After the Rise of ISIS, Will Iraq’s Shiites Secede?

As Iraqi Shiites celebrate the holy month of Muharram and its key holiday of Ashura (4 November), it can be argued that radical sectarian mobilization among them has risen to a level unprecedented in modern Iraqi history since 1927, when a series of episodes prompted calls among the Shiites of Iraq to form their own separate state. This year, too, visions focusing on the possible separation of the Shiite-majority provinces of Iraq as a separate political entity are back on the agenda.

The last time such ideas were being considered in an even remote way was in 2005, when Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim of SCIRI launched his scheme for a single Shiite federal entity stretching from Basra to Najaf. It was the first time since 1927 that anything in the way of territorial separation of Iraqi Shiites had received any serious attention whatsoever. However, back then the project was characterized by only fragmented levels of support, with most Iraqi Shiites still speaking in the name of a unitary state. An even more radical movement to separate the south entirely had even less of a support base.

However, following the rise to prominence of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in 2014, Iraqi Shiite discourse on the Iraqi state appears to have changed quite dramatically – in the direction of separatist solutions. It is true that some of the talk of a separate Shiite entity, often referred to as the “Sumer” project in a reference to one of the ancient civilizations of Iraq, may have gained extra prominence because of the proliferation of social media, meaning that a wider array of Iraqi Shiite voices are accessible to outside analysts than at any point in history. However, it is noteworthy that also more established political parties among the Iraqi Shiites appear to be warming up to ideas that were considered a taboo just a few years ago. A case in point is the State of Law alliance of former PM Nuri al-Maliki and current PM Haydar al-Abadi. In a first, during Ramadan, a key website supportive of Maliki accorded much prominence to an article that openly hinted at the possible secession of the Shiite areas from the rest of Iraq. Also, changes in the regional environment contribute to a greater push towards separatist  solutions. Iran, in particular, has altered its approach to Iraq in a dramatic way since the emergence of ISIS. In unprecedented ways, it is openly acknowledging and even propagandizing its military support for the Iraqi government through the presence of Iranian advisors among Iraqi military forces deployed on the frontlines against ISIS. The confirmation by the Iraq parliament of an interior minister with a background in the Iran-sponsored Badr brigades arguably gives Tehran more direct influence in Iraq’s security forces than they had under Maliki.

The optics of the Iraqi battlefield look increasingly sectarian as well. In the north-west country almost all the territory recaptured by Iraqi government forces from ISIS are areas associated with Shiite minorities or Kurdish territorial claims. Also recent Iraq government victories in the Jurf al-Sakhar area in Babel, while covering Sunni-minority lands, essentially fall into a picture of wider Shiite consolidation in a core territory from Basra to Samarra.

There are however still some important exceptions to the general trend towards sectarian fragmentation in a territorial sense. This relates above all to Iraqi Sunnis that want nothing to do with ISIS. In a macro perspective this can be seen above all in Anbar, where several key areas including Ramadi still remain outside direct ISIS control. Those who say the quick fall of Mosul is sign that ISIS enjoys general Sunni Iraqi legitimacy will have trouble accounting for the continued existence of pockets of resistance to ISIS among Sunnis in Anbar. If the fall of Mosul to ISIS is proof that Shia discrimination of Sunnis is the underlying cause of the current troubles, then why didn’t all of Anbar also immediately fall? Also at the level of individual politicians, these tendencies can be seen. Provincial councils of Anbar and Nineveh alike continue to operate outside ISIS-controlled territory and repeatedly have condemned ISIS. Prominent Iraqi Sunni politicians like Usama al-Nujayfi have made a point of visiting the Shiite clergy in cities like Najaf and Karbala, which of course is anathema to the rabidly anti-Shiite ISIS.

Beyond this, many of the same historical and practical arguments against separatism that transpired in 2005 remain relevant. The Iraqi Shiites can offer no historical precedent for their separatist scheme, and the link to the old, pre-islamic Sumer civilization has of course nothing more to do with Shiites than with Sunnis (Saddam Hussein was also a huge Sumer enthusiast). And at the practical level, Iraq remains a multi-religious country whose disintegration would likely lead to huge numbers of displaced people, quite possibly creating human tragedies on a scale worse than anything caused by ISIS thus far.

With foreign military advisors of all descriptions pouring into Iraq and the concomitant internationalization of the whole debate pertaining to the future of the country, it becomes doubly important that Western pundits exercise caution when they go about attributing cause and effect in the current crisis. In particular, the notion that ISIS somehow embodies “legitimate Sunni demands” must be rejected. To maintain such a view is not only an affront to the large numbers of Iraqi Sunnis who bravely resist ISIS, often by putting their lives on the line. It also means accelerating a process towards a territorial fragmentation of Iraq that lacks historical basis and points towards an uncertain future.

Iraqi Shiites Debate Federalism Again

Parliament Speaker Usama al-Nujayfi’s recent outburst about potential Sunni separatism has had the side effect of a limited resurgence of discussion of federalism among Iraq’s Shiite Islamist factions.

