Elections in Iraq
Amir Taheri (archive)
February 29, 2004 | Print | Send
Invited by Washington to have a look at things in Iraq, the United Nations has just reported its most crucial finding: it would not be possible to hold a general election for the foreseeable future.
The UN’s verdict is certain to be used by the US-led coalition as an argument in their ongoing discussions with those Iraqis who insist that, despite terrorist attacks, the country must be given a chance to make its views known.
With the June deadline for the transfer of power to an Iraqi transition government now around the corner, a rising tempo of political posturing on all sides can be expected. Those who have failed to find a popular constituency are likely to paint a grim picture, with emphasis on lack of security, to seek a prolongation of direct rule by the US-led coalition. Some are calling for the Governing Council to be transformed into a permanent organ of state. Others want it expanded and made into an ersatz parliament.
Still others, however, want the Americans and their allies to leave as fast as they can. These are individuals and parties that have been able to fill part of the gap left by the collapse of the Ba’athist regime. They are concerned that a longer American presence may result in the spread of ideas and the establishment of rules that would prevent them from imposing their brands of politics on the newly-liberated nation.
The noisiest of these are the so-called Islamists, some of whom have just had a verbal spat with L Paul Bremer, the Coalition’s “Pasha” in Baghdad.
It all started with a couple of obscure mullahs demanding that Islam be declared the “foundation” of the future Constitution. The demand was echoed by one or two members of the Governing Council , presumably for want of better things to do.
Bremer, a normally cool man who thinks twice before he makes a move, was provoked into a hasty reaction, asserting that he would not sign such a constitution.
The spat looks like a scene from the theatre of the absurd. The mullahs who made the initial noises represent no one except their own images in a mirror. Bremer, for his part, was unwise to brandish a veto that belongs to the people of Iraq.
Do the Iraqis want an Islamist regime?
The question is pertinent and must be debated.
At least five major public opinion polls conducted since the liberation show that support for such a regime hovers around three to four per cent. In one poll, the question whether an Iranian-style Islamic Republic would be suitable for Iraq drew a positive response from only one per cent of the respondents.
None of Iraq’s dozen or so political parties- from the atheist leftists to religious Shi’ites- demands the creation of an Islamic state. Nor can one find a single prominent Iraqi intellectual who would wish to establish a religious regime. Even the Shiite mullahs, starting with their primus inter pares, the Grand Ayatollah Ali-Muhammad Sistani, are not making such a demand.
Anyone with some knowledge of Iraqi Shiism would know that the last thing that Iraq’s Shiites want is a regime like that of the Khomeinists in Iran which, after a quarter of a century of terror and war, is now in deep, possibly terminal, crisis.
The Iraqi Shiites’ rejection of the Khomeinist model is based on the Shiite belief that creating “a perfect state” is possible only under the Hidden Imam, a Messiah like figure who is supposed to return to prepare mankind for the end of the world.
In the absence of the Hidden Imam, all governments are bound to be imperfect, and open to criticism. Mixing religion with politics could sully the former and derail the latter.
In 1979, one of Sistani’s foremost masters, the late Grand Ayatollah Abol-Qassem Mussawi Khoi, put it like this: “An Islamic state cannot be imposed by fiat; it can come into being only as the natural consequence of the Divine Will as expressed in the coming of the Mahdi (i.e. the Hidden Imam.)”
Like the overwhelming majority of their co-religionists in Iran and elsewhere, Iraqi Shiites regard Khomeinism as an aberration, an innovation (bed’ a) which violates the basic tenets of the duodecimal imamist faith.
Iraqi Shiites opposition to a religious state, however, is not solely doctrinal. It is also dictated by practical politics.
Though Shiites account for some 60 per cent of the Iraqis, they cannot be regarded as a monolithic bloc even on issues of faith. Like other Shiites they are divided into dozens of ways (tariqats) and countless forms of allegiance (taqlid). As the Iranian experience has illustrated, it is impossible for Shiites to agree on a single political reading of Islam. But even if such a single reading were to be imposed by conjecture, as was the case in Iran in 1979, it would not be sustainable for long. The Iraqi situation is more complex still because 40 per cent of the country’s population are not Shiites and have no reason to accept any Shiite political reading of Islam.
Any attempt at imposing an Iraqi version of Khomeinism would lead to civil war and the dismemberment of the country.
As the sole organising principle of political life, religion is unworkable outside small, ethnically and culturally uniform, and isolated communities, which Iraq is not. All this does not mean that Islam should be scripted out of the future Iraqi constitution. Some 95 per cent of Iraqis, including those who describe themselves as “humanists”, acknowledge Islam as a key element in their existential reality. Thus there is no harm in reflecting that fact in the new constitution, much like what the Afghans have done in theirs.
Even the thorny issue of the “ shariah” ( religious law) need not cause frictions. No modern society can be policed with the “ shariah” as its only legal framework. There is not a single Muslim country -including Iran, the Sudan and Saudi Arabia- where the “shariah” is the only law. Indeed, it cannot be because all Muslim states are signatories of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and hundreds of international treaties that are not of “Islamic” origin. (That most Muslim governments violate or ignore the declaration and the treaties in question is due to their despotic nature, not their love of Islamic jurisprudence.)
There is no reason why the “ shariah” should not be mentioned as one of the sources of law in Iraq. In practical terms this means that where the “ shariah” is in conformity with reason, modern ethics, and international agreements, it will be applied. Where it is not, it will be set aside. The only effective way to settle these matters is through free and fair elections. Nowhere has an Islamist party advocating the “shariah” come to power through the ballot box. Even the most moderate Islamist parties, that, like the Justice and Development Party in Turkey, deny any religious identity, have never won a majority of votes anywhere in the Muslim world. (In Turkey’s 2002 general election the Justice and Development Party collected almost 35 per cent of the votes and formed the government. But let us not forget that 65 per cent of the electorate voted against it.)
In Malaysia the Islamists have polled between 11 and 13 per cent in local and general elections in the past four decades.
In Jordan and Kuwait, the only Arab countries where elections of acceptable standards are held, the Islamists’ share of the vote has varied between 15 and 22 per cent.
In Algeria in 1991, the Islamists won more than 50 per cent of the votes in the first round of a general election. But this was largely because all democratic parties had boycotted the poll, leaving the Islamists alone against the discredited and corrupt one-party establishment that had led the nation into an impasse. In a normal voters turnout the share of the Islamists would have amounted to no more than 21 per cent.
As we have just witnessed in Iran, the Islamists, even when firmly established in power, are always afraid of free elections.
This is why when Iraqi Islamists call for elections, the wisest thing to do is to call their bluff.
Iraq needs free and fair elections to choose a transitional government that would write a draft constitution for submission to a referendum.
It may be difficult to hold elections by the end of June, the deadline set by Washington. But there is no reason why the formation of a provisional government should not be accompanied with the announcement of a timetable for the election of a constituent assembly and, later, a referendum to approve a new constitution.
Just as the light of day turns Nosferatu into dust, the most effective way of killing the Islamist “un-dead” is free elections.
Last year the people of Iraq clamoured for liberation. This year they are demanding elections, not to risk their newly won freedom but to make sure it is safe against all would-be despots, Ba’athist or Islamist.
Amir Taheri is an Iranian author of ten books on the Middle East and Islam. He's reachable through www.benadorassociates.com.
©2003 Amir Taheri |
