Electoral portents
On 15 October, Iraqis went to the ballot box for the second time since regime change. On this occasion, they were being asked to vote for or against a permanent constitution. Turnout, at 63%, was higher than at the general election held ten months earlier. In addition, the political violence that has dogged the country since the removal of Saddam Hussein abated temporarily to allow the vote to take place, in what was for Iraq comparative calm. With 78.4% voting for the permanent constitution, the referendum appeared to deliver resounding backing for a democratic Iraq and for the political parties who were involved in drafting the document. However, beyond the headline voting figures, the constitution became the focus of an acrimonious and increasingly sectarian debate about how politics in post-Saddam Iraq were to be organised. These matters bear crucially on the run-up to legislative elections scheduled for the end of this year.
The Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), drawn up under the stewardship of Paul Bremer, the head of the former Coalition Provisional Authority, set out the road-map to guide Iraq from regime change and occupation to a fully democratic government. The process has unfolded within the confines of a very tight timetable. It started with the vote for a constituent assembly in January 2005 and will end on 15 December with elections for a new parliament with full constitutional powers. The main role of the constituent assembly was to provide the personnel to draft the permanent constitution in a consensual and transparent manner. This drafting process was designed by American and British diplomats to be a vehicle for communal and political reconciliation. However, the January elections were boycotted by those who opposed the occupation. This meant that Iraq’s minority Sunni community – thought to make up 20% of the population – was largely absent from the new assembly. After the vote, a small number of unelected Sunni politicians were delegated onto the committee, but this only increased the acrimony and sectarian nature of arguments that dogged the drafting process. After weeks of stalemate, the document was presented to the electorate without the agreement of the Sunni members of the committee. Yet the TAL stipulated that the constitution could not pass if two-thirds of the voters of any three of Iraq’s 18 provinces voted against it. This gave those opposed to the constitution the incentive to build an electoral coalition against the document. On 15 October, two-thirds of the voters in Anbar and Salahudden provinces rejected the constitution and 55.8% of Nineva also voted against it. Anbar, Salahudden and Nineva are thought to have Sunni majorities, highlighting the sectarian dynamics behind the voting. This impression was bolstered by very high votes in favour of the constitution in Kurdish areas like Dohuk and Erbil and across the Shia south of the country.
Coalescing coalitions
Iraq now faces another election campaign for a new parliament. The elections on 15 December will be held under a new set of regulations designed to bring greater diversity to the new chamber. Some 240 members will be directly elected from Iraq’s 18 provinces in accordance with how many registered voters each province has. Another 35 will be allocated on the basis of the total number of votes cast, in an attempt to increase the representation of smaller parties. The elections will be dominated by at least three broad groupings.
The most important of these is the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), which seeks to represent Iraq’s Shia community and won 140 of the parliament’s 275 seats in January’s election. The UIA is dominated by the Iranian-backed Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and the Dawa Islamic Party.
However, it has now widened its appeal by joining forces with the radical nationalist Moqtada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi army has twice led uprisings against the American-led occupation. A major source of UIA popularity in January’s election derived from the backing it received from Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most senior Shia religious authority. Sistani has refused to support the UIA in December’s election and has pledged to remain aloof from the poll. Combined with growing resentment at the government’s inability to deal with the insurgency or improve the lives of the majority of its constituents, this means that the UIA vote may drop in December. It opens up the possibility that a rival Shia alliance, the Independent Iraqi Capabilities Bloc, might contest the elections. Those involved in creating this new group claim to have a stronger indigenous base in the country, born of the fact that they did not spend many years in exile and have not been tainted by the repeated allegations of corruption that have been levelled at the current UIA-dominated government. However, even with a sustained challenge from rivals and in the face of growing popular alienation, the UIA looks set to gain the largest number of seats, and possibly a majority, in December. As the major player in the government, it has access to resources, and SCIRI’s militia (the Badr brigade) has become the dominant force in the security apparatus across the south of the country. This gives the UIA both the money and organisational capacity that its rivals lack.