So far, the contributions to this reawakened debate follow patterns that are familiar to those who followed the previous discussion about federalism south of Baghdad in the 2005–2007 period: The Shiite Islamists remain divided on federalism, with many signalling only limited interest in the concept as such, and most players being explicitly opposed to the idea of a single Shiite region that was propagated by ISCI and the Hakim family from 2005 onwards. Only some Kurds keep calling for a tripartite Iraq made up by ethnic and sectarian regions.

A typical example are recent statements by Shakir al-Darraji, from the State of Law bloc of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. While correctly conceding that the creation of new federal regions are the prerogative of popular initiatives in the governorates, Darraji warns against any new regions at the current stage given the security situation and the heated political atmosphere. Specifically, he warns against a single Shiite region: Such a region would not be in the interest of the Sunnis and Kurds, Darraji says, before adding that the considerations of Iraq’s interest as a whole should be given due weight in any renewed federalism discussion. Symptomatically perhaps, in his interview, Darraji also gave an erroneous account of the legal framework for forming new regions: By saying that any three governorates have the constitutional right to form a new region he reiterated the provisions of the Transitional Administrative Law from 2004 rather than those of the new constitution in 2005 (which allows for any combination of governorates into federal regions, excepting Baghdad, as well as uni-governorate federal regions.)

For his part, Muqtada al-Sadr has commented on the recent threat by Usama al-Nujayfi by challenging the inhabitants of these regions to prove their interest in federalism in a referendum. He added that he was against any kind of federalism that would lead to partition… Also, to the extent that there are departures from this general trend, they relate to Basra – as they always did in the past. In a recent statement Jawad al-Bazuni, a young deputy from Basra affiliated with Daawa (Tanzim al-Iraq) exhibits this tendency. Echoing pro-federal tendencies in evidence among State of Law deputies who captured the governorate council in Basra in January 2009, Buzuni says the creation of multiple federal regions would be the best solution in Iraq in the context of enduring political tension. Buzuni also highlights the Kurdish experience as a successful case of federalism.

Perhaps the greatest surprise in all of this has come from a “Sunni source” – Nujayfi himself. In media comments subsequent to the latest controversy about his statements, Nujayfi revealed that in addition to the petition by the Basra governorate council for a federalism referendum that was submitted in the second half of 2010 (but has so far remained unaddressed by the government in Baghdad in violation of the law on implementing federalism), a similar petition from the governorate council in Wasit, signed by 16 out of 28 council members, was submitted some 2 months ago. This is interesting because Wasit has not figured prominently in past discussions of federalism among Iraqi Shiites. The existence of an oilfield operated by a Chinese company in the governorate adds to the complexity of centre–periphery relations in this case, as does the fact that the State of Law alliance is severely divided there, with a recent split between the Shahristani and the Maliki blocs (the Shahristani supporters have joined independents and the Iraqi Constitutional Party). The exact political configuration behind the latest pro-federal move remains unclear, but an ISCI politician played a key role in making the first moves in 2010.

Shiastan Strategist Criticises Maliki-Allawi Rapprochement; His Boss Meets with Hill

Predictably, the signs of increasing dialogue between Iraqiyya headed by Ayad Allawi and State of Law (SLA) led by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki are met with alarm not only by the Kurds, but also by the Iraqi National Alliance, the more sectarian Shiite group of parties that received 70 seats in the new parliament.

The latest contribution to this chorus is from Basim al-Awwadi, a political adviser to Ammar al-Hakim, the leader of the pro-Iranian Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI). In a statement to the press, Awwadi suggests that SLA and Iraqiyya cannot cooperate because their political programmes are incompatible and “180 degrees from each other”.

Clearly, Awwadi is not a supporter of the “180 solution” ! Also, he is not very good at analysing political programmes. The fact is that SLA and Iraqiyya agree on a number of salient issues in Iraqi politics, including the importance of a strong centralised state including a powerful oil ministry, respecting Islam but without giving clerics too much power (unlike Awwadi’s own INA, State of Law does not have adherence to the diktats of the Shiite priests as part of its official programme), boosting Iraqi oil production (even in a situation where Iran may not like this because prices may go down), and not ceding the mixed city of Kirkuk to the Kurds. In fact there is greater agreement on these issues between Iraqiyya and SLA than there is internally within INA (where at least some Sadrists are more centralist and anti-Kurdish than the rest).

But there is also some more interesting background to this. Awwadi, who has become more prominent as a Hakim adviser lately, used to be a strong advocate not only of the idea of a Shiite federal entity stretching from Baghdad to Basra, but indeed for full Shiite independence. In articles written back in 2004 and 2005 and published on websites such as that of the “Committee for the Independence of the Shiites of Iraq” (on which more here), Awwadi claimed that “the Shiites of Iraq are a separate nation, totally distinct from the others”. He advocated emulating the Kurdish strategy of independence, aiming for the liberation from the rest of Iraq of the territory in the triangle between Fao, Samarra and Kirkuk/Diyala. He strongly criticised the Allawi government and suggested the Shiites do more to get on par with Sunnis and Kurds with respect to military capability.

