[Mb-civic] Why Jan. 30 Won't Work

[Michael Butler]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-gelb3dec03.story

COMMENTARY

Why Jan. 30 Won't Work

Postponing Iraq's elections would be bad; holding them would be worse.
 By Peter W. Galbraith and Leslie H. Gelb
 Peter W. Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador to Croatia, is a senior fellow
at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. Leslie H. Gelb is
president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relatio

 December 3, 2004

 Even though President Bush, interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and
Shiite leaders are insisting on going ahead with the Iraqi national
elections on Jan. 30, there are powerful reasons for a delay.

 For one thing, most Sunni Arab leaders are telling their followers to
boycott, and Sunni insurgents, even after Fallouja, can still mount attacks
all across the Sunni Triangle and will disrupt substantially the elections
there. For another, although the Kurds in the north are more supportive of
U.S. policy, privately they favor deferral. And what's more, because of the
way the elections are structured, low voter turnout could undermine the
legitimacy and workability of the new Iraqi government.

 Conversations in Baghdad and Washington in recent weeks suggest that for
all the brave words about going forward, few of those actually responsible
for the elections' success ‹ Iraq's top government leaders, military
commanders and election officials ‹ actually believe they can be held in
just two months. Postponing them would be bad, but holding them would be
worse. 

 The purpose of the elections is to choose a national assembly to write a
permanent constitution and establish a government with legitimacy. The
U.N.-designed electoral system provides for proportional representation of
political parties based on their share of the vote throughout Iraq. This
would produce fair results only if the three major groups ‹ Kurds in the
north, Sunni Arabs in the center and Shiites in the south ‹ voted
proportionate to their share of the total population.

 But, and here is where disaster lurks, this is virtually certain not to
occur. Sunni leaders have told their people not to vote in order to protest
the Fallouja offensive, and insurgents will intimidate many others. Sunni
Arab turnout, then, might well be as low as a quarter of their total number,
compared with likely Kurd and Shiite voters reaching three-quarters of their
totals, or more. In 1992, more than 90% of Kurds voted in free elections in
the north. 

 If this were to happen, Sunni Arabs could end up holding only 5% of the
assembly seats while constituting 20% of Iraq's population. Shiites could
amass 65% of the seats with only 55% of the population, while the Kurds
would have 25% of the seats with less than 20% of the population. Thus,
Shiites and Kurds would dominate the elected assembly overwhelmingly, while
Sunni Arabs effectively would be marginalized.

 Such results would not only be unfair, but they could light a stick of
ethnic, religious and policy dynamite. With a commanding majority in the
assembly, the Shiites would understandably expect to govern Iraq. But the
reality is that Sunni Arabs will not accept rule by the very people they
bossed and victimized for most of the last century. National elections will
make Iraq's Sunni center less governable, not more.

 Shiite leaders would want to dictate the terms of Iraq's constitution. In
fact, they opposed a provision in the country's interim constitution that
would have given the two smaller groups a veto over the final document. This
puts the Shiites on a collision course not only with Sunnis, but also with
Iraq's powerful Kurdish minority. The Shiite parties are religious; the
Kurdish parties are secular and nationalist. The Kurds, who have been de
facto independent from Baghdad since 1991, look to the West for their
political model; the Shiites are influenced by Iran. So, if Allawi and Bush
go forward with nationwide elections in January, here's what they can
expect: The Shiites will have the full legal authority derived from free and
democratic elections, but not the power to enforce it outside their own
region. Sunni Arabs will be further marginalized, and more will join the
insurgents. Ethnic and religious conflict could explode.

 It has already begun in Mosul, where Sunni Arab insurgents have targeted
the city's Kurdish minority, leading the Kurds to deploy their military ‹
flying the Kurdish flag, not the Iraqi flag ‹ to the city. Tensions are also
rising between Sunni and Shiite Arabs. South of Baghdad, a Shiite commando
unit attacked and burned a Sunni Arab village near Latifiya thought to
harbor insurgents who murdered Shiite pilgrims en route to the holy cities
of Najaf and Karbala.

 The underlying problem is that Iraq's new electoral system suffers from the
same conceptual flaw that has characterized U.S. policy since Saddam
Hussein's fall ‹ an incorrect assumption that Iraq's three main communities
share a common sense of being a nation. In fact, all three think primarily
in terms of their own ethnic or confessional community. These differences
cannot be reconciled in a national vote based on a pretense that there is a
unitary state. 

 If Iraq is to survive as a state, it can do so only as a loose
confederation of at least three self-governing entities, with multiethnic
Baghdad as a special capital district. To get there, Iraq's three main
communities need to bargain as equals. The Kurds already have their regional
government. Iraq's three Shiite southern governorates have recently proposed
forming a single region and are seeking the same powers Kurdistan has,
including ownership of the oil beneath their land.

 The best solution at the moment is for Iraq's national elections to be
postponed, but for previously scheduled voting to go ahead for the Kurdistan
National Assembly and the governorate councils in the Shiite south. This
still would leave Sunni Arabs in central Iraq out in the cold, but at least
it would not disenfranchise them within their own central part of Iraq or in
a future national assembly.

 Postponing elections will be a terrible jolt to Iraq's long-suffering
Shiites, who have seen democracy as providing them the fruits of their
numerical majority. But regional elections will give the Shiites the
self-government they desire without the burden of taking on an invigorated
Sunni insurgency and a recalcitrant, but powerful, Kurdistan. To see what is
possible in their own region, the Shiites need only look north to an
increasingly prosperous Kurdistan that is today the only safe part of Iraq.

 For Bush, postponing national elections would be a setback; he has leaned
heavily on the upcoming vote to justify his Iraq policy. But as Sen. Chuck
Hagel (R-Neb.) said this week, the date should not be sacrosanct. Sham
elections, held too soon, would only intensify Sunni Arab resistance and
possibly tear the country apart.


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