The second coalition contesting the elections is formed by the Kurdish Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. The Kurdish alliance did well in January’s vote, benefiting from the Sunni boycott, but is expected to gain fewer seats (between 40 and 50) next time. It may seek to form a post-election alliance with two of the other broadly secular coalitions. The first of these has been put together by the former prime minister, Ayad Allawi, in conjunction with Ghazi al-Yawar, one of the country’s vice-presidents, the septuagenarian politician Adnan Pachachi and the head of the Iraq Communist Party, Hamid Mousa. Their aim is to rally voters across the sectarian and religious divide who have been alienated from the UIA’s overt promotion of an exclusive Shia identity. Although Allawi’s previous coalition had heavy US backing, money and advice, it only gained 14% of the vote in January. This time, Allawi will not be the sitting prime minister with all the benefits of incumbency. And he remains the focus of a great deal of resentment for his backing of the US military’s assault on Falluja.
The other coalition attempting to appeal to a broadly secular vote has been formed by Ahmad Chalabi. He withdrew from the UIA after he was reportedly offered only three places on their list of candidates. Chalabi has forged an alliance with a number of small parties, but they are not expected to do well in the election. If his campaign does not gain momentum it is possible that he may try to rejoin the UIA on more favourable terms than those he was offered in October.
Overall, those attempting to build a secular electoral platform face a difficult struggle. In the aftermath of state collapse, ordinary Iraqis have had to survive as best they can. The local organisations and militias that have stepped into the security vacuum have used religious identity to justify their presence within politics and society. These communal and sectarian dynamics, born of post regime-change instability, have restructured Iraqi politics, the identity of large sections of the population, and consequently voting behaviour. Outside of the comparatively stable and prosperous Kurdish areas of northern Iraq, those seeking to rally a broadly secular, professional middle-class vote have been greatly hampered by the violence, insecurity and increasing poverty that have become the dominant factors of everyday life.
The Sunni minority
The final collection of political organisations is that seeking to represent the Sunni community. These organisations face the problem that the Sunni community itself has largely failed to coalesce around any one group or individual, and is at odds about whether to take part in a US-supervised election.
The Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP) has formed an alliance with a group called the Iraqi People’s Gathering in an attempt to appeal to religious Sunnis. However, the IIP’s popularity was undermined by its involvement in the Iraqi Governing Council, the organisation created by coalition authorities to liaise with society. The IIP is also tainted in the eyes of many Sunnis by its last-minute support of the constitution, while the vast majority of organisations and voters within the Sunni community rejected it. These twin problems leave space for a rival coalition to be built on a more militant, secular and nationalist platform that unambiguously rejects the US presence in the country. This would seek to gain the support of Harith al-Dhari, the head of the influential Association of Muslim Scholars.
Yet, any group attempting to mobilise the Sunni community faces two major problems. The first is that those involved in the insurgency who do not favour participation will deploy violence and intimidation to reduce voter turnout in Sunni areas. Secondly, those groupings that have consistently rejected the occupation have yet to decide what their policy is towards the coming poll. Sunni voters will therefore be divided, with a large number failing to vote either because of a boycott or because of fear of reprisals. This could lead to those groups contesting the elections in the name of the Sunni community gaining as few as 50 seats.
Deep fault lines
The December elections will mark the final event in the road map set out by the US administration to guide Iraq from occupation to democratic government. However, in the aftermath of the state collapse that greeted regime change, Iraq has been dominated by violence and uncertainty. The debates that surrounded the drafting of the constitution were riven by the overt deployment of divisive rhetoric. Major political groupings, both in government and in opposition, are increasingly defining themselves and appealing to their prospective constituencies in a militantly communalist language. The last six months have also seen an upsurge in murders being carried out with a distinctly sectarian motive. Although radical Sunni jihadists originally drove these trends, militias and death squads on both sides of the sectarian divide – those aligned with the insurgency and the government – now carry them out.
This is not yet a ‘classic’ civil war with coherent military groupings representing rival communities. In Iraq, the Shia, Sunni and Kurdish communities are still internally divided, with opinion polls showing a strong popular commitment to a unitary Iraqi identity and a deep distaste for sectarianism. But the grave danger is that December’s election, held in a country still wracked by violence and insecurity and contested along overtly sectarian lines, might hasten Iraq’s slide into civil war instead of putting it on the road to reconciliation, state building and stability.
