Repeating mistakes

by Michael Jansen

During his brief visit to Baghdad last Tuesday, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told appointees to the new Iraqi government to run the country efficiently and eschew patronage, and warned against instituting a purge of the country's army and police with the aim of ousting those who served under the Baathist regime.

While the outgoing interim government was plagued by mismanagement and corruption, former premier Iyad Allawi strove to induct into the security forces experienced former soldiers and policemen who lost their jobs in June 2003 when US Viceroy L. Paul Bremer disbanded these forces. Thanks to this policy, Iraq's security services now have on their books around 140,000 men either in service or in training, compared to some 400,000 before the war. Unless the forces retain all or most of these men, the US, which seeks to reduce its deployment from 150,000 to 105,000 by the end of the year, will have to maintain this level and, perhaps, even boost the number of troops in Iraq.

However, senior figures in the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), including Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari of the Islamist Dawa party, have repeatedly expressed their determination to root out former Baathists and those employed by them. Furthermore, Dr Ali Shahristani, another UIA legislator who was chosen to be deputy speaker of parliament, told 12 of the 17 Sunni deputies that they would not be given any posts because of their ties to the former regime. This vindictive attitude shows that the UIA is committed to the exclusion of experienced officials and military men because they held jobs in the administration and security services from 1963 when the Baath assumed power until it was toppled in 2003.

Even Rumsfeld, who ordered the sacking of the military in the first place, sees that this is a very short-sighted approach. But observers of the Iraqi scene should not be surprised. This is because even after the Jan. 30 election, Iraq continues to be run by a clique of politicians who lived abroad for ten, twenty or thirty years and returned once Washington effected regime change. The majority of the members of this clique served on the Governing Council where seats were allocated according to sect and ethnic background by Bremer in July 2003. These durable personalities also secured positions of influence in the interim government formed a year later.

All clique figures belong to the Shiite Alliance, dominated by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and Dawa, or the Kurdish bloc, comprising the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), headed by Massoud Barzani, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), led by Jalal Talabani. The Sunni community has been marginalised and sidelined.

Once the election results were out, the UIA, with 147 seats, and the Kurds, with 77, formed a consortium which not only takes all major decisions but also runs the show on a sectarian/ethnic communal basis. All seven appointments made so far have been according to ethnic or sectarian affiliation, regardless of qualifications.

On April 3, the first posts were filled by a Sunni, a Shiite and a Kurd. Hajem Hassani, a Sunni Turkoman who is a legislator on the list of former Sunni President Ghazi Yawer, was chosen to be speaker of parliament. His deputies were also named as Husseini Shahristani, the former nuclear scientist jailed by the Baath who is a confidant of Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and Arif Tayfur, a KDP official. At this time, the UIA said that Hassani and Yawer were the only two Sunnis it found acceptable outside the three on the Shiite list.

On April 6, parliament elevated Talabani to the presidency and confirmed two deputies. The first was Sunni tribal figure Yawer and the second was Shiite Islamist Adel Abdel Mahdi, a member of SCIRI who served as minister of finance in the last government and who is said to be very "close" to Washington and US oil companies seeking the privatisation of Iraq's energy sector. These three men make up the "presidency council" which, once sworn in, chose Jaafari as premier. He said he would be appointing at least two deputies, presumably a Sunni and a Kurd.

While the rest of the Cabinet remains to be named, the five major posts have already been allocated, with the Shiites taking finance, interior and oil, the Kurds getting foreign affairs, and the Sunnis being graciously granted defence (which is largely handled by the US military anyway). The other posts have also been divided up on a communal basis. Therefore, Jaafari's pledge to choose "technocrats and nationalists with a good clean record", was a public relations ploy only.

Posts are certain to be awarded according to communal affiliations. To make life more difficult, he must name women to 30 per cent of the posts on the basis of the communal quota. Although Sunnis are present in the threesomes and will have seats in the Cabinet, the community is not properly represented in the government.

As the UIA-Kurdish clique settled on appointments, 80 Sunni leaders gathered in Baghdad to nominate candidates they considered representative of the community. They put forward three names which were rejected. The senior Sunni secular figure, Dr Adnan Pachachi, who convened the meeting, said that the UIA's nominees were "not the choice of the Sunni Arabs". The imposition on the Sunni community of UIA-selected Sunnis and the exclusion by the UIA and the Kurds of anyone who had a Baathist past is certain to alienate already disaffected Sunnis who could swell the ranks of the resistance.

To make matters worse, the lack of transparency in the process of filling senior posts and the predominance of returnees without domestic constituencies could undermine the credibility of the new government. This could, in turn, diminish the legitimacy of the constitution which this government is supposed to draft in final form by Aug. 15. This could make things even more difficult for the Shiite-Kurdish clique to reach agreement on the issues of Kurdish autonomy, the fate of the oil-rich Kirkuk area, the role of Islamic law in the new Iraq, the future of Kurdish and Shiite militias which continue to operate in the north and south, and the status of women in Iraqi society.

Instead of putting in place people, laws and institutions dedicated to the emergence of a sectarian, pluralist, democratic Iraq, the Bush administration reverted to the communal model imposed on Lebanon four decades ago by France. Lebanon has already suffered two civil wars and is in the midst of a prolonged political crisis thanks to this model. Washington has all too obviously learnt nothing from the history of the 20th century. The US is, therefore, condemned to repeat the terrible mistakes of others.

This article was published in the Thursday, April 14, 2005 edition of the Jordan Times. It is used here with permission.