Pan-Shiite Alliances in Diyala and Salahaddin: Sectarianism on the Rise in Iraq before the April 2013 Elections?

After having approved the political parties allowed to run in the April 2013 local elections, the Iraqi elections commission IHEC keeps updating its list of coalitions as the various parties join to form greater alliances.

The current list is very preliminary, especially since the leading Shiite Islamist parties have not shown their hands as regards what they will do south of Baghdad (where they use to fight against each other given the Shiite majority population). However, their alliances for two governorates with Shiite minority populations – Diyala and Salahaddin – have now been declared. In both provinces, they will run on a joint Shiite sectarian ticket including everything from ISCI and Badr via Daawa to Sadr.

For anyone who is worried about sectarian tendencies in Iraqi politics, this development should give reason for concern. Suffice to say that back in the provincial elections in 2009, when the climate in Iraqi politics was considered at its most non-sectarian in the post-2003 era, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki ran separately in both places. Not only that, he played a role in challenging the other Shiites (chiefly ISCI) when the battle for the governor position in those provinces got going during the months following the election.

To those who are interested in an Iraqi politics defined in non-sectarian terms, the ups and downs of the relationship between the central government in Baghdad and the Kurdsih federal government in Erbil is not as worrisome as many analysts claim. As long as both parties stay within bounds, there is hope for a settlement, and the dispute itself often forces Iraqis in the central-government areas to rethink the relationship between their sectarian and national identities. On the other hand, what is happening in Diyala and Salahaddin regarding these new coalitions seems like miniature replays of 2005, when Iran played a key role in bringing together a unified Shiite coalition at the national level. Still, the most interesting part will be to see what coalitions the Shiite parties will form south of Baghdad over the coming weeks.

Iraq Adopts the Sainte-Lague Method for Its Election Law

Until recently, a major problem regarding the forthcoming (April 2013) Iraqi local elections was a ruling by the federal supreme court which had deemed the current election law unconstitutional for its seat distribution formula.

Previous revisions had failed to deal with the problem, but today it was solved. The Iraqi parliament voted to adopt changes to the seat distribution formula, taking it from a variant of the largest remainder principle to a formula that gives somewhat better hope for smaller parties: The Sainte-Lague method. The differences between the two systems had been accentuated under the former arrangement since only parties that had already won seats had the chance to win the “leftover” seats following the initial distribution. Sainte Lague is a method which is common in Scandinavia and Germany and several other countries.

Hopefully, this latest change will not only satisfy the Iraqi federal supreme court, but also provide some better chances for smaller parties to gain representation come election time in April next year. A major problem in past Iraqi elections has been the large number of wasted votes cast for parties that fell just short of the thresholds for winning seats.

Meanwhile, there are conflicting reports regarding the withdrawal of the bloc of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki from the session today just after the passage of the election law amendments. Some sources claim it had to do with unhappiness with the new election law; others claim it had to do with the next item on the parliamentary agenda – the contested federal supreme court bill. It will be interesting to see which explanation is correct. It seems logical that a big party should dislike a change for better representation, although the call for a change by Maliki’s friends at the supreme court had been quite clear. On the other hand, if rumours that State of Law wanted to go further with Islamizing the federal supreme court are true (some sources claim it insisted on a stronger clerical veto), it would mean a strengthening of the religious tendency that Maliki specifically sought to downplay in the last local elections in 2009. Whichever interpretation is correct, following the initial approval of political entities, the process of joining parties into coalitions for the April elections is now slowly beginning to get underway and will likely provide the best answers about the overall direction of Iraqi politics.

