IRAQ - Hussein Al-Shahristani.

The Oil Minister since May 2006, Hussein al-Shahristani is a prominent Shi'ite close to Grand Ayatullah Ali al-Sistani who is the highest religious authority for Iraq's Ja'fari Shi'ites. Shahristani, a nuclear physicist, took up this post from Hashem al-Hashimi of the Shi'ite Islamist group al-Fadhila al-Islamiya which is headed by Ayatullah Muhammad al-Ya'qoubi.

Since the US-led invasion, Iraq's oil portfolio has been headed by a Shi'ite. The first Oil Minister in 2003/04 was Thamer al-Ghadhban, a secular Shi'ite who had been one of the technocrats at the Oil Ministry for many years. He held that position under the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (PSA) which until late June 2004 used to be headed by veteran US diplomat Paul Bremer.

In the post-CPA interim government of Iyad Allawi, a secular Shi'ite favoured by the US and the Sunni Arab MPs as well as their Kurdish counterparts, the Oil Ministry portfolio eventually went to Ibrahim Bahr ul-Ulum. An oilman who previously worked outside Iraq, Bahr ul-Ulum is the son of Ayatullah Muhammad Bahr ul-Ulum who is a moderate Ja'fari religious figure of Najaf.

Under a government formed in April 2005 by Dr. Ibrahim al-Ja'fari, The Oil Ministry portfolio was given temporarily to Ahmad Chalabi, then one of four deputy PMs. Before the invasion of Iraq, Chalabi curried favour with the US by suggesting a post-Saddam Iraq would pump huge amounts of oil and break with OPEC. But Chalabi's spokesman Entifadh Qanbar in 2005 said there was to be no such change.

Later, however, Dr. Ja'fari gave the oil portfolio of Hashemi of the Fadhila party who held this post until May 2006. But the Fadhila objected to the lost of this portfolio, despite Shahristani's high standing among Iraq's Ja'faris. Dr. Ja'fari, head of one faction of the fractious al-Da'wa al-Islamiya movement, in May 2006 had to cede the premiership to his close aide Maliki.

Shahristani was among the first Ja'fari Shi'ites to be nominated for the post of PM in 2004. But he declined the post after many Islamist Shi'ites wanted it to themselves. He was most prominent among Iraqi scientists jailed and tortured by Saddam's regime for many years for having refused to develop nuclear weapons.

As Oil Minister, Shahristani has been working hard and very keen on develop-ment of Iraq's petroleum sector. He has travelled frequently to promote this sector. In April he went to Japan and South Korea, where he signed agreements for co-operation involving companies from the two countries in the various branches of the petroleum industry (see down19IraqFieldsMay7-07).

The following are extracts from an article on Shahristani published by The New York Times on Aug. 31, 2004, to give an idea of his background (with bracketed comments by APS):

"An ancient fan rattles away in a window as chemical fumes waft among rotting laboratory benches and corroding racks of tubes. A young graduate student, Farah Yassien, perspires in the oppressive afternoon heat as she labors over an experiment involving the drip, drip, drip of benzene and hexane.

"This is a chemical engineering laboratory at Baghdad University, the most respected institution of higher education in Iraq. And striding through the ruined lab is...Shahristani..., who in a nation of impossible dreams and broken infrastructure may have picked the most quixotic task of all. He hopes to restore Iraqi science to its former pre-eminence in the Middle East, and he has founded an Iraqi National Academy of Sciences to help him do so.

"Unlike the well-financed, prestigious academies of the West, Shahristani's has only 16 members, about half of them foreigners, and no budget to speak of. The academy members have no regular meeting place and at present huddle in an office at a university computer center. They have been largely ignored by both Iraqi and American officials, who presumably feel that they have more pressing problems. Furthermore, Iraqi research labs, like this one, are a crumbling, looted, odoriferous mess.

"The most unlikely element in Shahristani's quest may be his decision to undertake it in the first place. He came within a hair's breadth of being named prime minister of Iraq last spring. He was tortured by Saddam Hussein's government for refusing to work on an atomic bomb and spent 12 years in prison, much of it in solitary confinement, before escaping during the Gulf war of 1991.

"Born in 1942 and educated in London and Toronto as well as Iraq, Shahristani often draws comparisons to Andrei Sakharov, the Russian physicist who was persecuted in the former Soviet Union for his outspoken views on human rights during the cold war.... He has a strong commitment to democratic rule and pulls few punches on any topic.

"Jammed in the back of a car with no air-conditioning as he rushed to another appointment after the visit to the lab, he said there was little hope of quelling the continuing violence in Iraq without free and fair elections, planned for early next year.

"So far, he said, typical Iraqis see the American-installed government as just another unrepresentative regime and therefore have no incentive to act against insurgents. He said: 'If they mess up the election, then the country is down the drain. Because, quite frankly, I think the Iraqi people have been too patient'.

(The elections did take place in January 2005 as millions of Shi'ite and Kurds went to the polls. But most Sunni Arabs boycotted the polls, partly in fear of possible punishment by Ba'thist or Neo-Salafi insurgents and partly because of their suspicions about the US motives in Iraq. But the Sunni Arabs joined the Dec. 15, 2005, elections and won many seats in parliament - mainly thanks to various types of US encouragement).

