Shrewd diplomat who made the transition to the new Iraq
Hamid Alkifaey
The Guardian
At the time of the ambush, Hashmi had been setting off for New York, where on Tuesday she had been due to attend the important UN general assembly meeting on Iraq. On July 22, she had been part of an earlier delegation seeking UN recognition for the GC. It was widely anticipated that she would become Iraq’s permanent representative at the UN, and she was spoken of as an eventual foreign minister in Baghdad.
Her background as a low-ranking member of the previous regime – and thus a member of (though not an officeholder in) the Ba’ath party – had caused controversy, but ultimately was not seen as an obstacle to her GC membership. On the contrary, her knowledge of many aspects of Saddam’s foreign policy, and her diplomatic expertise, were relied upon by other GC members.
Her gender and religious affiliation also counted in her favour – as a Shia, she was a member of what in Iraq is the majority, southern branch of Islam, which had been oppressed by Saddam. Moreover, for an Iraqi she was unusual in several respects: a pragmatist who was able to switch sides at the right moment; an unmarried career woman who had put her work before her personal life; and the only GC member who both had real experience of the workings of the former Iraqi state, and was acceptable to the US administrator.
Born in Najaf, Hashmi took a law degree in Baghdad, and then moved to France, where she gained a PhD in French literature at the Sorbonne. On returning home in the early 1980s, she was appointed to a diplomatic post in the foreign ministry, under the stewardship of Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s main foreign affairs adviser and his foreign minister from 1983 onwards. The ministry made good use of Hashmi’s knowledge of French politics and culture – she was also a fluent English speaker – by putting her in charge of relations with France, a very important position given the significance Saddam’s regime attached to that country.
Sympathetic to Arab countries since Israel’s victory in the 1967 six-day war, France had become a major trading partner of, and supplier of arms to, Iraq during the 1970s. In the 1980s, it sided with Iraq in its war against Iran, supplying Mirage fighter bombers and Super Etendard aircraft equipped with Exocet missiles.
By the time of the 1990 Kuwait invasion, the Iraqis were in enormous debt to France, and French envoys were in Baghdad trying to find a diplomatic outcome until just before the start of the Gulf war. Throughout this period, Hashmi was a key aide to Aziz, accompanying him on frequent official visits to France and elsewhere.
From 1992 until 2001, Aziz was succeeded at the foreign ministry by Mohammed Said al-Sahaf, best known now for his shameless role as information minister during this year’s conflict. While Sahaf was foreign minister (though true authority in this area remained with Aziz, as deputy prime minister), Hashmi was a frequent visitor to the UN in New York, where she campaigned against economic sanctions.
At home, she was the ministry official responsible for running the oil-for-food programme, under which the UN allowed Iraq to exchange oil earnings for humanitarian goods. Her last post at the ministry was as director of international relations.
The GC’s first president, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, praised Hashmi’s diplomatic skills when they visited London last July. Its president for the month of September, Ahmad Chalabi, said that she had received many threats in the past few months. However, she was reported as having said that to allow threats to influence her life would be doing what her enemies wanted. “I am carrying on with my duties as normal, and God will protect me.”
Hashmi was a sophisticated woman with a commitment to secularism and modernisation, and a passion for culture and literature. She saw herself as an advocate of women’s rights, and was a moderate, but strong, women’s voice on the male-dominated GC.
In seeking to continue to promote Iraq’s interests in the wider world, she was a likely and vulnerable target for remnants of Saddam’s regime, who would both have resented her cooperation with the new order and known of her personal situation. However, her choice as a member of the GC had sent a clear message to the whole country: the new regime not only tolerated people who had worked with the previous one, but welcomed all talents who had not committed crimes against the people. Her loss is a further blow to the efforts to stabilise Iraq.
· Aqila al-Hashmi, diplomat, born 1953; died September 24 2003
http://www.theguardian.com/news/2003/sep/26/guardianobituaries.iraq