Given the limited coverage of Iraq, I have decided to do my best to continue to produce analyses relating to the various stages of the local elections in Iraq in April 2013 as a public service despite the massive and illegal police operation that I have been subjected to since February 2011 and the apparent attempt by the Norwegian government to kill me. Coalition-forming, candidate lists, constitutional issues, de-Baathification, the results themselves, and the seating of the new provincial councils will be covered to the best of my ability as I also did in 2009. If you find these writings useful, please consider writing to the Norwegian minister of justice, who is constitutionally responsible for the operation that is targeting me and my work every day through harassment and torture, at grete.faremo@jd.dep.no Please tell her that enough is enough. Extra-judicial punishment by police is a human rights crime. Government-led persecution of sexual minorities is a crime against humanity. This has been going on for more than 600 days. It is time to bring the responsible officers of the organized crime section of the Oslo police before the court to hold them account for their crimes of torture as defined per article 117 of the Norwegian penal code. If you are part of the Middle East speaking circuit and run into any Norwegians, please remind them that it is high time Norwegian police authorities stop behaving like members of a third world country internationally. It is also possible to contact Norwegian diplomats in your country or Amnesty International. The full details of my case are available via this link: http://policestalking.wordpress.com/case-summary/ Thanks for your support.

IHEC Publishes the List of Entities for the April 2013 Local Elections in Iraq

The official deadline for registering political parties for next year’s local elections in Iraq on 21 April 2013 expired last Sunday. The Iraqi elections commission continued to handle registrations on Monday and Tuesday but has now published a list that looks more definitive in that it does not any longer include the expression “registered until now”. This being Iraq, it is hard to be certain whether this really is the final list, but it is certainly the most comprehensive account available so far and a brief discussion of these 261 entities can be worthwhile.

It should be said at the outset that the publication of this list, while significant, is not a definitive indication of how the political landscape for the next local elections in Iraq is shaping up. The crucial stage in that respect is the list of coalitions, which on previous occasions has been published as late as one month before the elections themselves. What voters will deal with on election day, after all, is electoral lists, which can be made up of one party or several registered entities joined together on a list. A registration as a separate entity at this stage may well be nothing more than an expression of the hubris of Iraqi politicians who feel the need to have a political party of their own; as in previous elections a key question is the extent to which such hubris can be transcended for the purpose of creating electable lists and viable coalitions when the elections get closer.

With regard to the registered entities themselves, they fall in three main categories.

Firstly, there are all the well-known Kurdish parties. There will not be local elections in the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) areas proper on 21 April 2013 although they should have been held long time ago. Smaller Kurdish parties claim the two biggest Kurdish parties are procrastinating. Nonetheless, all of these parties are interested in local elections in disputed areas outside the KRG, and as on previous occasions, it is likely they may coalesce into a single Kurdish coalition to maximize the vote. Kirkuk is outside the KRG but was excepted from the 2009 elections due to disagreement about the rules for ethnic representation and is so far not scheduled to hold elections in April 2013.

Secondly, there are all the parties that in one way or another form part of or have recently split from the secular, often Sunni-backed Iraqiyya coalition. Most of the familiar sub-entities of Iraqiyya have been registered, and there are new sub-entities as well. Well-known entities include the Hadba party of the Nujayfi brothers in Mosul and blocs associated with personalities like Saleh al-Mutlak and Zafer al-Ani. Some of the latest major breakaway factions of Iraqiyya are also running, including Wataniyun, Free Iraqiyya and the blocs of Ali al-Sajri, Iskandar Witwit and Kamil al-Dulaymi and the governor of Salahaddin. Also small sub-entities of Iraqiyya that have materialized very recently, possibly for the purpose of these next local elections, are running. They include blocs headed by Ahmad al-Masari, Talal al-Zubayie, Mustafa al-Hiti, Abdallah Hasan Rashid, Ziyad Tareq Darab and Adnan al-Jannabi. The party of Ahmed Abu Risha, the sahwa leader of Anbar, is also running. To some extent this Sunni/secularist fragmentation is understandable in the local election context, although it should also be seen against the backdrop of growing internal dissension in Iraqiyya over the past year. In an interesting expression either of chaos in the Iraqiyya camp or conceptual confusion regarding the difference between an entity and a coalition, Hadba and Wifaq are registered as separate entities but so are also the larger coalitions of which they sometimes form part – Iraqiyun and Iraqiyya. In the case of Hadba/Iraqiyun, the Nujayfi brothers have registered for one entity each, whereas with Wifaq/Iraqiyya, Ayad Allawi has registered Iraqiyya and left Wifaq to a lower-ranking politician. A notable omission so far is the Iraqi Islamic Party, whose gradual disintegration will be complete if they fail to present lists for the 2013 elections.

