The Iraqi Parliament Passes the Provincial Elections Law

The law on the Iraqi provincial elections was passed by the Iraqi parliament on 22 July. The adopted text largely reflects earlier drafts that have been circulating for weeks and months, with certain important amendments and clarifications:

• The hybrid system of lists and individual candidacies (single-person lists) is maintained. The adoption of this system means that the focus to some extent shifts from parties to politicians: voters can vote for a party list, or a specific person on a party list, or an individual candidate on a single-person list. However, the counting rules with no transferability mechanisms for “redundant votes” (i.e. surplus votes that accrue when a single-person list has reached the necessary number of votes required to secure election) still create a certain bias towards the established parties, because only multi-person lists will accumulate “party scores” that can give them additional shares of the last remaining seats.

• The female quota remains purely aspirational and has been subjugated to the increased focus on individual candidacies: there is a requirement to the parties about nominating a certain proportion of women high on the lists, but this “enhanced visibility” notwithstanding many voters will vote for individuals on lists rather than the lists themselves. A murky paragraph authorising the electoral commission to take undefined steps to secure a 25 per cent female representation after the elections appears to have been removed.

• The ban on the use of religious symbols survives in a slightly more general version: the use of pictures or propaganda for persons who themselves are not candidates is disallowed. Hence any party that wishes an ayatollah to grace its elections poster needs to convince the cleric in question about the virtues of serving as a councillor in one of the Iraqi governorates. Also the ban on the use of places of worship for election campaigning purposes is upheld, alongside an unchanged and still highly hypocritical “ban” on the participation of parties who maintain militias.

• The explicit mention of the 1 October 2008 deadline has been removed, and options for dealing with delays have been expressly mentioned: the existing councils will in that case continue to serve. The requirement of conducting the elections in a single day remains.

• With this piece of legislation, the formal “Lebanonisation” of Iraq has reached an unprecedented magnitude. Elections for Kirkuk have been postponed, but a power-sharing formula for the interim period has been envisaged in which key positions will be distributed between Kurds, Turkmens, Arabs and Christians in accordance with a percentage formula of 32-32-32-4. Security forces from “the centre and the south” of Iraq will take charge of Kirkuk militarily in this period, while a committee of politicians will have until the end of the year to explore solutions to the conflict over the city. In a conundrum to Iraqi and Arab nationalists, it seems as if the insistence on the hated logic of quotas (muhasasa) in this case has been the most effective means of countering Kurdish nationalist ambitions.

• In a similar feast of ad hoc ethno-religious cake-sharing, the “final provisions” of the law allocate a certain number of “minority” seats in certain parts of Iraq, without specifying the procedures for their election. In Baghdad there will be three seats, presumably mostly for Christians; in Mosul 2 seats, specified for Yazidis and the Shabak respectively; in the Kurdish areas two seats in each governorate (likely to go to Christians), and in Basra one seat which will probably go to a Chaldean or a Sabaean.

In many ways, the current version of the law for the provincial elections serves to underline the growing confidence of a group of centralist Shiite politicians around Nuri al-Maliki. It challenges the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) with the ban on the use of religious places of worship in elections campaign, while at the same time does not give the Kurds everything they want regarding Kirkuk – Kurdish representatives ultimately abstained from the final vote, where some 127 out of 140 members of parliament reportedly supported the law. Interestingly, complaints about the voting procedure for the law itself prompted criticism from Kurds and UIA independent Khalid al-Atiyya alike, suggesting that the presidential veto may once more come into play in Iraqi politics in relation to this piece of legislation.

Updated 23 July with a subscriber exclusive: Kirkuk Clauses Were Supported by Bloc of Opposition Parties [published online for non-subscribers on 7 August]:

Information about exact voting patterns and the debate surrounding the elections law is now beginning to filter through. It has emerged that the arrangements for Kirkuk to a large extent were supported by the bloc of opposition parties which had demanded the 1 October deadline for the elections in the first place – a cross-sectarian alliance of Shiite Islamists (Sadrists, Fadila, some Daawa branches, independents), Sunni Islamists, secularists and minority representatives. Those who supported the Kurds over Kirkuk were reportedly ISCI but also some United Iraqi Alliance independents. Thus, even if many aspects of the adopted law clearly carry the hallmarks of the more self-confident Nuri al-Maliki, and recent additions to his government of certain ministers who claim to represent “Sunni interests” notwithstanding, it seems that on the Kirkuk issue the government was actually overwhelmed by a cross-sectarian opposition less inclined to make compromises with the Kurds. With the numerous reports from Iraq about Nuri al-Maliki being in the ascendancy as some kind of strongman with good ties to the security forces, this clear indication of parliamentary weakness as well as the obvious contradiction between his declared objectives as an Iraqi centralist and his choice of alliance partners (the Kurds and ISCI) certainly need to be taken into account as well. In fact, this is the second time in 2008 that the Kurdish-ISCI axis appears to have lost a parliamentary battle, once more forcing them to consider the presidential veto as a last resort.

The Sadrists, the Bush Administration’s Narrative on Iraq, and the Maysan Operations

Last week, on 25 June, a curious essay on Iraqi politics made its way to the op-ed pages of The New York Times. In it, Thomas L. Friedman drew up a rosy picture of how the supposed “Shiite mainstream” and “mostly secular-oriented Shiite majority” in Iraq is currently in the process of “liberating” the last remaining pockets of opposition, as Maliki’s government pursues military operations against what Friedman describes as “Mahdi Army militiamen and pro-Iranian death squads” in places like Basra, Sadr City and Amara (the provincial capital of Maysan). Friedman’s latest offering provides a crisp and eloquent summary of the Bush administration narrative on Iraq, especially concerning who are seen as true “moderates”: Maliki and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) are construed as good, Iraqi nationalist and even secular; the Sadrists are portrayed as Islamic extremist evil-doers with Iranian sympathies.