Little wonder, then, that Awwadi is critical to an alliance between SLA and Iraqiyya that could once more push his beloved sectarian identities slightly to the background. Meanwhile, however, his primitive kind of thinking still appears to command some interest in American circles, not least as far as Ambassador Chris Hill is concerned. He made sure to follow in the footsteps of Joe Biden and UNAMI representative Ad Melkert to make his nth meeting with Awwadi’s boss, Ammar al-Hakim, over the weekend. Characteristically, the ISCI communiqué from the meeting said the meeting resulted in “reassurances… that a government would be formed of all the political forces of all the factions of the Iraqi community”. In fact, that sounds very 2004, but some players apparently still want to keep the idea of a “factionalised” Iraqi society on the agenda…

Hakim Still Dreaming about Regions

He has lived in the country less than half of his life but the 37-year old Ammar al-Hakim, the new leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), continues to spend time contemplating radical changes to the state structure of Iraq. In a recent interview with Iraqi television, he made it clear that he still envisages the creation of multiple federal regions in Iraq south of Kurdistan.

In the period between 2005 and 2007 Hakim was perhaps the single most vocal spokesperson for the idea of a single, Shiite sectarian region to be established from south of Baghdad to the Gulf. While he no longer pushes that particular configuration of governorates to form a new region, the recent interview makes it clear once more that he has no qualms about future changes to Iraq’s administrative map: One governorate, three governorates or nine governorates in a single federal region, that is for the people to decide, says Hakim. Iraq may perhaps be the cradle of civilisation with a millennia-long tradition of centralised government but to Hakim this historical legacy simply seems irrelevant.

While legalists will point out that Hakim is finally moving closer to the 2005 constitution, a more meaningful interpretation of the significance of his statement emerges when it is contrasted with what other Iraqi politicians are saying these days. Just within the past weeks, representatives for the Daawa party (Abd al-Hadi al-Hassani), Iraqiyya (Maysun al-Damluji), Hiwar (Mustafa al-Hiti) and the Sadrists (Talib al-Kurayti) have all expressed scepticism to the creation of any new federal entities. Several have hinted that restrictions on federalism may be a subject for the upcoming constitutional review. In other words, when most Iraqi politicians finally seem to respond to recurrent popular demands for an end to federalisation and a greater focus on more pressing issues of security, health and the economy, Hakim makes a point of keeping such options open.

This in turn highlights potential contradictions inside the newly created Iraqi National Alliance, where Hakim is playing a key role. In a recent interview with the Christian Science Monitor that has been widely reproduced in the Iraqi press, another leading ISCI figure, Adil Abd al-Mahdi, weighed in on the issue of state structure. Although some of the translations of the interview have clearly been garbled in the Iraqi press, the one by the Furat television channel based on an ISCI press release is probably an authoritative account of what Abd al-Mahdi intended to say. Put briefly, in his view, the goal of the new coalition is to create a unified government without ideological contradictions: “It is impossible to have a centralist view within a government that believes in decentralisation”.

Seen in isolation, this is clarifying: The Iraqi National Alliance confirms its decentralisation ideology and emphasises its differences with others in the Maliki government, such as the premier himself, on the issue. Alas, the problem, of course, is the presence of certain arch-centralists – in particular the Sadrists – as a key element in the new Shiite-led alliance. Clearly, if Abd al-Mahdi were to follow through on his own logic, the obvious next steps would be as follows: Firstly, to cut all contact with the centralist Iraqiyya (with whom negotiations supposedly still go on). Secondly and, more importantly perhaps, to ditch the Sadrists, who also reject the creation of more federal entities.

But they are not going to do that, are they? After all, the Sadrist votes for the Iraqi National Alliance are badly needed. For his part, Ammar al-Hakim has already declared that he will not subject himself to the unpredictable whims of voters by running as a candidate. And whereas ISCI earned one third of its members of parliament in 2005 not on the basis of actual votes for candidates but in post-election distribution of so-called compensatory seats at the national level, the Sadrists are holding a kind of primaries these days, with a reported turnout of 16,000 in Dhi Qar. The Sadrists, in turn, are under instructions from Muqtada al-Sadr to select only non-clerical independents, making it even less likely that ISCI would benefit from the Sadrist vote under an open-list system.

This illustrates a more widespread dynamic related to the ongoing debate on the elections law. In public, all the parties except the two Kurdish ones agree that an open-list system should be used. ISCI supported closed lists in the past but has been pressured into accepting an open-list system after persons close to the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani increasingly have expressed a strong preference for this. (In fact, for this reason Sistani is almost portrayed as something of a nationalist hero on normally unsympathetic television stations like Sharqiyya these days, so don’t say Iraqi politics isn’t changing!) In theory, then, the only remaining problem with the elections law should be what to do with Kirkuk, and even here a compromise should be possible after a very helpful proposal two days ago by Hasan Turan, a Turkmen representative, to make provisions for a re-examination of the voter register for that province – an idea that received public support yesterday also from Usama al-Nujayfi, another powerful voice from the north.