Thirdly, all the familiar Shiite Islamist parties have registered as separate entities. This also includes several subdivisions of the Daawa party of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, including Tanzim al-Iraq and Tanzim al-Dakhil. It is interesting that in addition to (erstwhile) Maliki ally Ali al-Dabbagh, Shirwan al-Waili is also running a separate entity. There are moreover two entities combining the names “knights” (fursan) and “the law” (qanun). Parties with names like these have previously been described as extreme Maliki supporters, and one of them is indeed headed by Abd al-Sattar Jabar who was also involved in the previous incarnation of the “Knights of the State of Law”. The Sadrists, whose participation was in doubt and/or fragmented in many governorates in 2009, are this time apparently running on a straightforward Ahrar list. The Shaykhis (Shiite sub-sect) of Basra once more mobilise under Amir al-Fayiz. Finally, in a parallel to the situation with respect to Iraqiyya, there is a State of Law registration in the name of Haydar al-Abbadi (presumably the coalition) in addition to the Daawa registration under Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. A key question is whether Maliki’s State of Law alliance will run its own ticket or whether it finds it necessary to create wider alliances in the many intra-Shiite contests in Baghdad and the southern governorates.

The seat distribution list per governorate is also confirmed, with minor changes to the previous numbers from 2009. The next step now is candidate registration, with a 25 December 2012 deadline. Some kind of de-Baathification circus will most likely ensue, before the coalitions will likely form official lists early in 2013. One should remember that when all this is going on (and with UNAMI enthusiastically cheering as representative of the outside world), the Iraqi supreme court has reiterated its view that current electoral law is unconstitutional and void due to the seat distribution formula, and parliament has so far failed to pass the mandated changes. The court arrived at its interpretation after the ballots had been cast in the previous elections and the ruling didn’t affect the outcome of those elections retro-actively. This time, however, a warning has been issued. Absent the required legislative action by the Iraqi parliament to clean up the electoral law, the unclear situation could in theory be exploited by the powers that be if they are unhappy with the way winds are blowing in Iraqi politics come April 2013.

Given the limited coverage of Iraq, I have decided to do my best to continue to produce analyses relating to the various stages of the local elections in Iraq in April 2013 as a public service despite the massive and illegal police operation that I have been subjected to since February 2011 and the apparent attempt by the Norwegian government to kill me. Coalition-forming, candidate lists, constitutional issues, de-Baathification, the results themselves, and the seating of the new provincial councils will be covered to the best of my ability as I also did in 2009. If you find these writings useful, please consider writing to the Norwegian minister of justice, who is constitutionally responsible for the operation that is targeting me and my work every day through harassment and torture, at grete.faremo@jd.dep.no Please tell her that enough is enough. Extra-judicial punishment by police is a human rights crime. Government-led persecution of sexual minorities is a crime against humanity. This has been going on for more than 600 days. It is time to bring the responsible officers of the organized crime section of the Oslo police before the court to hold them account for their crimes of torture as defined per article 117 of the Norwegian penal code. If you are part of the Middle East speaking circuit and run into any Norwegians, please remind them that it is high time Norwegian police authorities stop behaving like members of a third world country internationally. It is also possible to contact Norwegian diplomats in your country or Amnesty International. The full details of my case are available via this link: http://policestalking.wordpress.com/case-summary/ Thanks for your support.

Iraq Is Still Muddling Through

Nearly 10 years on from the start of the Iraq War, Iraq as a political system continues to defy easy classification. It is neither the success story some voices in the Obama administration would like to claim, nor the complete disaster referred to by a growing number of critical pundits – ranging from opponents of the war to those who think the American occupation just wasn’t thorough enough.

With respect to the exaggerated optimism in some corners, the fact that the country is not falling apart does not mean we are seeing a functional democracy in Iraq. Anyone who revisits the “benchmark legislation” goals for national reconciliation that emerged during the Bush years will find that Iraq still lacks an oil and gas law, a supreme court law and a revised constitution which is supposed to create a second federal chamber of parliament. And the problems do not stop with that either. In August, parliament did adopt some changes to the local elections law, supposedly in a move to have the legal framework ready for local elections by early 2013. But the fine print tells a different story: The revisions passed by the Iraqi parliament fail to address a specific distribution mechanisms for “surplus seats” that was ruled unconstitutional by the supreme court as far back as in summer 2010. Instead – and perhaps somewhat symptomatically – the few changes that were made by parliament related to the representation of small ethnic minorities, including Turkmens who had previously not pressed for minority seats outside of their area of territorial concentration in Kirkuk.

