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Iraqi Alternatives
By: Shlomo Avineri
Oct 14, 2005
The Iraqi draft Constitution will probably
be approved in the mid-October referendum. But ultimately it does not
matter, as the Constitution – and the whole constitution-making process –
is totally out of touch with the realities of a country which does not
exist anymore as a coherent body politic.
The problem is not with the Constitution,
but with the conventional wisdom – almost an idée fixe - that Iraq is a
viable modern nation-state and all it needs to make it work properly is
the right kind of constitutional and political arrangement. This is a
fallacy and one should begin to think outside the box.
The Iraqi state, as established by British
imperialist planners in the 1920's, is an incongruous pastiche, put
together from three very disparate provinces of the old Ottoman Empire:
Mosul in the north with a Kurdish majority, Baghdad in the center with a
Sunni Arab majority, and Basra in the south with a Shia Arab majority. For
their own political reasons, the British put the Sunni Arabs – never more
than 25% of the population – in control of the whole country, and even
imported a Sunni Arab Hashemite prince to rule over it.
Ever since then, the country could be held
together only by the iron fist: its history is replete with Shia, Kurdish
and even Christian Assyrian revolts, all put down in the most bloody
fashion by the ruling Sunni Arab minority. Throughout its history, modern
Iraq has always been the most oppressive of all Arab countries: Saddam's
rule was only the most brutal in this long list of Sunni Arab regimes.
It was this hegemony – and not only Saddam's
Ba'athist regime – which has been toppled by the United States. But given
its history and demography, the American attempt to fashion Iraq anew has
foundered on the triple rocks of the Shia majority feeling empowered, of
the Kurds' unwillingness to give up their hard-won de facto mini-state in
the north – and of the Sunnis violent campaign to undermine any form of
reconstruction that will not be headed by them.
The draft Constitution is an attempt to
square a circle which cannot be squared. The Sunni resistance – a guerilla
and terrorism war well prepared in the last years of Saddam's rule – will
continue to try to subvert any semblance of order representing the current
majority Shia-Kurdish coalition. The Sunnis will go on with their
murderous attacks on Shias, Kurds – and Coalition forces. They will in all
probability boycott the constitutional referendum and all subsequent
elections – as they have boycotted the previous elections: they are a
minority, and given the brutal logic of their long hegemony in Iraq, why
should they submit to a process which is premised on their minority
status? In any case, whole areas of Iraq are under effective control of
the Sunni insurgency.
Similarly, the Shias will not submit anymore
to Sunni hegemony, and are busy building up their own political structure
in the south, modeled on what the Kurds have already achieved in the
north.
Iraq is going the ways of Yugoslavia, and
this should be acknowledged and ultimately welcome, despite the
conventional norms relating to territorial integrity of existing states:
these norms are helpful – but once a state disintegrates, as it happened
in Yugoslavia in the early 1990's, no constitutional formulations can save
it. Constitutions works only if all sides have an interest in operating
within the proposed constitutional framework – and this obviously is not
the case in Iraq.
There is nothing sacrosanct in the continued
existence of multi-ethnic and multi-religious states if the components do
not wish to live together: there are lessons to be learned from the demise
of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia – even Czechoslovakia. Bosnia-Herzegovina
is an example of another failed attempt to keep such a multi-ethnic entity
alive: it doesn't work, and it is held together only by the almost
dictatorial power of the international community's representative and the
presence of foreign troops.
Reality should be faced: the Kurdish region
in the north is functioning in a reasonable way, and has been able even to
allay the fears of Turkey that its very existence will aggravate its own
Kurdish problem. With Shias building their polity in the south, the Sunni
areas too should be allowed to go their own way. This may be more
conducive to peace than trying to impose on them a hated occupation or an
equally hated Shia hegemony.
This emergence of three states – or highly
autonomous regions – instead of a unified Iraq is happening anyway,
whether the draft Constitution will be ratified or not. It will take
courageous thinking to acknowledge what is occurring before our own eyes,
rather than continue to reach for an unrealistic chimera of a consolidated
Iraqi state: nobody, it appears, can put Humpty-Dumpty together again.
Moreover, as in the former Yugoslavia, the separate entities may have a
better chance of developing a semblance of representative and eventually
democratic structure than if all warring communities are forced to live
together in the prison house which Iraq has been for the majority of its
citizens for most of the 20th century.
The author is Professor of Political
Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a former
Director-General of Israel's Foreign Ministry.
Syndicated column, published – among others
– in THE NATION (Bangkok), Oct. 14, 2005.
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