The end of Arab Iraq?

Salt, Jeremy

In October 2005 Iraqis voted on a constitution. The Kurds and Shi'a Muslims voted for it. But on the grounds that it could lead to the disintegration of Iraq as a unified state, most Arab Sunni Muslims voted against or boycotted the referendum. The vote fell just short of the two-thirds-majority vote against it required in three provinces for the constitution to fail (these provinces were predominantly Sunni Muslim, although the Turkmen minority did not like this constitution either). The document has the Bush administration's fingerprints all over it. Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador, shuttled between Kurdish and Shi'a leaders in the last stages of the negotiating process to make sure they got the details right. Adecentralized Iraq certainly suits the interests of the United States and Israel, where the break-up of Iraq into ethno-religious 'statelets' has been on the wishlist for decades.

The constitution begins with a preamble that refers to the suffering of the people under the Ba'athist government, tying in 'the suffering of the people of the western region where the terrorists and their allies sought to take hostages and prevent the people from participating in the elections and the establishment of a society of peace and brotherhood'. (It was in this western district that the United States launched a series of land and air attacks in September, attacks Sunni leaders have said were designed to prevent people from voting in sufficient numbers to gain the two-thirds-majority vote against the constitution.)

Since the advent of the Ba'ath as the governing party in the 1960s, Iraq had been one of the few Arab countries with a secular constitution. The new constitution has a religious base. Iraq is situated in the Islamic world and Islam is described as the official religion of the state and 'a basic source of legislation'. No law can be passed 'that contradicts the undisputed rules of Islam'. The rights of women and minorities are guaranteed in other articles but when the 'undisputed rules of Islam' are treated as a basic source of law it is clear that these may well be threatened in practice, depending on who interprets the rules and where and how they are applied. Because Islamic law is unlikely to be applied in the Kurdish north but will almost certainly form the basis of any Shi'a regional government, it is evident that not all Iraqis will live under the same laws.

The previous constitution treated Iraq as having two nationalities, Kurdish and Arab. By inference anyone who was not Kurdish was Arab. The new constitution describes Iraq as a multiethnic, multi-religious country, with an Arab people who 'are part of the Arab nation'. The document makes numerous references to the various ethnic and religious 'components' of Iraqi society without defining 'Arab people' any further. By splitting the people up into these segregated layers, it seems to suggest that Iraqis who are Kurdish, Turkmen, Shi'a or Christian cannot simultaneously be regarded as Arab. This is entirely inconsistent with the historical idea of the Arabs as a people. The Arab 'nation' is not based on religious or ethnic identity but a shared culture, history and, above all, language. To play with religion and ethnicity in the Middle East is to play with fire. The raw appeal to religious and ethnic chauvinism drives Iraq in the direction of 'Lebanonization'.

This apparent attempt to break down Iraq's Arab identity is reinforced by a federal structure based on a central government and regional governments of an ethnic or religious nature with strong executive, legislative and judicial powers of their own. The constitution allows two or more provinces to merge into one regional government. The Kurds already have theirs, formed from the amalgamation of the Irbil, Dohuk and Sulaimaniyya provinces. In time, the Shi'i and Sunni Muslims, left with no other option if they fail to obstruct the proposed constitution, can be expected to follow suit. The potential for disagreement between the centre and the regional governments, and between regions, will be great, inflamed by overlapping laws and different understandings of Iraq's national identity and interests.

The constitution puts Kurdish (spoken by fifteen to twenty per cent of the population) alongside Arabic (the lingua franca) as an official language of the state. All official correspondence will be issued in the two languages and there is a reference to the dual-language principle being applied to other realms 'such as currency bills, passports [and] stamps'. Other languages are to be regarded as official in the regions where they are spoken.

Article 9 deals with the composition of the Iraqi armed forces and the security services. They are to consist of 'the components of the Iraqi people, keeping in consideration their balance and representation without discrimination or exclusion'. In short, just like the Lebanese army, the Iraqi military is to be organized on the basis of ethnic or confessional distinctions. The same article prohibits the formation of militias outside the framework of the armed forces, yet in Article 129 the regional governments are given the authority to establish internal security forces 'such as police, security and regional guards'--in other words, separate militias in all but name. This provision would allow the Kurds to retain their 75 000-man army as a 'security force'.

The federal structure will consist of an executive, judiciary and bicameral parliament. The lower house (the Council of Representatives) will be elected on a four-year cycle. The powers and responsibilities of the upper house (the Council of Union) are not spelt out beyond its formation from 'representatives of regions and provinces to examine bills related to regions and provinces', so it will evidently function as the equivalent of a states-rights house. The powers of the executive are largely ceremonial. There is no provision for a presidential veto of legislation but the president will be able to ask parliament to withdraw its confidence in the government and can take over the responsibilities of the prime minister if the position becomes empty 'for any reason'.

The third part of the constitution sets out the powers of the judiciary and the fourth the powers of the federal authorities. These include responsibility for foreign affairs, national defence and trade. Oil and gas are described as being 'the property of the Iraqi people in all the regions and provinces'. The exploitation of 'current' fields will be carried out in co-operation with regional governments, leaving open the question of who would exploit and benefit from reserves not yet accessed.

Chapter Five sets out the power of the regional governments. Each will have legislative, executive and judicial functions and the right to amend federal laws in matters that do not impinge on the exclusive responsibilities of the federal government. It will be able to open its own offices in Iraqi embassies and diplomatic missions 'to follow up on cultural, social and local development affairs'. Those of the eighteen provinces that do not choose to form themselves into a region will have the right to their own governor, provincial council and 'independent finances'. At this point, decentralization is clearly beginning to sound like fragmentation. The constitution guarantees the administrative, political, cultural and educational rights of the 'various ethnicities' such as Turkmen, Chaldeans and Assyrians. These rights are to be regulated by laws that are yet to be written.