Kirkuk of course, under a quintessentially Iraqi arrangement, was exempted from local elections as far back as in 2008 because no one could agree on the rules for the elections there; this problem has yet to be solved too. Changes to the important provincial powers bill were agreed by the government in August but have been met with hostility by deputies for provinces interested in greater autonomy, like Basra and Najaf, and have yet to be passed by parliament. There are also outstanding issues relating to financial affairs after Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki decided to camouflage his unhappiness with parts of the 2012 budget through the introduction of a brand new infrastructure bill that also has yet to be passed. Finally, the essentially stalled nature of Iraqi parliamentary politics was only underlined by a recent decision to “agree in principle on the introduction of a proposal for a law for the senate”, even though a final settlement of the matter with the required constitutional amendments seems as distant as ever. Today, parliament is once more on holiday and Maliki has used the opportunity to further centralise power through getting rid of a central bank chief and replacing him with someone thought to be more loyal to him. More parliament holidays are coming up towards the end of the year so it will soon be time to turn to the difficult discussions of the annual budget again.

Meanwhile, though, those claiming that everything is doom and gloom in Iraq will also face problems in their narrative. Despite the polarising impact of Sunni-Shia tensions in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Lebanon, Iraqi politics has so far failed to collapse fully along sectarian lines. Although there are reports of Iranian support for Assad continuing to flow to Damascus through Iraqi territory, Prime Minister Maliki has at least had meetings with elements of the Syrian opposition and has nominally signalled a commitment to change in Syria, including constitutional change. A landmark Arab League meeting was held in Baghdad in March and was somewhat more successful in terms of attracting the poorer Arab states than critics maintain. Iraqi oil output remains steadily growing, even if the numbers are less spectacular than some analysts had predicted.

Half full or half empty, the underlying political dynamic here remains a matter of concern regardless. Back at the beginning of this year, there seemed to be some hopeful signs that Maliki finally understood that his pragmatism with respect to employing people with ties to the former regime in his bureaucracy needs to be complemented by some inclusion of them in his political coalition too. Turkey’s increasingly heavy footprint in the Kurdish parts of the country may have pushed in the same direction of finding (Sunni) Arab allies in the disputed boundary areas in the north that Maliki can work with. However, the trends during the course of the year – Maliki’s failure to co-opt defectors from the Sunni-dominated, secular Iraqiyya party (who at one point were in plentiful supply), the increased focus on small groups as minorities rather than as potential nationalist alliance partners (the case of the Turkmens), and the renewed attention to a possible Shiite-Kurdish deal on governorate boundaries (including possible changes to the Sunni-dominated Salahaddin governorate) – all indicate Maliki has not managed to exploit the momentum for building a less sectarian alliance that clearly existed in the first part of the year. Quite the contrary, Maliki’s latest failure to get parliamentary support for an enlarged independent electoral commission served as a reminder of his inability to build a more solid political support base beyond his fractious Shiite alliance.

Among the drivers that will decide the outcome are developments in Syria and the regional policy of Turkey. One particularly interesting challenge relates to Turkish support for Iraqi Kurds who in turn advocate more privileges for Syrian Kurds than Ankara is prepared to accept. Perhaps the most worrisome aspect in all of this, however, is the fact that the Iraqi parliament’s failure to complete a mandated revision of the electoral law may play into the hands of those who want no change in the country. As such, it may serve as a pretext for delaying the local elections that are supposed to take place in early 2013, at a time when a shakeup at the local level is perhaps one of the few things that can create some dynamism in a stalled Iraqi political process.

Every article I have published since February 2011 has been written against the backdrop of on-going police persecution of me, initiated by the Norwegian government and supported by various other Western governments. Please visit my other blog for full details.

How the Norwegian Government Brought an End to My Iraq Research

Reblogged from Police Stalking, Police Criminality, and Human Rights:

I sometimes wonder why it took me so long to write in the first person about police stalking.

