in the Dawa party set some of the Shiite parties against him, a senior Shiite government official said.
"The main thing in this ministry is he has to really clean it from the influences of the various groups and political parties," Mr. Pachachi said. "We have to wait and see."
Ali Adeeb and Khalid W. Hassan contributed reporting for this article.
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Citation: Sabrina Tavernise. "New Interior Minister Faces Unenviable Task: Purging His Forces of Militia Members," The New York Times, 10 June 2006.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/10/world/10interior.html
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