However, it is reported that several parties are unsecure about their real standing among voters and secretly prefer the closed-list system for that reason. The motive is that with a closed list the big vote-getters (such as the Sadrists) can enhance their electoral prospects by creating a “ticket” in a very literal sense – i.e. by giving others, less popular politicians, a free ride to parliamentary seats that would otherwise be at risk (that is, if voters were given a chance to intervene in the selection of candidates). As if to underline the lack of respect for Iraqi voters, with all these issues pending, the parliament has announced it will not reconvene until 13 October, only two days before the deadline for completing changes to the electoral system.

Ahmad al-Sulayti, or, Maliki’s Basra Problem

Ahmad al-Sulayti, member of Basra's provincial council for ISCI

The standardised Western narrative on Basra political developments over the past two years is as simple as it is deceptive: For a while, the people of Basra were terrorised by militia rule directed mainly by two “extremist” and “milita-affiliated” groups – Sadrists and the ruling Fadila party – but this sorry state of affairs came to an end in March 2008 by the heroic intervention of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki,  variously celebrated as the “legalist”, the “secularist” and the “hater of the Iranians” depending on the writer’s closeness to the Bush administration. The militias disappeared, “the rule of law” was restored in Basra, and Maliki was rewarded by the Basrawis last January with a resounding win in the local elections.

The reality in Basra these days is somewhat different. Since the assumption of power by the new local government last April, reports of increasing Islamisation of Basra’s public sphere have intensified. Growing pressures towards Islamic dress code in public-sector workplaces have been reported, along with increased attempts at gender segregation in public spaces like parks and university areas. In August came a formal ban on the sale of alcohol.

Some of these moves have been championed by the very “secularist” list that Maliki’s alliance was supposed to represent, with the new governor Shaltagh Abbud in the lead. However, by far the greatest enthusiast for imposing strict Islamic order in Basra society – in fact, his zeal is such that other council members have had to restrain him lately – is from neither the Daawa nor the Sadrist camp. Rather, Shaykh Ahmad al-Sulayti is a leading figure of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) and a preacher in Zubayr, traditionally a Sunni stronghold but since the 1960s increasingly populated by Shiites. He has been at the forefront of several of the recent legislative initiatives aimed at enhancing the observation of Islamic codes of conduct in Basra. Like many other Shiite activists he refers to the elusive “marjaiyya” as his source of authority; at his website this is operationalised with links to the “four great” top ulama of Iraq – the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the three other leading traditionalists of Najaf.

Basra may be in the middle of a water supply crisis but Sulayti’s current preoccupation is that he wants Basra’s men to grow their beards – to let the beard flow freely, as the Arabs say – a matter in which he is indeed supported by Sistani fatwas. It should be stressed that the way he has gone about this business in itself seems quite innocuous: Last week he introduced a law that would prevent public officials from directing employees to shave their beards, referring to the principle of individual freedom. But if his strategy thus seemed somewhat indirect (and not really different from, say, campaigns by Muslims in Europe for the right to wear the hijab at work), it was considered to go too far by the rest of the council (which had previously approved the ban on alcohol) and was cancelled a few days ago after having first been adopted.

Sulayti’s priorities reflect an interesting focus on rituals and dress code as the key to creating Islamic spaces, not entirely different from Sunni Islamist tendencies, but previously often thought to be the preserve of “radical Sadrists” as far as the Iraqi Shiite scene was considered. And whereas the Daawa-led coalition in Basra right now appears to be in a position to resist pressures from clerics like Sulayti, it is surprising how far in the direction of Islamisation they have ventured already, their rock-solid majority in the local council notwithstanding. More than anything the Basra developments speak volumes about the pressures that Maliki is facing from elements in the Shiite Islamist camp often considered “moderates” by the outside world, and hence the need for him to think carefully through the constellation of his political alliances in the next parliamentary elections. (Not that the Basra regionalism trend is going away either – a Basra member of his list, Mahmud al-Maksusi, recently reminded Iraqi parliamentarians about their promise to give Basra special status as Iraq’s “economic capital”.)