I wanted to exhaust every other possibility first. To make sure that there was no other conceivable road back to the life I once lived.  I had been happy as an historian based in Oslo in Norway, working on Iraq and its transition to democracy and the rule of law.

Read more… 2,615 more words

Iraq’s New Independent Electoral Commission: Some Initial Thoughts

It looks as if it is going to be a long session for Iraq’s parliament today, so here are some initial reflections on the reported vote by parliament to approve 8 out of 9 new members of the country’s independent electoral commission (IHEC). All that follows is based on the assumption that initial press reports about the vote and the identity of the new councilors are correct. The official parliamentary report is due later today and should be taken as the final word.

For many weeks, the battlefront regarding the make-up of the new electoral commission board has concerned its size. The decision last week to keep the current size of the board (9 members) was seen as a setback for Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who had apparently hoped to expand the board to 15 with the aim of diluting the political influence of his enemies.

It can be worthwhile, therefore, to begin with a brief look at the political composition of the new board and compare it to the old one. Most reports suggest that of the 8 new commissioners, 4 are from the Shiite alliance (two from Daawa, one from ISCI, one from the Sadrists), two are from the secular and increasingly Sunni-backed Iraqiyya and two are from the Kurdistan alliance. There is  an unresolved question as to whether a final ninth member of the commission, supposedly a minority representative, will be a Turkmen or a Christian. Compare this with the previous IHEC, which pre-dated Maliki’s rise to power. It also had 4 Shiite Islamists, but only 1 was considered close to Maliki – the rest being closer to ISCI, Fadila and the Sadrists respectively. There were 2 Kurds (same as today), but Iraqiyya had only one commissioner close to them, the two remaining members of the board originally having been considered close to the Shiite Islamist Tawafuq alliance.

On the balance, then, Maliki has apparently seen his position improve slightly, but not a lot. The ISCI-Iraqiyya-Kurdish-Sadrist alliance that threatened him earlier this year commands perhaps as many as 6 seats on the new board. It makes you understand why Maliki had wanted 15 commissioners instead, ideally with some space for his newfound allies in the smaller parliamentary blocs among the Kurdish opposition and the Iraqiyya splinter groups. Today, there were even reports that members of the second branch of Maliki’s Daawa party, the Tanzim al-Iraq faction, were unhappy that the mainline Daawa had monopolized two commissioner seats for the State of Law coalition to which they both belong.

Every little will count, in other words, so it will be interesting to see who the ninth commissioner will be, whether Turkmen or Christian. One Iraqiyya spokesman has already said he is in favour of the Turkmen female candidate, Gulshan Kamal. It should be added in this respect that there is no legal or constitutional requirement that any sect be represented. The IHEC law from 2007 only stipulates that there should be at least 2 lawyers on the board, that the rest should be “experts” in electoral affairs, that they should be politically independent, and that the representation of women should be taken into regard.

It seems the female representation requirement has been given only a very symbolic nod today (in the possible ninth seat for a Turkmen female). The political “independence” criterion hasn’t been taken seriously at any point since the IHEC law was passed. From the legal point of view, perhaps the most glaring question is whether a parliament vote on 8 members is valid when 9 are called for by the law.

In any case, attention will now turn to the local elections scheduled for 2013. Perhaps those elections, in turn, can produce some new alliances that can help breathe life into Iraq’s stalemated politics.

Parliamentary Setback for Maliki in the Electoral Commission Struggle

Iraqi parliamentary politics briefly got exciting again on Thursday, as one of the first contested votes in a long time divided the chamber along interesting lines.

Contested votes are comparatively rare in Iraqi politics. Usually, bills never come up for a vote until the political leaders have ruminated on them for so long that consensus is achieved through sheer exhaustion (or, not infrequently, by watering down the bills to the point where they are meaningless and/or contradictive and hence acceptable). Dissent is often marginal and not taken note of at all: Parliamentary  records typically include a notice to the effect that this or that bill passed with a “majority”. Usually, this will have meant that the chamber – rarely more than two thirds full even on the best of days – will have passed the bill with a solid margin of maybe 80 or 90% of deputies voting in favour.

