An Iraqi-American female activist, whose foundation has spent much of the last decade devising visions of "democratic rule" for Iraq and lobbying for a war crimes trial of Saddam Hussein, will become the country's diplomatic representative in Washington, Iraqi political leaders said.
Rend Rahim Francke, 54, has directed the Iraq Foundation, which she helped set up in 1991, and is a familiar face in Washington from her years lobbying policy makers to provide more muscular support for opponents of Saddam Hussein.
Her new job as a representative of the Iraqi Governing Council, will be a kind of informal ambassadorship, she said, and added she would represent the emerging Iraqi authority and speak "for the nascent Iraqi government."
"It is awkward," she added, "because technically Iraq is still a country under occupation."
While she was born in Baghdad and spent some of her childhood there, Francke has not lived in Iraq full time since the 1970's. However, Francke said, she believes that Iraqis who lived under Hussein's rule for those years can create a "democratic state".
"It's true we have a generation of people who knew nothing but this terror and this silence," she said, cited by the New York Times. "But I think the human spirit is something that can be resuscitated. It's always there."
She became a US citizen in 1987, but held on to her Iraqi passport, which has long since expired.
Francke, whose father is a Shiite Muslim and whose mother is a Sunni, went to boarding school in England, studied at Cambridge and at the Sorbonne. She worked as a banker and a currency trader in Lebanon and Bahrain, as well as London, and said she knew she could not survive in her homeland.
The rest of her family followed her, moving to England in 1978. She and her family emigrated to the United States in 1981. (Albawaba.com)
© 2003 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