"Shahristani briefly became the top contender for interim prime minister of Iraq in May [2004], when it was leaked to journalists that he was favored by Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN envoy to Iraq, as a non-political compromise choice. He withdrew because of opposition by various Iraqi [Shi'ite] political parties, but he did not rule out running in democratic elections. 'I will try to avoid it, as I did the first nomination', he said, but added that if he construed it as a personal duty, as defined by his Islamic faith, then he would run.

"For now, Shahristani, with the help of a handful of Iraqi, American and British colleagues, is trying to resurrect a scientific establishment that once pursued illicit weapons - weapons the US suspected were still under development before the recent invasion. Instead, by the time of the American-led invasion of Iraq last year to remove Saddam, that establishment turned out to be a crushed remnant of what it had been in the 1960s, 70s and 80s....

"Many scientists in Iraq have lost the ability to generate fresh ideas independently and then seek money to carry out the research. 'The whole science structure in the previous regime was based on isolating groups of scientists and telling them exactly what to do, without access to outside scientific groups', Shahristani said in an interview at his home in Baghdad. 'For people who have been brought up in such a system, it would be very difficult to say, 'OK, you decide'.

"Some analysts are harsher, suggesting that many Iraqi scientists are proving to be incapable of responding to the leadership of Shahristani and a few other academics and researchers. 'There doesn't seem to be the kind of motivation that you'd expect', said Stuart Schwartzstein, an official at the American Embassy in Baghdad who is an adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Science and Technology. 'There still seems to be a sense that they're waiting for orders to come down from on high, with the requisite resources. And that's probably not going to happen'.

"But a more democratic form of leadership is just what Shahristani hopes his academy will provide. He would also like to see the organization help restore the country's shattered medical infrastructure, address enormous pollution problems - some left over from the nuclear and biological weapons programs of the 1980s - and establish an ethical framework for scientific research. 'We wanted to be sure that science was never again misused in Iraq', he said.

"As the US pours billions of dollars into reconstruction projects, there are other reasons to nurture scientists, engineers and medical researchers, said Irving Lerch, an American physicist and human rights advocate who has pressed for quicker action. He said: 'We've got to

give that country the intellectual capacity to rebuild itself. If we want Iraq to be dependent on the United States for its security, for its rebuilding, for its life, then all we have to do is continue what we're doing'.

"By the early 1950s, the University of Baghdad had asserted itself as Iraq's leading institution of higher learning, according to an assessment by the Arab Science and Technology Foundation, based in the UAE, and by Sandia National Laboratories in the US. During that time, Iraqi-born scientists with degrees from Britain, the US, France, Egypt, Lebanon and elsewhere began streaming back to their homeland, invigorating academic fields from physics to economics.

New universities and about 80 technical institutes were established in the 1960s and 70s, and Iraq's technical infrastructure was the envy of the Middle East, Baz said. But then there was the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, which cost Iraq an estimated $100 billion. By the 1991 Gulf war, most major research institutions had either been shuttered or been severely damaged. Scientists were drafted into the Iraqi Army and many died, or their careers languished. Economic sanctions imposed after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 made it impossible even to stock the labs where scientists remained.

"After the invasion last year, almost everything that was left was gutted. Attempts by the American occupation authorities to remedy some of the damage were delayed by the worsening security situation. Last November, Shahristani and his colleagues, including people like Mosa Aziz Al-Mosawe, the president of Baghdad University, formally established the academy in a ceremony at the Royal Society in London. There could hardly have been anyone in Iraq whose credentials, both moral and scientific, were better suited for making the proposition a success.

"In July 1980, in one of scientific history's great acts of defiance, Shahristani said he served his country better by not working on the Iraqi atomic bomb program. In the interview at his home, he said that he feared Saddam Hussein would end up using an atomic weapon against his own people. Shahristani remained in prison for the next decade and managed to remain very much the scientist. Worried that Saddam would use chemical weaponry and harm the inmates where he was confined as the first Gulf war approached, he taught them how to improvise gas masks with wet rags and charcoal.

"Shahristani escaped. Then, on the strength of his remarkable reputation, he formed the national academy and quickly secured a promise from the Baghdad municipal government for the academy to occupy a modest, three-story building at 6 Haifa Street if he could raise the money to renovate its looted interior.

"Then things started to go wrong. He raised the money, only to be told by the Baghdad authorities that the building had been given to the Iraqi National Olympic Committee, which already had a headquarters building. Both the city's real estate department and the chairman of the Olympic committee, Ahmad Al-Samarrai, said the committee simply got its paperwork in first. The building is to become an Olympic museum, Samarrai said.

"Shahristani asserts that the real estate department conspired with the Olympic committee to secure the building. Finally, in May, Schwartzstein, of the US Embassy, tried to secure the right to take over one of the hundreds of government-owned buildings controlled by the occupation authority. But the Americans took until July to process the request, and then an Iraqi claimed ownership, saying that Saddam's government had wrongfully appropriated the property, and that building, too, slipped out of the academy's hands. Yassien, the student at the Baghdad University lab, is forced to buy chemicals for her own experiments. She goes to a market called Bab Al-Muadham and often sees other students trolling for bargains. The professors at the university, she said, 'can't do anything for us'".