For this reason, the comparatively rare contested votes in the Iraqi parliament tend to receive attention. Memorable past ones include the cliffhanger vote on the law for forming federal regions in October 2006, the battle over the provincial elections law in 2008, and the fight over a new parliamentary speaker in the first part of 2009. Interestingly, most of those votes to some extent touched on disputes relating to fundamental issues of state structure, with the Kurds and advocates of stronger centralization siding with opposite camps on all three occasions.

Yesterday’s developments in parliament belong to the long-running saga of installing a new electoral commission for Iraq (IHEC). In fact, that process has already seen one contested vote last year, when Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki tried to sack the existing board but lost the vote in parliament. The term of the current IHEC board has now expired and it survives only through monthly extensions of its mandate granted by parliament in lieu of agreement on a new board. The big decisions relate to how many seats the board will have (there are currently nine commissioners) and who should fill them.

In this dispute, Maliki has identified himself with a proposal to extend the number of commissioners from 9 to 15. Presumably, the thinking behind this is that a big commission could be more susceptible to divide and rule strategies, and Maliki is probably also eager to find seats on the commission for newfound friends of his in splinter groups from the secular Iraqiyya and the Kurds (Goran). Maliki allies have said openly that they fear a 9-person board would have a too strong pro-Iraqiyya contingent (maybe 3 commissioners).

A law featuring proposed changes to the existing law for the electoral board – including the Maliki-sponsored increase of the number of commissioner – has been making its way forward in the Iraqi parliament and yesterday was ready for a vote. However, instead of adopting the changes, parliament voted to cancel the proposed changes.

This is where the political dimension comes into play. The official parliamentary record says 233 deputies were present when parliament opened. Press accounts say pro-Maliki deputies from his own State of Law coalition, White (Iraqiyya breakaway group), Fadila and Goran (Kurdish opposition party) left the chamber in protest, leaving deputies from Iraqiyya, the Kurdistan Alliance, ISCI and the Sadrists to vote down the changes. Just to complicate matters further, there are two accounts of how many MPs were present during the contested vote: Parliament speaker Nujayfi of Iraqiyya says 169 deputies were in the chamber (above the quorum level at 163); Maliki ally Khalid al-Atiyya says there were 156 deputies (less than the required quorum).

Whichever interpretation is correct, the vote yesterday should serve as another wakeup call for Maliki with respect to his narrow support base in parliament. Essentially, the forces who threw out his attempt to increase the number of IHEC commissioners were the same that tried to unseat him earlier this spring. Even though Maliki appears to have made some progress in drawing parts of Iraqiyya closer to him than to their nominal leader, Ayyad Allawi, this is of limited consequence unless he can get them to vote with him in key parliamentary contests like this one. Earlier this week, Allawi – who is technically a deputy but who rarely visits the national assembly – appeared briefly at the parliament building to discuss with the components of the Iraqiyya alliance. Allawi will likely see this latest vote as something of a vindication after a rather bumpy ride and multiple Iraqiyya defections during the first half of 2012.

Absent any supreme court challenges regarding the quorum, the debate about IHEC is now likely to focus on the identity of the 9 commissioners. The legal requirement that they be independent from party politics has long been forgotten, across the board.

The Allawi Resignation and Iraq’s New Strongwomen

There are several interesting dimensions to the first major political event in Iraq after the Eid: The resignation from the Iraqi government of Muhammad Tawfiq Allawi, the minister of communications.

Firstly, of course, there is the party politics of the case. The presence of Allawi inside the cabinet at a time when his cousin and party chief Ayad Allawi remained very much on the sidelines of government sent an ambiguous message about how the Wifaq group within the Iraqiyya coalition related to the premiership of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. One possible consequence of the resignation is that it may have a liberating effect on Wifaq and can help turn it into a more purely oppositional party. From the margins, Wifaq may be freer to speak its mind and criticize a government where it is now much less involved. The flipside to that, of course, is that the move might solidify cracks in the Iraqiyya coalition that have become more evident over the past few months as Maliki successfully has lured at least parts of the Sunnis and secularists in Iraqiyya to take a more cooperative stance (as seen most recently in the return of Salih al-Mutlak to cabinet as vice premier).

