Tens of Thousands March in Funeral for Slain Cleric

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Monday, September 01, 2003

Tens of Thousands March in Funeral for Slain Cleric

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The funeral cortege for Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr Al-Hakim, who was killed Friday by a car bomb, crawled south from Baghdad Sunday freighted with both political and religious symbolism, Iraq's Shiite Muslims determined to assert their importance at the very moment one of their most significant voices was stilled.

In the first day of a three-day funeral, tens of thousands of mourners marched through the streets of Baghdad and lined the route south. Men rushing forward to hang onto the 18-wheeled flatbed truck serving as a hearse or ritually beat themselves as the procession passed through their hamlets. Many pushed up small pieces of paper, tattered cloth, rocks or even small boulders to be rubbed against the coffin, one of the many clerics riding on the truck handing back the now blessed objects.

The funeral was billed as a symbolic one, largely because no remains of the ayatollah, one of the four leading clerics in Iraq, could be identified. The car bomb in Najaf after Friday prayers killed him and more than 80 others. Scores more were injured.

The regime of Saddam Hussein banned such processions, so Ayatollah Hakim's funeral was the largest many people could remember here since the last one allowed by the Baath Party in 1970, that of his father, Ayatollah Mohsen Al-Hakim.

The funeral brimmed with anti-American sentiment and chanting, more vociferous than previously voiced in the broadly moderate Shiite community Ayatollah Hakim led. He had counseled patience with the occupation to give it a chance to help build a democratic government that could no longer shunt the Shiites aside.

The loudspeaker at the shrine of Imam Hussein, a gold-domed mosque here where the casket was lodged for the night, also boomed with invective against the occupying power. "Yesterday we faced the tanks of Saddam Hussein, today the tanks of the Americans," the unidentified cleric said. "We are not afraid of the Americans, who are not innocent of the blood of the grandson of Hussein."

Source: Agencies

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