The Hindu : Opinion / News Analysis : Iraq has to build a working democracy

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Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

Iraq has to build a working democracy

Ian Black

Outside Baghdad's Green Zone, mass unemployment, power shortages, sectarian incitement, and suicide bombings continue.

IF PEOPLE happen to have been discussing constitutions anywhere in the world recently, it's a fair bet they were talking about the European Union, not Iraq. Yet what is happening in Baghdad probably matters much more than any knife-edge referendums in Paris or The Hague.

Iraqis, facing an insurgency that has killed 600 people this month, have to do what the French, Dutch and other Europeans — looking beyond the nation state to something new — no longer have to worry about: build a working democracy from scratch now that the Ba'athist system of Arab socialism, freedom and unity has gone the way of all tyrannies.

It really doesn't matter what you think of George W. Bush, Tony Blair, or their case for war. This — along with an awful lot of other things — has to be done if the occupation is to end and the country is to come out of it in reasonable shape.

But U.S. neocons willing a new Middle East to emerge from the rubble make it sound far too easy, fantasising about a Philadelphia-on-the-Tigris, where the founding fathers of free Iraq will be moved by the vision of 1787 to overcome their differences and strike grand bargains as they look, misty-eyed, to some shining city on a hill.

Words such as "democratic," "pluralistic" and "inclusive", bandied about by an anxious Condoleezza Rice, ring hollow behind the heavily guarded walls of the Green Zone in Baghdad while mass unemployment, power shortages, sectarian incitement and suicide bombings continue outside.

Momentum was lost after the January 30 elections in haggling over a government dominated by Shias and Kurds, and it will be hard to meet the August 15 deadline for completing the constitution. Opting for a six-month delay is possible, but more uncertainty might help keep violence going.

Process is vital, since writing a constitution is the only non-violent opportunity to build a workable compromise. Last week, a 55-strong parliamentary drafting committee was expanded, at U.S. urging, to become a 101-member commission. It will permit greater representation for the Sunni minority, which lost most with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, largely boycotted the elections and forms the backbone of the insurgency.

But since the Sunnis still cannot be represented beyond their roughly 17 per cent proportion of the population, the trick will be in finding other ways to draw them in and compensate them for their loss of power as members of the Ba'ath party, military and security apparatuses.

Other people's experience may help, and there are great hopes of the U.N.'s man, the highly regarded South African lawyer Fink Haysom. Mr. Haysom, an adviser to Nelson Mandela, is an expert on constitutional reform, conflict resolution and good governance. Iraq needs all those — and more. Civic education and public participation will be important too.

Yet the exercise could end up undermining the current system and its de facto understandings about Kurdish independence and relations between Islam and the state. Sheikh Hummam Hammoudi, the Shia cleric chairing the drafting body, wants Islam to be "the principal source for all legislation." And his committee has rejected the idea that the transitional administrative law (TAL), the interim constitution, can serve as the basis for the new one because it is an American document.

Under the TAL, if two-thirds of voters in three or more of the country's 18 provinces reject the draft, Parliament must be dissolved and new elections held — meaning angry Sunnis have an automatic veto if they are not satisfied.

The constitution is the centrepiece of the U.S. and British exit strategy, so the stakes could hardly be higher. But it is, sadly, not a subject where the Iraqis can expect much useful advice from Europeans — though perhaps Valery Giscard d'Estaing, author of the troubled EU document, might lend a hand. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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Iraq has to build a working democracy