Perhaps more interesting are the specific reasons given by Allawi for resigning, In a letter framed as an ultimatum to Maliki, Allawi demanded a series of changes to the administration of his ministry, including unwanted interference from people he considered to be acting outside their professional remits. One individual, in particular, receives much attention in the letter: Dr. Hiyam al-Yasiri, a female adviser to the cellphone department within the ministry. She is acting beyond her prerogatives and is building a power base of her own, Allawi complains. She cancels good projects and promotes bad ones. And even this: She was a member of the Baath party with personal ties to Saddam Hussein! (Never mind that much of Allawi’s own electorate admired the Baath party too.)

The letter from Allawi was not really a resignation letter but an ultimatum letter. It ended with a simple request for Maliki to remove Yasiri, or else. As is now well known, Maliki didn’t do anything to unseat Yasiri and Allawi eventually resigned.

The case of Hiyam al-Yasiri is interesting as an example of female empowerment in post-2003 Iraq.  The debate rages as to whether the Iraq War represented a setback or a step forward for Iraq’s women. On the one hand, Iraq had one of the best educated female workforces of any Middle Eastern countries prior to the war, with some women even playing infamous roles in the regime’s weapons programmes. Many saw the triumph of Islamism after 2003 as a step backward for the secular vision of female empowerment in public life. On the other hand though, post-2003 Iraq has seen some interesting new mechanisms for female empowerment that were introduced in part thanks to external (US and UN) pressure, including most notably female quotas in parliament that secure a higher rate of female MPs in Iraq than in many Western countries.

Some say the women in the Iraqi parliament owe their positions more to family ties than to championship of women’s issues. Others have stood out for positions that shocked many Western feminists, including outspoken criticism of lesbians and declarations in favour of eradicating homosexuality in Iraq.

Whichever way they should be interpreted, newly empowered women like Hiyam al-Yasiri clearly stand up for their ideas. And Yasiri is not alone. Take other famous cases like Basima Luay al-Jadiri (who rose to an important position in a key security-related office of PM Maliki) and Lubna Rahim (recently in conflict with Iraqiyya members in Babel for having allegedly threatened them with armed guards). Their values and goals may be very different from what feminists in other parts of the world advocated when Iraq was rebuilt after 2003. But they form an important contrast to the more marginal role played by their sisters in both Iran and Saudi Arabia. And, as the resignation case of Allawi shows, they refuse to be pushed around.

Provincial Elections Law Revisions in Iraq

At a time when most Iraqi politicians seem to consider the cabinet crisis to be over,  attention is increasingly turning to the next local elections, scheduled for early 2013. More and more, it is being suggested that major political reform may well end up on the back burner again, with a decision on the electoral commission composition perhaps the most prominent issue of the day (it is also on the agenda as parliament meets today).

Yesterday finally saw a vote on revisions to the provincial electoral law that originally dates back to 2008. Symptomatically, perhaps, the revisions have yet to be published on the parliament website! But at least some features are known from press reports.

The problem with the revised law is that the Iraqi supreme court has already deemed it unconstitutional, at least if press reports about the contents are true. This is so because the revised law reportedly keeps the principle of allotting surplus seats to winning parties only, using the largest remainder principle. In 2010, the supreme court, based on a request from the small communist party, specifically ruled this arrangement “undemocratic” (and therefore unconstitutional), and demanded change to a more proportional allocation formula. Apparently, this aspect – which after all was one of the main reasons there was a need to change the law in the first place – was conveniently forgotten by Iraqi politicians yesterday. In other words, once more Iraq is saddled with a law that will be unconstitutional from the get-go.

Other reported changes concern the allotment of additional minority seats for Fayli Kurds and Turkmens (the latter reportedly in Baghdad). Again, this may be indicative of a trend in Iraqi politics. The previous iteration of the law only gave true micro-minorities (Yazidis, Christians, Shabak etc.) seats in particular governorates, whereas medium-sized minorities like the Turkmens and the Fayli Kurds were left with the option of mobilizing within the framework of the ideologically defined (non-ethnic) parties. Inevitably, one gets the impression that the more Iraqis are encouraged to vote in closed ethnic constituencies, the smaller the prospect for the development of a truly national political fabric. With recent moves to expand the size of the electoral commission, it is conceivable that this trend will only continue to grow further.

