A Litmus Test for Iraq

Former Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari arrived in Basra on January 24. His mission in the southern oil port was to stump for his Reformist Front, a breakaway faction of the Da‘wa Party of the current premier, Nouri al-Maliki, ahead of Iraq’s January 31 provincial elections. His itinerary included visits to the Five Miles area – often described as a stronghold of the movement loyal to the young Shi‘i leader Muqtada al-Sadr – as well as a rally at a sports stadium. Only days earlier, he had been preceded by Maliki himself, and in the first days of 2009 numerous other national politicians trooped to Basra as well… Full story here.

Daawa Sides with the Opposition in Parliament (But Quarrels with Them in Wasit)

In an interesting move, a member of Hizb al-Daawa (Tanzim al-Iraq), Abd al-Hadi al-Hasani, has signalled sympathy with the views of the opposition in the question of who should succeed Mahmud al-Mashhadani as parliamentary speaker (see entry for 23 December 2008 below). While the main coalition partners of Nuri al-Maliki – ISCI and the two Kurdish parties – are determined to elect a Sunni replacement from the remnants of the Tawafuq bloc in order to keep the system of ethno-sectarian quota-sharing afloat (this in turn gives them, as purported representatives of “Kurdish” and “Shiite” interests, even greater privileges), the “opposition” (featuring the Sadrists, the secular Iraqiyya, the breakaway factions of Tawafuq, sometimes Fadila, and occasionally independents) has insisted on an open contest where the speaker should be elected on the basis of merit only. This development echoes tendencies seen in early 2008 when the Daawa factions broke with its coalition partners over statements concerning Kirkuk and oil, and later faced off against the Kurds and ISCI over the provincial powers law. Thus in the question of state structure, the division lines between the nationalist opposition and the largely pro-federal government are blurred, because here Daawa sympathises with the view of the opposition, though without letting this bring about a change of its coalition partners. The contradictions of this position became clear in Wasit recently, where a quarrel between an Iraqiyya candidate and Daawa reportedly prompted Nuri al-Maliki to abruptly appoint a new police chief – a decision which ISCI members in the local council in turn seized on in order to make the case for their decentralisation agenda (though this time rather modestly so, with a reference to the Transitional Administrative Law, and on behalf of the existing governorate rather than in the name of any imagined federal entity). More than one Daawa politician have recently hinted at a possible plot aimed at unseating Maliki, but it is also possible that this latest move in parliament could be yet another attempt at playing the centralist/nationalist card in the context of the upcoming provincial elections.

PS: On 19 January, the Iraqi parliament decided to postpone the vote on a new parliamentary speaker until 4 February (i.e. after the 31 January provincial elections), thereby effectively depriving Iraqi voters of an opportunity to see for themselves which parties are truly sincere when they claim they are against ethno-sectarian quotas and in favour of a strategy that puts Iraq first.

Basra, the Failed Gulf State, Part II: Wail Abd al-Latif Concedes Defeat

Wail Abd al-Latif, the chief protagonist of the campaign to transform Basra into a standalone federal region, has told Iraqi radio that his project has failed. While Abd al-Latif did not know the exact numbers of signatures collected since the legally fixed month-long campaign period started on 15 December 2008 (and at a time when the Iraqi elections commission has not yet released any results and there were even rumours to the effect that the deadline had been extended with a few days), this declaration by the principal advocate of the scheme seems to be a certain indication that the goal of mustering 140,000 signatures in favour of the project – the precondition for a referendum – is unachievable at present. Abd al-Latif is already talking about the possibility of re-launching his scheme at some future juncture, and his comments echo statements to the press by another supporter of the project, Muhammad al-Zaydawi, to the effect that the required number of signatures had not been reached by 11 January.

