'Conflicting agendas are pulling Iraq apart'

by Michael Jansen

Few observers of the Iraqi scene were surprised when the country's transitional national assembly adjourned in confusion on Tuesday after failing to choose a speaker.

The differences between the sectarian and ethnic blocs are so great that it is not even certain that legislators will be able to reach a consensus on a candidate before the 275-member legislature reconvenes for its third session on April 3. This means that Iraq is in a constitutional crisis even before the new constitution can be written, because lawmakers have not observed the time frame laid down in the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), adopted last spring.

According to that schedule, they should have appointed, by now, a speaker and elected a president and two vice presidents who should have chosen a prime minister. He, in turn should have selected a Cabinet. Parliament should also have selected members for a commission which would draft a new constitution by Aug. 15. This document should be approved by referendum on Oct. 15 and a full-term parliament is slated to be elected on Dec. 15. But two months into the ten-and-a-half-month term of this temporary assembly nothing has been accomplished.

Legislators argue that a Sunni should be given the post, but cannot agree on a candidate. The Shiite United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), with a majority of 148 seats, can impose its nominee, Fawaz Jarba, but most of the 17 Sunni deputies favour Adnan Janabi, a former minister. Unfortunately, he is an ally of outgoing interim Premier Iyad Allawi who has refused to join the government. Therefore, Janabi is considered out of the running by the Shiites and Kurds, who have two-thirds of the seats. The Kurds back interim Industry Minister Hajem Hassani. Sunni deputies have not been able to put forward an alternative to Janabi.

The crisis erupted on Monday when interim President Ghazi Yawer refused to take up the post and said he prefers to become one of the two vice presidents, on the ground that he would be better able to serve the underrepresented Sunni community. Eighty-five per cent of Sunnis did not vote in the Jan. 30 poll because of insecurity in the four Sunni-majority provinces or due to a boycott called by Sunni leaders.

The assembly's failure to perform its initial task, selection of a speaker, is causing postponement of the election of a president, two vice presidents and prime minister that is to form a new government. Until the government is in place, parliament will not be able to appoint a commission to draft a new constitution. This is set to be completed by Aug. 15 so that Iraqis can vote on it in a referendum set for Oct. 15. Legislators attending Tuesday's gathering predicted that it is impossible to meet these deadlines. This means that foreign forces could remain in Iraq much longer than anticipated in the TAL.

Even if the speakership is settled by the weekend, there are other obstacles to a smooth transition between the out-of-date US-appointed interim government and the elected transitional government. The Shiite Alliance and the Kurdish bloc have agreed that Jalal Talabani, head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, should be president and Ibrahim Jaafari, leader of the Shiite Islamist Dawa movement, should be premier. But these nominations are under contestation on two fronts.

Talabani's traditional rival, Massoud Barzani of the Kurdish Democratic Party, feels he has been marginalised. To reassert his influence, he has put forward demands for an additional post in the new Cabinet and stepped up pressure on the UIA to agree to the settlement of Kurds in the city of Kirkuk (which has a two-thirds majority Arab-Turkoman population and a one-third Kurdish population), the incorporation of Kirkuk and its oil fields into the Kurdish region, and retention of the Kurdish peshmerga militia as the security force in this region. For eight long weeks, Shiites and Kurds have been squabbling over these issues and it is not clear whether or not they have found a formula which would be acceptable to the two camps. Although the Kurds are well aware that Iraq's 80-85 per cent Arab majority flatly rejects their demands, the Kurdish bloc is pressing hard to have them accepted ahead of the vote for the presidential council because, once this is installed, the Shiite Arabs can veto the demands by a simple majority vote.

Secular Arab and Kurdish legislators argue that Jaafari, an Islamist layman, should not become prime minister because he would use this position to promote an Islamist agenda, including the adoption of the Islamic law for the regulation of personal affairs such as marriage, divorce and inheritance, thereby depriving Iraqi women of the legal equality they have enjoyed for half a century. They see the adoption of Islamic law as the first step towards the transformation of Iraq into an Islamic republic dominated by the Shiite clergy.

Furthermore, there is deep disagreement over the allocation of oil, foreign, finance, interior and defence ministries. Barzani insists that Kurds should have two of these ministries, plus the deputy premiership which he says should have the same powers as the premier. Since one of these ministries is meant to be filled by a Sunni, this would leave the UIA with only two of these ministries, although it has twice as many seats as the Kurdish bloc. While Sunnis want interior, the Shiites are prepared to give them defence.

US President George Bush shrugged off Iraq's acute political crisis as the growing pains of democracy. But responsible analysts argue that the ongoing crisis was unavoidable because Washington toppled the secular Arab regime without making detailed plans for the succession. They predicted that US intervention would produce a chaotic political situation because of the long-standing demand of the Kurds for autonomy-verging-on-independence and the half-century old aspiration of the Shiite clerical hierarchy, which founded Dawa in 1957-58, for a state governed by the tenets of Islam.

These conflicting agendas are, at present, pulling Iraq apart and could lead to civil conflict because the two major camps which emerged from the Jan. 30 election have very different ideas about the sort of polity the "new Iraq" should become.

This article appeared in the Thursday, March 31, 2005 edition of the Jordan Times. It is used here with permission.