IRAQ: ELECTION AFTERMATH: Doubts cast on Allawi's vow to unite the country
Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad
IYAD ALLAWI, the Iraqi interim Prime Minister, called for unity between Iraqis yesterday, but in the wake of the election for the National Assembly they remain deeply divided. "Starting from today, I will begin a new dialogue to make sure that all Iraqis have a voice," Mr Allawi said as the interim government celebrated an unexpectedly high turnout at the polls on Sunday.
The success or failure of the National Assembly depends on whether it can meet voters' high expectations, said Dr Mahmoud Othman, who is sure to be a member of it because he is fourth on the list of Kurdish candidates.
Dr Othman, a veteran and highly respected politician, said a new government must be able to talk to the resistance, arrange a timetable for an American withdrawal and end the economic and social crisis in Iraq. He said: "If the new government is a photocopy of the old one, then that is not so good. The people expect change."
The make-up of the 275-member assembly will take time to emerge. In the election, Iraq was treated as one constituency in which each party that submitted a slate of candidates will be allocated seats in proportion to the percentage of the vote it received.
The three big winners are expected to be the Kurds, the list of Iyad Allawi, expected to attract many secular voters, and the so-called Shia list, created under the auspices of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the Shia spiritual leader.
Ghassan Attiyah, the Iraqi political scientist and writer, said it would be highly polarising if the Shia and the Kurds were dominant. This would further alienate the Sunni Arabs. The Kurds, themselves mostly Sunni, and the Shia have difficulty in agreeing common policies.
Dr Attiyah said: "If the Shia list has 140 seats, the Kurds 65 to 70 and Allawi with most of the rest it will not be good news. It would also help if the smaller parties win votes because then there will have to be compromises in sharing power."
It would be better if the Shia list got 70 to 75 seats, Mr Allawi 60 to 65 and the Kurds 60 to 65 and the rest to smaller groups, Mr Attiyah said. If the Shia list is denied an overwhelming victory the other two communities will be less worried.
Mr Allawi's party seemed to be gaining ground before the poll because he had portrayed himself as the only secular candidate likely to do well. This made him attractive to well-educated urban voters in Baghdad and Basra who fear the clerical parties. But Shia list leaders insist they swept the board in much of southern Iraq.
Dr Othman still thinks it would have been better if the poll had been delayed. The Sunni parties had also pleaded for this, saying they needed to persuade their community to take part. He says the Americans would not allow this.
It is unclear if Mr Allawi will survive as prime minister when the new assembly meets. It will elect a president and two vice-presidents who will in turn appoint a prime minister and ministers. But voters may bedisillusioned if they find the same old faces are in a new government.
The last months of the old government were marked by a worsening economic crisis: There are acute shortages of electricity, petrol, kerosene for heating and bottled gas for cooking. This has led to a rise in prices.
The insurgency is so extensive that although the election may be a setback to it there is no chance of it disappearing and every expectation that it will continue to grow.
The opponents of the Iraq war, France, Germany and Russia, hailed the elections as a success yesterday and, in a sign of warming transatlantic ties, pledged to back American efforts to restore stability.
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Independent (London) - January 31, 2005
Iraq Votes: A victory for the Shia majority may not mean a real transfer of power
PATRICK COCKBURN
"WHAT AN extraordinary election, quite extraordinary," said Adnan Pachachi, the elder statesman of Iraq and a man not easily impressed after seeing his country convulsed by war and dictatorship for half a century.
It is a strange affair. Not since the war which overthrew Saddam Hussein had there been such a gap between the reality of politics in Iraq and the picture presented by the US and British governments. The poll yesterday was portrayed as if Washington and London had finally been able to reach their goal of delivering democracy to Iraqis. In fact the US postponed elections to a distant future after the invasion of 2003.
The overthrow of Saddam Hussein had been so swift that the American administration thought it could rule Iraq directly with little Iraqi involvement. But in the autumn of 2003 the US made two unpleasant discoveries: The guerrilla attacks in Sunni districts of Iraq were increasing by the day. They were supposedly confined to "the Sunni triangle", a description with a comfortingly limited ring to it, but in reality an area larger than Britain.
The second development which Paul Bremer, the head of the US-run Coalition Provisional Authority, was slow to understand, was that an elderly Shia cleric living in an alleyway home in the holy city of Najaf had more influence than any of the former Iraqi exiles on the US payroll. In June 2003, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most influential Shiah leader, issued a fatwa or religious ruling saying that those who drew up Iraq's constitution must be elected, not nominated by the US and the Iraqi Governing Council whose members Washington had appointed. In November 2003, he issued a further ruling saying that the transitional government must be elected.
Shia leaders believed they had made a grave mistake after Britain defeated the Turkish army and occupied what became Iraq in the First World War. The Shia revolted against the British occupation in 1920 so Britain turned to the Sunni community to rule Iraq and the Sunni kept their grip on power under the monarchy, the Republic and the dictator.
The reason there was a poll yesterday was that the US, facing an increasingly intensive war against the five million Sunni, dared not provoke revolt by the 15 to 16 million Shia. The price the US paid was to have an election in which the Shia would show that they are a majority of Iraqis.
But will the election yesterday involve a real transfer of power to the Shia? Last June, Iraqi sovereignty was supposedly transferred to the US- appointed interim government of Iyad Allawi. The change was largely a mirage. The government still depends for its existence on the presence of 150,000 US troops.
The wall-to-wall media coverage of the election yesterday obscured several of the realities of political life in Iraq. The National Assembly now being elected will have limited powers. It is constituted so no single community can dominate the others. But, as in Lebanon, this may be a recipe for paralysis. The assembly must elect a president and two vice-presidents and they will in turn chose a prime minister and ministers. The successful candidate will be the person with the fewest enemies.
The Shia were not going to the polling stations for the pleasure of risking mortars and suicide bombers. Their leaders have told them they will obtain real power for the first time.
Some US commentators have wondered if Washington might not be able to hold Iraq or at least remain in covert control by relying on the Kurds and the Shia. Together they make up 80 per cent of the population. This is known as `the 20 per cent solution" whereby the US will be able to deal with a rebellion supported by the Sunni Arabs, 20 per cent of the population.
This policy is based on a misconception. The Sunni are resisting the US occupation in arms. The Shia have not joined this rebellion, though Muqtada Sadr and his Mehdi Army fought the US Marines for Najaf last August. A central feature of Iraqi politics is that since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the US has become steadily more unpopular in Iraq outside Kurdistan. This is true among the Shia as well as the Sunni. An opinion poll by Zogby International shows that the Sunni Arabs who want the US out now or very soon total 82 per cent. The proportion of Shia wanting the US to go is less than the Sunni but still overwhelming at 69 per cent. Shia religious leaders have been telling their followers to vote as the quickest way to end the occupation.
The enthusiasm with which so many Shia went to the polls is a double-edged weapon. They did so in the belief that their ballots would translate into power.
In the immediate future, the election changes little in Iraq. The world is full of parliaments duly elected by a free ballot but power stays elsewhere, with the army, the security services or, in the case of Iraq today, an occupying foreign power.