The situation in Basra has wider ramifications that are as fascinating as they are potentially explosive. At some point, members of the Iraqi public with an interest in Islamic law are likely to ask themselves why, given the theoretical oneness of Islamic law, is it legal to sell alcohol in Baghdad and not in Basra? More likely, they will not stop by asking themselves, but may well want to pose the question to other authorities that are supposed to be in the know about these issues, like the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, or the Federal Supreme Court, or, worse, perhaps both of them at the same time. Even more critically, some may want to know why the ban is not being implemented in the streets of Arbil and other parts of the Kurdistan Region, which just like the rest of the Iraq is subject to the constitutional imperative that no legislation may contradict the fundamentals of Islam. In this battle between Islamic law and secularism lies the conflict that could one day topple the project of Iraq as an Islamic federation, as set out in everything but the name in the 2005 constitution. And if the issue is not raised by the Iraqi public itself, it will under any circumstances force its way onto the agenda once the law on the composition of a new federal supreme court – promised in 2005 but considered a too sensitive subject until now – is to be debated in the Iraqi parliament.

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.

Hakim’s Insincerity on the Local Elections

In a strange series of comments given to the Iraqi news agency Aswat al-Iraq, Ammar al-Hakim highlights the importance of holding early provincial elections and seems to forget that his own party, ISCI, has been at the forefront of attempts to derail those elections. First, back in February, ISCI along with the Kurds fiercely resisted the insertion of a timeline for elections into the provincial powers law. Subsequently, after having been defeated by a parliamentary majority on the issue, ISCI tried to use the presidential veto to avoid elections. More recently, ISCI has continued to complicate the parliamentary deliberations on the elections law itself through continuing to demand the right to use religious symbols for campaigning purposes. In a remarkable statement in the most recent interview, Hakim refers to the “timeline for elections laid down by the Iraqi constitution” – surely he must know that there is no timeline for local elections in the constitution.

Perhaps sensing a degree of pressure from the higher Shiite clergy, Hakim now tries to present ISCI as an advocate of early elections – unsurprisingly, he now blames the very parties that demanded elections in the first place for trying to obstruct them! This refers to the demand by a majority of Iraqi parliamentarians that pending elections in Kirkuk, and as part of the elections law, there should be some kind of shake-up in the local administration there in the direction of greater power-sharing between the various communities. This demand reflects a widespread desire among Iraqi parliamentarians to challenge the hegemony of ISCI, the Kurds and Maliki in dominating Iraq’s politics – a hegemony which came under threat when the provincial powers law with the timeline for elections was adopted back in February, but which has since been restored through heavy-handed action (often with US support) against political enemies of all shades, in many cases on the pretext of vaguely defined “security” concerns that have yet to result in formal charges against those targeted in the operations.

In the interview, Hakim is less bullish than ever before on the idea of forming a big Shiite region. This time, he merely refers to the constitutional provisions on the subject, which leave the issue to popular grassroots initiatives.

Debating Devolution in Iraq

In early August 2007, Jalal al-Din al-Saghir, a Shi‘i preacher affiliated with the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, made headlines with striking comments to a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor. The cleric revealed in an interview with Sam Dagher that “a massive operation” was underway to secure the establishment of a Shi‘i super-province in Iraq, to be named the “South of Baghdad Region,” and projected to encompass all nine majority-Shi‘i governorates south of the Iraqi capital. Saghir claimed that his party had already drafted detailed plans for how such a super-province would be governed — plans of such importance to Iraq and the region that there was “no room for misadventures”… Full story here.

Suffering, Oil, and Ideals of Coexistence: Non-Sectarian Federal Trends in the Far South of Iraq

[Paper presented to the MESA 2007 annual meeting, Montreal, November 17–20
Panel (P099) The Implementation of Federalism in Iraq: The Internal Debate]

Among the numerous fallacies that have become widespread in analyses of today’s Iraq is the notion that the Shiites of the country are unified in demanding the establishment of a sectarian federal entity, a Shiite super-state. And even though some studies at least acknowledge the internal Shiite division between anti-federal Iraqi nationalist and supporters of federalism, few bother to examine important sub-divisions inside the pro-federal camp. In many accounts there simply is only one Shiite federal vision of the future: iqlim al-wasat wa-al-janub (the Region of the Center and the South), covering all the nine Shiite-majority governorates to the south of the Iraqi capital.1

     In reality, the Region of the Center and the South was a latecomer to the Iraqi Shiite debate on federalism. A few Shiites tentatively grappled with federalism as early as in the 1990s, but always in a non-sectarian framework. And when concrete plans for federalism materialized in Shiite circles in late 2003, this was on the basis of a cross-sectarian civic platform. Only in the summer of 2005 did a sectarian variant of federalism emerge – but, despite colossal media interest in the West, it has yet to establish itself as the dominant federal project in Shiite circles in Iraq.

     This paper focuses on non-sectarian incarnations of federalism among Iraq’s Shiites, with a special focus on the far south of the country: the triangle Basra–Nasiriyya–Amara.2 Since 2004, federal mobilization in this region has taken place on a political platform that can be described as non-sectarian, if not always directly anti-sectarian. Three components in southern regionalist identity will be highlighted here: the idea of southern suffering during the course of history; the sense of special regional entitlement to the gigantic petroleum resources of the area; and the tentative efforts to provide these sentiments with a pluralistic ideological superstructure. The main conclusion is that, among Iraq’s Shiites, the non-sectarian approach to federalism has firmer historical roots than the sectarian one, but is increasingly coming under pressure not least due to a strange convergence of interest among three major external players in Iraq – the United States, the United Kingdom, and Iran.