Many of the problematic assumptions of Friedman’s and the Bush administration’s reasoning have already been challenged. For example, the leaders of the principal Shiite party in the Maliki government, ISCI, continue to travel freely in and out of Iran, even for medical treatment, suggesting that they still have perfect confidence in the regime that created their party in 1982 with the sole objective of maximising Iran’s influence on the Iraqi opposition. To put it briefly, Iran is a regime known for going after its enemies; had Hakim’s policies in Iraq constituted any kind of problem then Tehran would have dealt with it.

Similarly, the contention that ISCI is more “moderate” than the Sadrist when it comes to the imposition of Islamic norms is misleading. For example, after 2003 ISCI was at the forefront of the Islamisation of Basra (often cooperating with the notorious Tharallah), and even Adil Abd al-Mahdi, ISCI’s most pro-Western figure and presumably an exponent of what Friedman sees as “secular Shiism”, is on record as saying that church and state cannot possibly be separated in Iraq. ISCI and the Sadrists may differ when it comes to what particular aspects of Islamic law they choose to highlight and seek to enforce, but there is overriding consensus on the idea of a Sharia-based society and the monopoly of the higher clergy in interpreting Islamic traditions.

As for “special groups” among the Sadrists, they appear to be just that – special groups. Had the mainline Sadrists been prepared to work with the Iranians, the movement as a whole would probably have changed its position. Instead, Sadrist leaders keep complaining about Iranian attempts to divide and rule them by implicating them in attacks on the Americans. The parliamentary contingent among the Sadrist has repeatedly shown itself committed to the political process, and it was they, along with other Shiite and Sunni forces opposed to the Maliki government, who in February pushed through the demand for early provincial elections – against the determined opposition of Friedman’s “moderates”, who fear the prospect of losing their fiefdoms in the provincial administrations.

What is the relevance of Friedman’s ideas with regard to Maysan and Amara? By reducing the Sadrists to “pro-Iranian Shiite extremists [who] tried to impose a Taliban-like order”, he completely overlooks a potentially more benign aspect of Sadrist activity in the far south, where they have governed Maysan since the spring of 2005. In the Sadrist perspective, the current targeting of high-level Sadrist officials is unjustified (the arrest of the governor himself has been reported but has also been declared untrue by his office), and they choose instead to focus their discourse on the high rating given to Maysan in reports by the Iraqi ministry of planning concerning the implementation of development projects in recent years. As Friedman appears to believe that the single objective of the Sadrist movement is to enforce Islamic law, it can be useful to take a look at some of the Sadrist development initiatives in Amara over the past years. They include plans for new university and hospital buildings, as well as a multi-storey car park in downtown Amara. If this activity is all a smokescreen for more sinister activities, then the catalogue of projects illustrated below is surely an impressive cover-up.

Maysan university

Multi-storey car park

New hospital building

This is not to suggest that the Sadrists of Maysan are in any way faultless, or that they are generically Iraqi nationalist and therefore incapable of even thinking of cooperation with Iran. While it should never be forgotten that the Sadrists are Tehran’s historical main enemy among the Shiites of Iraq, it is also the case that activity across the border in Maysan has been quite intense since 2003, and the governorate has taken steps to facilitate such contacts. But this resumption of cross-border trade after decades of artificial isolation needs to be put into perspective. The flows of money and investments from Iran to ISCI-controlled Najaf, for example, have been far more impressive. And even if the Iranians may have been successful in their policy of dividing and ruling the Sadrists by luring individual Sadrist operatives away from the mainline movement, this does not mean that the movement as a whole has converted to a pro-Iranian policy, or that Iran necessarily has abandoned its traditional policy of using ISCI as its primary tool. Even the Maliki government’s current project of negotiating a security deal with the Americans could in theory make sense to Iran: either Maliki could arrive at a deal with a limited time framework (which would keep US forces busy in Iraq for a while as they help solidify Maliki’s grip on power and thereby isolate Tehran’s traditional enemies among the Sadrists), or Iran could win time as it waits for a new US administration more disposed to striking a “great bargain” on Iraq.

Yet another problem in Friedman’s theorising concerns his ideas about where exactly the Shiite Iraqi mainstream is located. In a remarkable development, during the past few days Sadrist websites have been filled up with reports on the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’s views on the need of reaching agreement on the forthcoming provincial elections, along with guarantees with respect to his neutrality and his disapproval of the use of his likeness in election propaganda (once more the process of preparing the elections has stalled because of delays in passing the required legislation). This comes after weeks with determined attempts by ISCI to have a clause removed from the draft for the provincial elections law in which this kind of usage of religious symbolism was prohibited. ISCI went out of its way during parliamentary deliberations and even cited widespread illiteracy in Iraqi society in support of their demand that the use of religious symbols be permitted. But in a typical expression of the media tendency to automatically label the Sadrists as the more fundamentalist of the two groups, the wire reports from Iraq are already describing a rumoured decision to stay with the original ban on religious symbols as a loss for the Sadrists!

Developments in both Maysan and at the national scene once more emphasise the complex nature of politics in Iraq. They also suggest the hollowness of Thomas L. Friedman’s take on what is going on.