"Selecting the people who are going to vote -- this is not full democracy," said Hikmat Jassem Zaidan, one of the protesters. "This is half democracy."
US plan angering new Iraq parties
By Anne Barnard and Farah Stockman, Globe Staff, 1/18/2004
RAMADI, Iraq -- The dilemma facing the United States appeared at Keith Mines's office here in the form of a dancing, chanting crowd of Iraqis demanding more clout for their political parties in a provincial council that will help choose an Iraqi government this spring.
They were angry that Mines, the top US civilian official in Anbar province, had allocated 10 seats to tribal leaders and only three to political parties. "Selecting the people who are going to vote -- this is not full democracy," said Hikmat Jassem Zaidan, one of the protesters. "This is half democracy."
The United States is scrambling this week to defend its controversial plan to form a sovereign Iraqi government through regional caucuses, rather than direct elections. Iraq's most influential religious leader wants a ballot. But US officials, who are expected to appeal to the United Nations tomorrow for support, say there is too little time to conduct a fair election and still meet a June 30 deadline to transfer power. So they have opted for a plan that requires US officials like Mines to go through a laborious, hands-on process of meeting with Iraqis, town by town, to determine which groups should play a role in the caucuses.
Working out how much influence to give Iraq's new parties and how much to reserve for the tribal sheiks is one of countless problems that US authorities must resolve in the complex caucus system. And whatever option they choose, they face accusations of manipulating the outcome.
Meeting with the leaders of eight new political parties, Mines explained why he decided to let sheiks choose a quarter of the council's members: The tribes are a clearly defined interest group, while it is unclear whether the new parties represent more than a few thousand people.
But the fledgling politicians went away grumbling.
"We are returning to dictatorship with different faces," said Zaidan, an organizer from the Council for Iraqi National Unity, a party that wants Iraq to move away from politics based on tribe, ethnicity, and religion.
Last week, as US representatives fanned out across the country to explain the caucuses to Iraqis, the plan came under the harshest fire yet. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the leader most revered among Iraq's majority Shi'ite Muslims, hardened his demand for a direct ballot, bringing tens of thousands of demonstrators onto the streets of the southern city of Basra on Thursday.
An aide to Sistani told Abu Dhabi Television that if Sistani's concerns are ignored, the cleric will issue a religious edict declaring the new government illegitimate, a US-appointed "council made of paper."
It is not only Sistani's followers who are chafing at the caucus plan. Kurds, who ran a de facto autonomous state in northern Iraq under US protection for a decade before Saddam Hussein's fall, are demanding that the transitional government guarantee them federal autonomy over a wider geographical area, including oil-rich Kirkuk. They want to rearrange the caucus system in their region to give them more unified clout.
Sunni Muslims, who lack the strong leaders and organizational strength of Kurds and Shi'ites, fear that they will be shut out of a new government or that Shi'ites will impose an Iranian-influenced religious state.
And Iraqis who fear sectarian conflict watch anxiously as the United States doles out concessions to various groups to get them to buy into the caucus process -- including deference to unelected Shi'ite religious leaders, autonomy for Kurds, and heavy representation for Sunni tribal sheiks. They fear that trend will push Iraqis to define their political interests along ethnic and religious lines.
"The coalition is dealing with them like children: `Yes, we'll give you something; just sit down and be polite.' This will split Iraq," said Ibrahim al-Mashadani, an organizer from the Iraqi National Accord, one of the groups that met with Mines on Thursday to demand more seats on the Anbar provincial council.
US officials in Iraq acknowledge they could use some help, even though bringing in the UN is a sensitive issue.
"An honest broker would be helpful -- let's leave it at that. Who that would be, I don't know," Mines said Thursday, after two hours of wrangling with Ramadi politicians who accused him of "taking away our vote."
Tomorrow, members of the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council will confer with Secretary General Kofi Annan at the UN. The leader of the US occupation authority, L. Paul Bremer III, is expected to appeal to the UN to help win over Sistani or suggest a compromise, and ask the world body to take a broad role in the transition.
It is hard to see how the United States will persuade Iraqis to feel ownership of the new government by the deadline, said Bathsheba Crocker, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who went to Iraq in July to assess reconstruction efforts at the request of the Department of Defense. "The fact that we are having a push-back from these major groups does not bode well," she said. "It will be very messy between now and the end of June."
Mines, 46, a State Department official on loan from the US Embassy in Budapest, plunged into Ramadi's political cauldron Thursday. About three dozen members from political parties sat in a circle on sofas, angry that their groups have been invited to select only three of the provincial council's 40 members. The council is the channel through which an Anbar resident can affect the national vote, if only remotely. It will appoint a third of a provincial coordinating committee, which will choose members of a provincial caucus, which will choose the province's representatives in the new National Assembly. After consulting with hundreds of Iraqis in Anbar province, Mines said, he allocated one or two seats to each major town and seven each to the largest cities: Fallujah and Ramadi. The cities' seats will be chosen by caucuses of doctors, educators, women, entrepreneurs, religious leaders, and others. A caucus of sheiks will choose 10 members.
"If it was a faulty process, it was a failure of judgment. It wasn't something stinky," Mines told the group, pointing out that he had cut the sheiks' share of the seats from 70 percent on the old council to 25 percent on the new. "I'd like to think of myself not as a dictator, but as a referee."
Khalid Mahmoud, a lawyer who belongs to an Arab nationalist party, said that approach is problematic because the people doing the most work often are overlooked: "As a referee, you gave the best seats to the person who's been sitting in the shade and eating apples. You forgot the person who's been sitting in the sun."
The eight parties wanted a seat each. Mines said they had little local support. (Mashadani, of the Iraqi National Accord, was from Baghdad -- his party's Ramadi headquarters was bombed last month.) Mines urged them to run as candidates for the geographical or professional seats.
The men responded that they cannot compete against sheiks who built up money and influence through generations of being favored, first by the British, then by Hussein and now, they said, by the United States. Mines "just wants to solve his problems, to put someone here who will be loyal to him. That's all he wants," Mashadani said to a neighbor. He said he would prefer the UN to organize the caucuses.
Mines eventually agreed to let all eight parties send delegates to the council but rotate through the three voting seats. They said they would have no time to hold a broad-based election to the seats: They learned the rules a week before they were scheduled to choose their members. Mines, too, said the accelerated timetable means the council "might not have quite the legitimacy and buy-in I was hoping for." But he said the wrangling itself would build democracy: "People we have never met are coming out of the woodwork and demanding a say in what is going on."
Barnard reported from Iraq, and Stockman reported from Washington. Barnard can be reached at abarnard@globe.com
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