Non-sectarianism in the Iraqi federalist tradition

Federalist pioneers have been present in Shiite political circles since the early 1990s, when a select few began toying with the idea of extending the idea of decentralization beyond the traditional concept of Kurdish autonomy in the north. But throughout that decade and into the period leading up to the 2003 Iraq War, these pro-federal attitudes were consistently focused on schemes for avoiding any sectarian definition of federal entities. Such sectarian units should be avoided at all cost, it was maintained, because they threatened to derail the entire federal project, fulfilling scaremonger prophecies about “federalism” being the equivalent of “partition”.3

     Such attitudes continued to prevail also after 2003. When the debate about federalism in Iraq heated up in early 2004 prior to the adoption of the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), even Shiites who were sympathetic in principle to federalism maintained that sectarian entities should be avoided. For example, Qasim al-Sahlani of the Tanzim al-Iraq faction of the Daawa party maintained that, whereas the principle of federalism might well be extended beyond the Kurdish areas, it should not be applied on “an ethnic or communal basis”.4 Similarly, Ahmad al-Barrak, a Shiite member of the governing council, was positive to a federation built on administrative and geographical criteria but rejected one where sectarian or ethnic identities would be involved.5 In fact, the first specific model of Iraqi federalism outlined in the 15 November 2003 deal between the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Iraqi governing council stipulated a form of federalism that would “comprise the governorates” (wa-tashmalu al-muhafazat) – a considerable step towards a non-sectarian, 18-governorate federal model of Iraq, but one that was subsequently torpedoed by Kurdish nationalist demands.6

     Even if a few Shiites were now beginning to look with greater interest at possible “Shiite” parallels to the Kurdish situation – members of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) were particularly prominent in this regard – an overwhelmingly negative attitude to sectarian expressions of federalism persisted in Shiite circles. This was reflected in institutional developments in 2004 and 2005. Although the pro-sectarian SCIRI dominated the Shiite delegations both in the February 2004 TAL negotiations as well as during the work with the Iraqi constitution in the summer of 2005, even they did not venture to try to impose sectarian federalism from above. The TAL had a ceiling of three existing governorates as the maximum size of future federal entities, thereby preventing any purely Shiite region from being formed. The 2005 constitution did not impose any such specific limits, but neither did it give political elites the opportunity to dictate the demarcation of new federal regions. Instead, Iraq’s new federalization framework emerged as a remarkable syncretism, combining ideals dating from Spanish nineteenth-century anarchism (and brought to the table by the UN and international experts involved) with the demands of the more sectarian Shiite political leaders for some kind of parity with the Kurds.7

     In an interesting testimony to the strength of non-sectarian attitudes among Shiite Iraqi federalists, resistance to sectarian variants of federalism has persisted beyond the adoption of the Iraqi constitution in October 2005. In the first place, it seems very likely that federalism was involved in some of the unspecified “weaknesses” of the constitution that Sistani mentioned when grudgingly according his “approval” to it a few days before the October 2005 referendum.8 Moreover, in October 2006 some political parties, like the Fadila, explicitly rejected the procedures for implementing federalism on the grounds that the absence of size limitations would alienate the opponents of federalism (who were particularly worried about the emergence of sectarian federal entities).9 Problematic as they may be in terms of methodology, public opinion polls have quite consistently reported a strong Shiite desire to restrict federalism and even to move back to a unitary state formula – an interesting indication of the general level of ignorance about federalism that must have prevailed during the October 2005 referendum.10 In fact, even SCIRI has been at pains to present its scheme for a nine-governorate Shiite federal entity south of Baghdad as a “non-sectarian” one (based on the amalgamation of governorates “which just happen to be Shiite in demographic composition”), although this would seem rather disingenuous. In his propaganda talks in favor of the projected region, Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim has spoken about  the “holy goal” (hadaf muqaddas) of implementing this project. Also emphatically sectarian are the signals sent by joint conferences of governors from all eleven Shiite governorates where Shiites have a substantial presence (including Baghdad, which is constitutionally barred from becoming part of a larger entity, and Diyala, where Shiites are in a minority but in control of the provincial government).11 This leaves SCIRI as the most important promoter of sectarian federalism for the Shiites, but at the same time it underlines the relatively vulnerable position of this project among the Shiite community as a whole.