Meanwhile, one interesting aspect of the decision yesterday on electoral law changes is the political dynamic. It was reportedly a deal between the two biggest coalitions, Iraqiyya and State of Law, that led to agreement. These two groups will both benefit from maintaining the current, largest-remainder for winning blocs principle regarding the “surplus” seats. For their part, Shiite parties outside Prime Minister Maliki’s bloc like Fadila and the Sadrists have already been prominent in criticizing yesterday’s parliament decision. A major elephant in the room, of course, was the disputed city of Kirkuk, which never held elections in 2009, and where the issue of ethnic quota seats remains a big problem.

This is an ironic reminder, then, about how State of Law and Iraqiyya could have got things done in parliament if their leaders could just hate each other a little less. Symptomatically, perhaps, when the two finally did vote together in parliament, it was on an issue that is likely to maximize their own powers in the crudest sense imaginable, at the expense of the smaller forces in Iraqi politics.

The Syrian Crisis and Its Repercussions for Erbil-Baghdad Relations

One of the interesting aspects of the crisis in Syria is the way Syria’s Kurds are navigating between regional power brokers in Turkey, Iraqi Kurdistan and Iraq. In particular, there seems to be a degree of tension surrounding the relationship between the largely pro-Turkish regional government of the Iraqi Kurds and Syrian Kurds who are seeking the support of Erbil but are not necessarily quite so supportive of Turkey.

So far, no decisive policy seems to have emerged among Syria’s Kurds in this respect. As for the spillover impact on the Iraqi scene, the Syrian crisis has so far served to further strain relations between the Iraqi Kurds and the central government in Baghdad. Due to tension in border areas with Syria, central government Iraqi forces have been seeking access to areas controlled by the Kurds, and this, in turn, has aggravated the conflict between Erbil and Baghdad.

For the first time, the Kurdish peshmerga ministry has now published a constitutional defence of its position. In a letter directed to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, the Kurds enumerate four constitutional articles that they consider Baghdad are violating when they are seeking access to the Kurdish areas: Articles 9, 61, 111 (some sources say 11 but that makes no sense) and 121.

Article 9 of the Iraqi constitution deals with the Iraqi army. It is one of the few constitutional provisions to specifically demand proportional representation on an ethno-sectarian basis (quotas), and this is conceivably what the Kurds are complaining about, even though there are large numbers of Kurds serving in the Iraqi army controlled by Baghdad.

Article 61 deals with parliamentary powers, and presumably the Kurdish objection relates to the failure of government to have leading military officials confirmed by parliament. This is a real problem, although there are reports that the government has lately sent a list to parliament which is now awaiting approval.

Article 111, if correctly cited, deals with oil ownership (“Iraqi oil belongs to the Iraqi people in all the governorates and regions”)  and is presumably a general criticism of Baghdad regarding the longstanding dispute about whether Erbil or Baghdad should conclude deals with foreign oil companies.

Article 121 specifically gives federal regions the right to organize internal security including “guards of the region” which is commonly seen as the standard reference to the Kurdish peshmerga militia which is now the official internal army of the Kurdish region.

All in all, whereas it seems clear that the central government may need to make some improvements as regards Kurdish representation in the Iraqi army (article 9) and getting parliamentary approval of army officials (article 61), it is hard to see how article 121 could override the exclusive prerogative of Baghdad when it comes to managing national security and external defence  as set out in article 110-2, where “borders” are specifically mentioned. Indeed, article 121 itself at the outset explicitly stipulates that the powers given to the region should not usurp exclusive prerogatives of the central government as specified in article 110.

What this whole issue brings to the forefront, of course, is that whereas Iraq on paper may be a federation, it is in practice a confederacy in which the Kurdish entity appears to be torn between seeking independence and de facto Turkish overlordship. The Syrian crisis is likely to make these tensions more acute, given the apparent greater scepticism of the Syrian Kurds when it comes to accepting the idea of a substantial role for Turkey in deciding their destiny. As a consequence, it is possible that the autonomous Iraqi Kurds, too, will finally have to be more specific and concrete about where exactly they are heading and when.