Iraq's political reconciliation is seriously handicapped by the lack of an Iraqi personality such as South Africa's Nelson Mandela, a top US diplomat said Monday according to DPa. In long-awaited testimony before the US Congress, the US ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, described the "animosity and suspicions" which have fed violent insecurity in Iraq over the past 18 months. During the decades of oppression by the late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, and in the aftermath since his ouster in 2003, "no Nelson Mandela emerged," Crocker noted, adding he "would not have survived." The former apartheid government in South Africa imprisoned Mandela for 27 years, but he was released in 1990 to oversee one of the most successful political transformations in world history. During his presidency from 1994 to 2000, Mandela led the reconciliation efforts to restrain black majority anger against the minority whites who had oppressed them. In Iraq, long-oppressed majority Shiites are now in control of the government, and minority Sunnis who were once in charge complain that they are left out of the new power structure. Sunnis are blamed for carrying out the violent insurgency that makes day-to-day life dangerous in Iraq, reported DPA. One sceptical Democratic congressman, Tom Lantos, on Monday worried that the United States was funding both sides of Iraq's "religious civil war" by arming and funding Sunni tribes in places like Anbar. "Instead of acting as a leader for Iraq as a whole, (Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-) Maliki has} erated as a front man for Shiite partisans and presided over a Shiite coalition that includes ... notorious ... death squads and sectarian thugs," Lantos charged, according to DPA.