Non-sectarian federalism in the far south

The chronology of the emergence of specific non-sectarian variants of federalism in the far south of Iraq is a straightforward one. Pro-federal ideas were current by late 2003, when the then Basra governor, Wail Abd al-Latif – a Shiite secularist – promoted the vision of Basra as a wealthy, mercantile single-governorate federal unit. Later, shortly after the TAL had been adopted, governors in neighboring Amara and Nasiriyya were the moving forces behind a slightly larger project that would combine Basra, Maysan and Dhi Qar into a three-governorate federal entity to be known as the Region of the South (iqlim al-janub). This idea was supported by the next governor of Basra, SCIRI’s Hasan al-Rashid, when he assumed office in August 2004, and it soon achieved a remarkable degree of cross-party support in Basra. It was adopted by Fadila and their coalition partners (who sidelined SCIRI in local government after the January 2005 elections), and was enthusiastically supported in conferences arranged by secular and religious leaders during the spring of 2005.12

     The “pro-federal” spring of 2005 culminated in southern demands that the central government should act on the provisions in the TAL for creating a federal region of Basra, Maysan and Dhi Qar. This was, however, aborted in what appears to have been an act of internal Shiite sabotage against the non-sectarian federal aspirations of the far south. In the first place, it was the (Shiite-dominated) Jaafari government that failed to act on the southern demands for a mechanism for forming a federal region. Secondly, by removing the maximum limit on the size of federal entities in the constitutional drafts, Shiite legislators – themselves overwhelmingly from the central parts of Iraq – effectively deprived the southerners of an obvious legal rationale for their project. And finally, SCIRI launched its competing project of a single sectarian federal region south of Baghdad in August 2005. None of this served to obliterate the plans for a small-scale federal entity in the far south, however. The Fadila party, in particular, has continued to promote a small-scale southern region (although the idea of Basra as a federal region of its own has apparently replaced the three-governorate scheme), but also tribal forces in Maysan and Dhi Qar have expressed similar variants of opposition to sectarian federalism in the shape of non-sectarian federal plans for the far south. Even some SCIRI leaders in Basra remained more focused on Basra than on the Shiite super-region as late as the summer of 2005, when the more sectarian plans of the party’s politburo were well underway.13 And despite the combined efforts of SCIRI and the Maliki government to remove the regionalist Fadila from power in Basra, the non-sectarian federalist theme has persisted: even at the height of his confrontation with Maliki in the summer of 2007, Basra governor Muhammad al-Waili emphasized the idea of a Basra federal entity during a meeting with tribal sheikhs,14 whereas members of other parties within the Fadila coalition that apparently had defected during the vote of no confidence against the governor earlier in the year also resumed propaganda with a clear Basra regionalist dimension – for example, in the form of complaints that the central government had not given Basra a sufficient quota during the annual distribution of pilgrimage permits.15

“Southern suffering”

With regard to the contents of the non-sectarian federalism of the south, one of its main characteristics has been a sense of a common destiny defined by historical experience. And in this historical experience, the theme of suffering takes center stage. Rather than being defined by any shared ethnic or sectarian heritage, Iraqi southerners claim uniqueness on the basis of a common myth of deprivation. They hold that their fate has been different from that of all other Iraqis, including the Shiites of central Iraq. And while this is often portrayed as a general historical trend, most southerners point specifically to the recent experience of living in the battleground of two bloody wars – the Iran–Iraq War from 1980 to 1988 and the Gulf War in 1991 – as the formative experience that entitles them to special political demands.

     Examples of this sense of suffering are widespread in southern political rhetoric. Typical are the words of Baqir Yasin al-Tamimi, a secular proponent of the Region of the South. In spring 2005, he wrote in a letter to the president of the Iraqi national assembly, “the governorates of Basra, Maysan and Dhi Qar have experienced worse neglect, injustice, marginalization and suppression… from the days of the monarchy and until this day.”16 He then went on to exemplify by referring to how the south had been transformed into “the stage for the destructive, bloody wars of the Baath regime”, claiming more than 300,000 victims. Some months earlier, the tone taken by Khalaf al-Manshidi, the editor of Manara – Basra’s largest newspaper – had been quite similar: “those who do not believe us should visit Basra, Maysan and Dhi Qar, and should make a car trip along the Shatt al-Arab river from Basra to Abu al-Khasib, or travel down to Fao, to see for themselves what disaster the former regime brought to this lush area … during the war with Iran”.17 And in a newspaper letter in March 2006, Abd al-Karim al-Amiri echoed many of the same grievances, lamenting how southerners have had to live through years of “deprivation, oppression, violence, killing and marginalization”.18

      One important aspect of this sense of injustice is the widespread feeling that discrimination persisted also after 2003 when, supposedly, more democratic regimes were installed in Baghdad. These increasingly acidic comments by southerners on the Shiite-led governments that emerged from 2004 and onwards highlight the non-sectarian nature of the regionalist movement in the far south. In July 2005, southerners spoke of “marginalization” (tahmish) inside the constitutional committee (which in purely sectarian terms was Shiite-dominated).19 “What has [SCIRI leader] Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim done for Maysan?” demanded an angry Fadila leader in Amara in May 2006, after more than one year with a Shiite Islamist coalition in power in Baghdad.20 And when steps were taken by the Nuri al-Maliki government to try to unseat Basra’s governor from the Fadila party in the summer of 2007, talk of “neo-Baathism” as well as accusations of a cave-in to “Iranian” interests by the Shiite-led central government and their SCIRI allies surfaced in an angry Shiite on Shiite altercation.21