Article 150 in the final section of the constitution places short-term responsibility for the contested city of Kirkuk in the hands of the executive, that is, President Jalal Talabani, leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, until a census has been held in the city and 'other disputed areas' some time before 31 December 2007. Kirkuk has a mixed Kurdish, Sunni Muslim Arab, and Turkmen population. In the past two years the Kurds have set out to reverse the Arabization policies pursued by Saddam Hussein in northern Iraq. Tens of thousands of Sunni Muslim Arabs have been displaced as the region is ethnically 're-cleansed'. In Mosul and Kirkuk, confrontations between Arabs and Kurds have ended in arson, looting and killing. The Kurds are determined to include Kirkuk in their regional statelet and will be able to do so if the city can be shown to have a Kurdish majority when the census is held. Article 150 gives them more than two years to achieve their numbers, and virtually invites continuing ethnic turmoil.

How are we to read this constitution? Internally, it gives the Kurds, above all, what they want, just short of independence, and enables them to seek independence should Iraq collapse into civil war (assuming that Jalal Talabani and leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party Massoud Barzani can suppress their mutual antipathy long enough to reach that point). Religiously, the Shi'a are bought off with the right to govern themselves in accordance with religious law.

The proposed constitution relocates Iraq in its political and historical context. The emphasis on religious and ethnic difference within a decentralized federal structure sounds good but undoubtedly does carry within it the seeds of Iraq's disintegration as a unitary state. Syria, which is already feeling the Bush administration's hot breath on its neck, would be vulnerable to the same kind of constitutional tinkering: it has a small but dominant Alawi minority in the north, a substantial Druze minority in the south, and an overall Sunni Muslim majority. The Syrians have already been through this once, with the French, who broke the country up into ethno-religious statelets and autonomous zones when given the mandate in the 1920s. Their purpose was to rule by dividing. In US eyes, behind the rhetoric of decentralization, freedom and democracy, is the Iraqi constitution intended to serve any other purpose?

Both Talabani and Barzani have said they see no difficulty in establishing relations with Israel once a new government is elected. Israel is looking not just to open diplomatic relationships but to reopen the pipeline from the oilfields of northern Iraq to Haifa, closed during the 1948 war in Palestine. The rise of a Kurdistan that will be independent in all but name, opens up a range of geostrategic possibilities for both Israel and the United States. Their activities in northern Iraq are being closely monitored in Ankara and other regional capitals. In the 1990s, Israel and Turkey were moving in the direction of strategic alliance (pushed very strongly by the Turkish military) but since the election victory five years ago of the Muslim integriste Justice and Development Party (AK Partisi) the relationship has cooled. The government has taken a strong stance against Israel's violations of international law and human rights in the Occupied Territories: last year Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan described the assassination of the Hamas spiritual mentor, Shaikh Ahmad Yassin, as an act of state terror.

Turkey's increasing independence displeases the Bush administration. Normalized relations with Iran and Syria, underlined by the state visit of President Necdet Sezer to Damascus earlier this year, received ventilated opposition from the US ambassador to Ankara. Turkey refused to be sucked into the war on Iraq: its parliament voted down a proposition to provide the United States with the access and troop support it needed to open a second front. Polls have shown that more than eighty per cent of its people remain opposed to the war. Popular and parliamentary opposition on legal and humanitarian grounds was compounded by US land and air attacks on Turkmen cities, such as Tal Afar, and Washington's questionable promotion of Kurdish independence. Turks link the rise of a Kurdish state-in-being in northern Iraq with the revival of PKK (now Kongra-Gel) militancy in south-eastern Turkey. Both the Kurdish regional government and the Bush administration have failed to respond to Turkey's requests to co-operate in sealing the border.

In the past eighteen months the Kurds have also been active in Iran, through the Party for a Free Life (PEJAK), and in Syria. This simultaneous surge in Kurdish militancy in three countries can scarcely be regarded as coincidental. According to veteran American journalist Seymour Hersh, writing in The New Yorker last year, 'Israeli intelligence and military operatives are now quietly at work in Kurdistan, providing training for Kurdish commando units and most important in Israel's view, running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria'. (1) Some Kurds are even beginning to identify Kurdistan and Israel as small ethno-religious states that should stand together in a hostile environment. Northern Iraq is clearly turning into a new strategic pivot in the region, to be used for purposes that make both Turks and Arabs nervous.

The balance of legislative, judicial and military power in the new Iraq will lie heavily with the Shi'a, simply by virtue of the number of votes. It is for this reason that the distinguished Lebanese Shi'a scholar and activist Sayyid Hussein Fadlallah called on Iraqi Shi'a to make sure they cast their votes. The decision of the United States to support the promulgation of a constitution that gives such power to the Shi'a is curious. A Shi'a-dominated government would not agree to the establishment of diplomatic relations with Israel, whatever Jalal Talabani thinks, let alone agree to the reopening of the Haifa pipeline. Such a government would be sympathetic to Hamas and Hizbullah and would establish close relations with both Syria and Iran. As it is scarcely conceivable that the United States and Israel do not realize this, they must have something else in mind behind the formal attempt to reconstruct Iraq in the name of freedom and democracy. If there is a Plan A there must be a Plan B, perhaps one in which the United States is ready to trade off the rise of a Shi'a state in the south for the emergence of a Kurdish state in the north that can be linked with Jordan and Israel. The Kurds will get protection and the United States and Israel will get cheap oil and a new strategic base of operations. Perhaps it will turn out that Plan B was Plan A all along.

(1) See S. M. Hersh, 'Plan B', The New Yorker, 28 June 2004.