Tribal leaders may get local powers

A few months after the 1991 Gulf war, Saddam Hussein welcomed Iraq's tribal leaders to an audience in his palace. He apologised for agrarian reforms that had angered them and offered reconciliation.

The tribes in turn swore allegiance to the Iraqi president and bestowed on him the title "sheikh of sheikhs" to add to his many others.

Officially, tribes had no place in revolutionary Iraq and the use of their names was banned, conveniently disguising the large number of people from Saddam's own clan who held high posts in the regime.

The palace gathering marked the culmination of a long process by which the Ba'athists, far from exterminating tribalism, revived it and sought to harness it in the service of the regime, according to Faleh Jabar, an Iraqi sociologist now based in London.

Today, British forces in Basra, facing a breakdown of law and order, are trying to do the same through their alliance with a local sheikh.

Encouraging the emergence of local leaders is seen by many as a better approach than importing exiled opposition figures such as Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi National Congress leader, who is believed to have little support inside Iraq.

Under Saddam, "major tribes, mostly Sunnis, were charged with national security tasks", Mr Jabar wrote in a paper published by the Royal Institute of International Affairs. He said "minor tribes" had taken on local duties such as law and order, dispute settlement and tax collection. All were encouraged to operate as an extension of state organs. To some extent, this filled the vacuum left by the Ba'athists' destruction of civil society institutions, Mr Jabar said. But it also extended their influence beyond the rural habitat into Iraqi cities, "damaging the very fabric of an urbanised and cultured society", he added.

It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that Britain's appointment of Sheikh Muzahim Mustafa Kanan Tamimi - a former brigadier-general in Saddam's army and a former Ba'athist - to take charge of Basra was greeted by protests.

Even before his name was announced, a doctor at Basra general hospital grumbled that whoever the British had chosen, the choice was bound to be bad. "All the sheikhs in Basra were friends with Saddam. They watched as he would cut someone's ear who did not join the military, or cut off someone's tongue who spoke out against the military," the doctor told a reporter from the New York Times.

But the political affiliations of tribes are not always consistent, according to Mr Jabar: "Tribes in the south of Iraq are not coherent social groups ... one section may enthusiastically cooperate with the government while another opposes it."

Tribes in Iraq, as elsewhere in the Middle East, are canny and fickle, and ultimately have loyalty to no one but their own kin.

A few days ago, an Associated Press correspondent in the Arab part of northern Iraq encountered Ishab Ahmad Alawi, a wizened man in his 70s, who drove into the city of Dooz in a battered Toyota. Mr Alawi, leader of the Biaty tribe, had gone there to pledge loyalty to Iraq's new government - whatever government that might be. "We are tribesmen," he said. "We have no problem with the American or the Kurdish forces. We'll respect them if they respect us."