This failure shows two things. Firstly, to the extent that there is an interest in federalism in Iraq south of Baghdad at present, such sentiments are concentrated in Basra in the far south, and focus on non-sectarian schemes for transforming Basra into a small federal region that would be defined by its geography and history, not by the Shiite religion of the majority of its inhabitants. Since 2005, there has been much fanfare about the grander designs of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) and their plans to create a nine-governorate federal region extending all the way from Basra to Baghdad (though lately more so in the Western media than in Iraq itself, perhaps with the exception of Najaf); it seems significant that the only scheme that so far has been translated into a degree of practical politics is the Basra project with its far more local outlook. Secondly, the Basra scheme itself, while clearly the preference of a group of local politicians that combines secularists and Islamists, is not immensely popular among the people of Basra at large. We now have a quantitative indicator of the true level of popular support: it is somewhere between the 2 per cent of the electorate that turned in the first 30,000 plus signatures required to get the initiative going and the 10 per cent of the electorate that the federalists were unable to mobilise between 15 December 2008 and 15 January 2009.

The fate of the Basra federalist initiative comes across as a fascinating replay of events that unfolded in Basra in the early 1920s. At the time, a small, cross-sectarian elite of merchants – including Najdi Sunnis, Christians, Jews and a few Shiites including some Persian merchants – launched a bid to transform Basra into a Gulf statelet under British protection, akin to Kuwait. However, the separatist leaders failed to attract London’s interest, and, equally significant, did not manage to mobilise popular support among the rural Shiite Arab majority of Basra and the young intellectual elite of the city (which was multi-ethnic and multi-sectarian in composition). The federalism initiative of Abd al-Latif is of course different in that it does not envisage separation, but instead aims at achieving a special status for Basra within Iraq, similar to Kurdistan. But the reasons for failure seem very similar in the two cases. Firstly, neither the Basra separatists of the 1920s nor the Basra federalists that have emerged since 2003 managed to present an identity project that resonated with the local population and was able to compete with Iraqi nationalism. Indeed, these leaders’ own desire to hang on to Iraqi nationalism is probably a limiting factor for their project overall. They criticise the Kurds for not flying the Iraqi flag, maintain that Baghdad should remain in control of the oil sector (though perhaps with some kind of special share of the income for Basra as Iraq’s main producing governorate), and portray their scheme as a strategy for saving Iraq’s unity by forestalling any moves by ISCI to create a nine-governorate federal region that would be loyal to Iran. Secondly, the failure of today’s federalists to dominate the public space and the media with compelling arguments in favour of the scheme (in fact, much of the propaganda has been limited to the rather uninspiring vision of additional layers of local bureaucracy that could give more jobs to the area) is a striking echo of similar problems seen in the separatist efforts in the 1920s. Instead, Wail Abd al-Latif and his supporters were on the defensive from day one of the initiative, criticising the elections commission for not providing a sufficient number of polling stations across Basra and for a lack of adequate information about the initiative for the general public. In a sign of desperation, a committee that supports the project at one point undemocratically declared itself the sole legitimate point of contact regarding the federalism scheme. These hapless manoeuvres are all the more remarkable in view of the fact that the party that controls the governor position in Basra, Fadila, has generally supported the bid, even if its leaders may have sensed the turn of the tide and have been less intimately associated with the campaign lately, the governor himself preferring to show up with the Iraqi national football team in Oman.

Basra federalists are still debating among themselves whether the negative result of the initiative constitutes failure in its own right (fashal) or a case of someone else having caused its failure (ifshal). At any rate, it seems important that the project was an anti-establishment attempt at doing something radical about the political system in Iraq. Few doubt the anti-Iranian agenda of Abd al-Latif and Fadila, but many Iraqi nationalists disagree with the tactics adopted by the Basra federalists in their attempt at stopping the steadily growing Iranian influences in Iraq (and also suspect a degree of involvement by a player that wants neither a strong Iran nor a strong Iraq: Kuwait). But while Basra popular opinion clearly has shown its disdain for federalism projects more generally (resistance to the project was framed chiefly in nationalist terms; counter-propaganda in defence of a slightly larger micro-region covering the triangle Basra/Maysan/Dhi Qar seemed more limited), a potential problem with the current federalism legislation is that once new governorate councils are elected on 31 January, it becomes far easier to launch ever more federalism referendums on the basis of the consent of a mere third of the members of the affected governorate councils. This opens the door for backdoor politics of the kind ISCI excels at, and while creating a nine-governorate region in one go may prove too complicated, the lax law on federalisation that was adopted in October 2006 allows for a gradual process that could slowly change the administrative map of Iraq and weaken the concept of a unified state.

