Break-out group 1
Inter-community relations and sectarian politics
Saturday 8 December 2007, 3.30 pm
CHAIRMAN
Dr Mamoun Fandy
Senior Fellow for Gulf Security, IISS
OPENING REMARKS
Muhiddeen Al Dhabi
Deputy Foreign Minister, Yemen
Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu
MP of Antalya, Vice President, Foreign Affairs Department, AK Party, Turkey
Dr Sadoun Al Dulame
Former Defence Minister, Iraq
Dr Bandar Al Aiban
Chairman, Foreign Affairs Committee, Majlis Al Shura, Saudi Arabia
Wafaa Bassim
Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Egypt
Remarks made in break-out groups may not be attributed to the individuals who made them. This rule is designed to encourage free discussion.
The break-out group on inter-community relations and sectarian politics heard initial presentations from the perspectives of Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey and Iraq. The discussion ranged over the history of sectarian and communal conflict, touching on the former Yugoslavia, Spain, Northern Ireland, Turkey and Lebanon. There were also extensive accounts of the complicated situations in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. But the focus of the discussion settled, naturally enough, on the Sunni–Shia divide in Iraq, and its possible knock-on effects in the wider region.
An Iraqi participant argued for a paradigm shift, away from sectarianism and in favour of tribalism. Despite some recent improvements in the security situation, he said, Iraq and its people are still greatly threatened. US forces have had some success in dealing with sectarian violence, but long-term prospects are unclear. Iraqi forces cannot do any better – it is, indeed, difficult for security forces to do their job because they are riven by the same sectarian divide as the country at large. The sectarian divide will continue and will be a ‘political way of life’ for as long as ‘religious parties dominate’. Democracy, he said, ‘is an illusion – it means nothing when run by sectarian leaders’.
Yet the recent American policy of supporting the role of Sunni tribes in fighting al-Qaeda – part of the so-called ‘Anbar Awakening’ – has been a very positive step. State-building strategies for Iraq should work with this tribalism, promoting it over sectarianism and undercutting those political parties that prefer to mobilise on the basis of sect.
A British participant worried that strategies based on tribalism could store up long-term trouble. Doesn’t tribalism, like sectarianism, also weaken and divide the state? The Iraqi replied that he believed the tribe to be something more basic – ‘before the state’ – but not in opposition to it. ‘I meet tribes from the south who speak in an Arab spirit, not a Shia spirit. I meet tribes from the west who speak in an Arab spirit, not a Sunni one.’ He conceded, however, that the Kurds, by definition, would not be part of this Arabic state-building. ’Kurdistan is different from the rest of Iraq. Iraq cannot be a state unless it is an Arabic state.’ He added, ‘Kurds one day will have a state of their own’.
There was discussion of the role of neighbouring countries in taking sectarian sides. An American asked whether the problem of neighbours could also be part of the solution. Could an external solution be crafted? No one was able to answer this question with any degree of finality, but an Iraqi did warn that the US government tends to be selective about whom it accuses of meddling. ‘Let’s be honest’, he said. ‘The people who are friends of America – we don’t talk about their interventions. Those who are not friends of America, we do talk about their interventions.’
In more general terms, there was a lively discussion about whether it made sense to look at clashes in Iraq and its region in terms of the Sunni–Shia paradigm. Some suggested that the paradigm is over-emphasised. At times of crisis, said one participant, people go back to basic identities – and the region has had plenty of crises. In this sense the return to sectarian identity is artificial, or at least ‘recovered’ in a way that is far from inevitable. Even the Arab–Israeli conflict, he argued, is not essentially a conflict between Muslims and Jews, but rather a conflict over land.
The subject of Israel–Palestine was raised often enough that European and American participants questioned its relevance. They acknowledged that the suffering of the Palestinians and the impasse over a two-state solution were huge problems demanding concerted effort towards a solution. But did it make sense to connect the issue to every other problem in the Middle East, including sectarian conflict in Iraq? Arabs in the group had three answers to this challenge. First, they said, the plight of the Palestinians was a hugely painful symbolic issue – a symbol of injustice and humiliation on the ‘Arab street’ – which compromised the legitimacy of Arab governments and, especially, their relationships with the United States. Second, more specifically, it was a propaganda gift to the Iranian regime, which uses it to mobilise discontent and stir radicalism among Arab populations, Sunni as well as Shia, and generally to bolster its position as the rejectionist state in the region. Finally, the unresolved conflict can spill over into neighbouring states in ways that are hard to predict. In Lebanon, for example, Hizbullah originally drew strength from opposition to Israel’s occupation of the south, but has gone on to be an important – and disruptive – vehicle of Shia radicalism. ‘Will the creation of Palestine solve all Arab problems?’ asked one Arab participant rhetorically. ‘Of course we cannot say that. But problems become much bigger the longer [the conflict] is not solved. In this way, the Palestine–Israel problem is huge and important.’
Sectarian divides are not new, so the question arises as to why they are sharpening now. An Indian participant recalled that when India became independent, no one thought it could survive – it was expected to fragment along ethnic and sectarian lines. But this didn’t happen. The democratic state played a basic role, as did secular politics. In general, he argued, whenever a religious party comes to power, the threat of fragmentation increases. Whenever a secular party rules, things improve. A Turkish delegate picked up this theme, saying the prerequisite for democratic unity in Turkey was the secular state. He acknowledged that this was not a realistic option for most Muslim countries, but argued nonetheless that ‘if democracy is a goal, secularism should also be a goal’.
