Iraq, still divided after three deadlines

Aug 29th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

Iraq's draft constitution has been finished and will be put to the voters in October. Sunni Arabs continue to object strenuously to the document, and say it could provoke a civil war

AFTER three deadlines and painful negotiations, Iraq finally has a draft constitution, endorsed by leaders of Iraq's Kurds and Shias. Iraq's president, Jalal Talabani (a Kurd), said in a ceremony on Sunday August 28th that only the Koran is perfect, but the constitution was “the first of its kind, written by representatives of important Iraqi factions”. But Sunni Arab leaders, who object to crucial provisions in the constitution, said the document was a failure and could provoke civil war.

Officially, the draft had been due on Thursday. But the negotiators took several more days to try—ultimately unsuccessfully—to reach consensus. Thursday night’s deadline came after a three-day extension the drafters had given themselves on Monday. And Monday’s deadline was itself an extension from the previous Monday. All of this delaying was in an attempt to get the Sunnis, who dominated Iraq under Saddam Hussein, on board. Many of the contentious issues had been settled by Thursday. For example, Islam is to be “a basic source” of Iraqi law, reflecting a compromise between religious Shias who wanted it to be the main source, and secular Iraqis (including most of the Kurds) who preferred to have weaker references to Islam.
Clerics will be allowed to serve on the supreme court, but they will not constitute a majority.

But while the religion issue has been settled, provisions in the constitution for a federal system of government remain unacceptable to the Sunnis. The draft hands considerable powers to the provinces. It also allows provinces to join together into regions. The Kurds have controlled an enclave in northern Iraq since the first Gulf War in 1991. The Sunnis accept that they will continue to do so, but they are much less relaxed about the potential ambitions of the Shias, who are the biggest ethnic group in Iraq by some way. Sunnis fear an Iraq dominated by a Shia super-region.

But since the Shias are a majority in Iraq, they would dominate any centralised government. So why are many Shias for federalism and many Sunnis for centralisation? One reason is oil revenues. The Kurdish-dominated north and the Shia-heavy south sit on nearly all of Iraq’s known oil and gas. Some Sunnis feared that federalism would cut them out of a fair share of this. Here, the Shias and Kurds compromised. The constitution calls for revenues from the country’s existing oilfields to be shared according to the population of each province. Revenue from new discoveries would belong to the province under which the oil lies. This was seen as the best possible split between the haves and the have-nots.

But Sunnis—and some of the Shias that follow Muqtada al-Sadr, a radical cleric—see other problems with federalism. Sunnis despise the Badr Forces, a militia allied to the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), one of the two main Shia parties in the current government. SCIRI is close to Iran; many of its leaders spent much of the Saddam era in the Islamic Republic next door. And the Badr Forces fought alongside Iran during the long Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Some observers worry that a Shia super-region in southern Iraq would be a foothold for Iranian influence.

So the constitutional deal struck between the Shias and Kurds has left the Sunni Arabs feeling coerced. “The streets will rise up,” predicted Salih Mutlak, one of their negotiators, over the proposed federal system. Indeed, on Friday thousands of Sunnis marched in Baquba against the constitution (as did thousands of Mr Sadr's Shia followers in eight cities including Baghdad).

A referendum on the constitution is expected to take place in October, in advance of general elections in December. If two-thirds of voters in at least three provinces reject the document, it will fail, and the general election will produce another transitional government, tasked with picking up the pieces and pushing through a new version. Sunni leaders are encouraging their followers to come to the polls—and more surprisingly, several militia groups, both Shia and Sunni, have been urging their supporters to do the same. This apparent willingness to fight the constitution at the ballot box, rather than with bombs, is a step in the right direction.

Sunnis are thought to have a majority in four provinces, but it is not clear whether they can achieve the necessary two-thirds majority in three. The Sunni provinces are also home to much of the current violence. If this prevents voters from turning out, the constitution will appear even more to the Sunnis like a product made almost entirely without their input. This would remove one of the rationales—pushed by the Bush administration—for setting the August deadline for drafting the document: that it would sap the Sunni insurgency that continues to take a toll on American troops and, in far greater numbers still, Iraqis.

With American nerves fraying, George Bush has his eye on the home front as well as Iraq itself. Just 34% of those answering a recent Newsweek poll approve of the president’s handling of the war. And a CBS poll found that 59% thought Iraq was not worth the loss of so many American lives. Even Mr Bush’s supporters are starting to wonder. “By any standard, we’re not winning [in Iraq],” said Chuck Hagel, a Republican senator believed to be nursing presidential ambitions.
The current constitutional exercise will be one of the key determinants of overall success or failure. If it works, Iraq may set a hopeful precedent for the entire Middle East, marking a big step forward in Mr Bush's campaign to spread democracy to the region. If it fails, it could mark the complete collapse of America's Iraqi experiment.

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