What, then, is the best hope for the many Basrawis who through their rejection of the Basra federalism bid have shown themselves in favour of an Iraqi framework for the future? They can of course vote for nationalist parties in the upcoming provincial elections (or, more specifically, parties that have practical nationalist agendas at a time when everyone in Iraq south of Kurdistan pays lip service to the concept of Iraqi unity, with even ISCI often feeling compelled to substitute “decentralisation” for “federalism”). Some evidently believe “the new Nuri al-Maliki” to be one of these nationalists, even though despite certain credentials as a centralist, in the past he has been remarkably reluctant when it comes to doing the only thing that could stop the current circus of unlimited federalism from sucking all the energy out of Iraqi politics in the coming decade: to facilitate institutional reform in the shape of a revised constitution. Also, if Maliki has serious intentions about a definitive break with Iran and moving beyond the hated politics of ethno-sectarian quota-sharing between political parties (muhasasa), it would have been more reassuring if his new electoral coalition had included a greater array of prominent candidates from outside the Shiite Islamist core. Hopefully, Iraqis will study carefully how their parliamentarians choose to pursue the ongoing process of appointing a new parliamentary speaker, where the parties favouring a general decentralisation of Iraq (ISCI plus the two Kurdish parties) are hard at work defining the vacancy as a “Sunni” post against any possible challenges from a nationalist candidate. In doing so, they appear to have the support of the international press (which has covered the issue as an intra-Sunni quarrel), as well as the United States (one of whose officials today found it necessary to leak to The Washington Post that the pro-federal parties supposedly enjoy the support of 142 parliamentarians to oust Maliki). Of course, the popular support and numerical influence in parliament of these parties are routinely inflated in conversations between them and the Americans (they have not won a real parliamentary victory since the federalism bill was adopted in October 2006), but votes are not the only thing that counts in Iraqi politics these days. To the new Obama administration, the challenge is to interpret the failed Basra initiative correctly: what it really means is a rejection of federalism (meaning, at this time, any kind of federalism) in Iraq south of Kurdistan – even in the most fertile ground that exists, and including the tripartite soft partition schemes with which some Democratic politicians have been associated in the past.

Postscript: The Iraqi elections commission has announced that the final deadline for submitting signatures in support of the Basra federal initiative is on Monday 19 January 2009. It is unclear whether the extension of the deadline with 4 days represents a concession by the elections commission to the federalists and their string of complaints. At any rate, the declaration of defeat by Abd al-Latif – which seems to have come at a point when he was already familiar with news of the extended deadline – suggests that fulfilment of the 10% requirement is still a long way off. The official result will be published here as soon as it has been released by the Iraqi elections commission (on 21 January the elections commission confirmed the failure; exact numbers of collected signatures are expected around 25 January).

The Sadrist Parliamentary Bloc Confirms Its Support of Two Electoral Lists

The Sadrist bloc has today officially confirmed that it does indeed support the “Blamelessness and Reconstruction” list in the forthcoming local elections (list 376; as discussed earlier here), in addition to the “Independent Trend of the Noble Ones” (Tayyar al-ahrar al-mustaqill, list 284). In Maysan, for example, some Sadrist members of the current provincial council now appear on list 284; others are on list 376. List 284 is also running in some northern governorates where 376 does not take part, such as Nineveh and Diyala (but not Anbar and Salahaddin).

This development underlines the trend towards political participation among the Sadrist bloc in the Iraqi parliament, which was invigorated in 2008 as the party became a key player in the 22 July alliance that challenged the government by demanding early elections (the provincial powers law in February) and special treatment of Kirkuk (the elections law, finally adopted in September). This alliance continues to exercise strong influence in the Iraqi parliament, and Sadrists are currently vocal proponents for a drive to reject Ayad al-Samarrai as new parliamentary speaker after he was nominated by the pro-government Tawafuq alliance (which itself is in the process of being reduced to the Iraqi Islamic Party due to defections to 22 July). The 22 July parties, a cross-sectarian alliance of Islamist and secularist parties, challenge the establishment and their preference for a state model of ethno-religious quota-sharing (muhasasa).

Baghdad, District of the Green Zone??

The debate about Iraq’s state structure rarely fails to make perplexing twists and turns, and the latest discussion concerning the status of Baghdad as Iraq’s capital city is no exception. In a scheme reported by several Arabic news media, local politicians in the Baghdad governorate council have presented the vision of the Green Zone as the future federal capital of Iraq – on pattern of the special status that Washington, D.C. has in the US system of government, with the rest of the governorate presumably acquiring a “normal” status (and with small chunks of neighbouring city quarters being annexed).

One would perhaps have thought that this kind of scheme could have originated with ISCI, the only party among the Shiites that has spoken out in defence of sectarian models of federalism, because theoretically it might then become easier for any future Shiite federal region to eat into parts of Baghdad. ISCI members have distinguished themselves in the Iraqi federalism debate earlier also by highlighting the option of federalising Baghdad as a standalone unit (it is constitutionally barred from becoming part of any other region under the current system). And, indeed, ISCI’s provincial council head in Baghdad, Mu‘in al-Kazimi, has been among the foremost promoters of these new ideas.

More surprising, however, is it to find Daawa member Salah Abd al-Razzaq speaking positively about this kind of project. Only months ago, he was in the media spotlight as the Daawa decided to contest the forthcoming 31 January local elections on a separate list from ISCI, not least because of disagreement between the now more centralist Daawa and the strongly pro-federal ISCI. Back then, many “centralist” independents in the United Iraqi Alliance camp that are believed to be in regular touch with Sistani, such as Husayn al-Shahristani and Safa al-Din al-Safi, chose Maliki’s side rather than Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim’s. But now also Abd al-Razzaq from Maliki’s group has signalled interest in the “federal district” plan.

It is hard to see how the scheme fits with the 2005 constitution, where even in a general tendency of extreme concessions to the centrifugal forces in Iraq at least the concept of an undivided capital seems to survive. Baghdad “with its municipal borders” is the capital of the Republic of Iraq “and shall make up the governorate of Baghdad”. One can understand the dilemma of local councillors who feel that urban development may not receive the attention it requires when the governorate of Baghdad is also tasked with matters relating to the infrastructure of the federal government, but Baghdad has such a symbolic position as the nation’s capital that any tinkering with its status is likely to meet with considerable scepticism among the Iraqi public at large. An initial challenge would be to find a reasonable name for the new creation.

Ahmadinejad Praises Maliki for the SOFA

So maybe the prospect of a timetabled US withdrawal not involving political reform in Iraq was after all quite acceptable to Tehran? Iranian president Mahmud Ahmadinejad certainly spun it that way after his meeting with Nuri al-Maliki in Tehran, describing the SOFA as a “pact of withdrawal”. Later, Maliki met with Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. This time, the Iraqi premier appears to have kept his tie on for the duration of the meeting (he was criticised for not having done so last time, in deference to Iranian post-1979 custom) but this symbolic assertion of Iraqi distinctiveness apart, the Iranian hosts generally seemed pleased about the turn of events in their neighbouring country.

Spot the difference: Nuri al-Maliki meeting with Ali Khamenei in January 2009 (above) and June 2008 (below)

Local Democracy, ISCI-style

ISCI preacher Jalal al-Din al-Saghir on Friday proclaimed that there was a foreign conspiracy at work to “split the vote” in the forthcoming local elections in Iraq. The existence of small parties, in particular, was seen as offensive by Saghir, who encouraged smaller lists to withdraw from the elections as soon as possible to leave space for the bigger parties. But then again ISCI fought hard against these elections in the first place, and later on tried to resist the introduction of open lists and individual candidacies.