     The southern idea of suffering also has a concrete physical focus that is unique to the region. The scars of the wars of the 1980s and 1990s are still evident in the area, above all in the vicinity of Basra which saw some particularly ferocious military action during the war with Iran. Historically, Basra was the pre-eminent date-growing region of Iraq, with a thick belt of date palms extending along the Shatt al-Arab from Fao all the way to Qurna – today, it is only a pale shadow of its former glory. But perhaps the most important symbol of southern suffering is the marsh areas, shared by the three governorates in the south, and largely destroyed by the former regime during operations targeting opposition groups in the 1990s. Regionalist southerners often refer to the marshes as an example of the tragedies unique to the southern parts of Shiite Iraq, complaining that “the southern marshlands were dried out on the pretext of security operations… killing millions of birds, fish and domesticated animals”.22 This is another area where criticism has persisted beyond 2003, even though there is growing awareness that the local authorities themselves have not fully exploited the opportunity to improve conditions in the marshes. For instance, whereas Basra politicians were busy highlighting the plight of the marsh inhabitants during an international conference in Amman in Jordan in the summer of 2006, Basra newspapers back home had already sounded a critical note about the lack of local initiatives for doing something about the problem.23

Example of “southern” regionalism propaganda dating from the summer of 2007. The accompanying map is slightly atypical in that it also incorporates one locality north of the old Basra vilayet – Diwaniyya

Ownership of local energy resources

A watershed in Iraqi political discourse after 2003 has been the burgeoning idea of local ownership of energy resources. According to the standard Iraqi nationalist canon no such thing has ever existed: Iraqi oil belongs to the entire Iraqi people, full stop. As late as in January 2004, even a member of the Kurdistan Democratic Party would maintain that he saw the central government as the natural administrator of all Iraqi oil, regardless of whether it was located in Basra or in Kirkuk.24

     Accounting for perhaps 70% of Iraq’s oil wealth and more than 97% of the energy resources located in the Shiite areas, Basra with its two neighboring governorates spearheaded the changing attitudes on this issue. Soon after having assumed power as Basra governor in August 2004, SCIRI’s Hasan al-Rashid revealed ideas that broke dramatically with the orthodox approach to resource management and ownership:

Taxation is among the prerogatives of the local government, and as a local government we have the right to put tax on exports, whether on oil or on other goods. Basra should not be the milk cow. All the oil fields of Iraq are in Basra. The United Arab Emirates is a country whose oil resources has made it into the most important state in the region.Abu Dhabi takes 50% of its oil income and hands over the other half to the central government.We also have the right to take a share from the oil.25

.

Subsequently, different approaches to the oil question emerged among southern regionalists. Some were content to juxtapose the legacy of neglect with the presence of oil resources and present this as a big paradox – as seen for instance in a statement by a Basra delegate to the big national convention in Baghdad in August 2003 who had left the proceedings in protest: “Basra is the city of the deprived and the oppressed [but also] the city of the oil wells”.26 Similarly, the Sadrist politician Abd al-Jabbar Wahid in April 2005 made the following complaint: “The Maysan governorate is rich in natural resources, but it has suffered neglect and marginalization. The sum set aside for it of 110 million dinars is not appropriate for this governorate which suffered so much under the former regime.”27 Others went further, echoing Hasan al-Rashid’s demand for a disproportionate share of the oil revenue. This was evident in March 2006, when Fadila supporters in Nasiriyya called for a general strike to “to guard our rights to administer our natural wealth as southern governorates that were hurt by the former regime”,28 and again in May 2006 when Muhammad Sa‘dun al-‘Abbadi of the Harakat al-Daawa vented his anger: “Basra single-handedly finances all of Iraq and had it not been for this city, Iraq would have come to a standstill… And yet, in terms of finances, Basra is treated as if it were another ordinary governorate.”29 And in some cases, the idea of local ownership was explicit. In May 2006, a Fadila member in Maysan openly accused the central government of “theft of the region’s oil resources for the benefit of the central government and the Kurdistan government”,30 whereas in July 2007 advocates of setting up a southern regional government in the three southernmost governorates referred to “our rich south” (janubna al-ghaniyy) to back up their political demands.31

     These ideological developments have been accompanied by cruder actions on the ground. Since its emergence in early 2003, the Fadila party has worked systematically to assert its influence within the local oil industry in Basra. More than any other party, it has succeeded in exercising some kind of control through personal links with leaders in the Southern Oil Company and through its dominance in the special security forces charged with guarding the oil installations. On more than one occasion, political strikes in the oil industry have been construed as acts of regional protest by Fadila leaders, as for instance in March 2005 when Basra’s governor  Muhammad al-Waili met with oil workers on strike who were demanding that “sons of the south” be recruited to the ministries of oil and transport,32 and again in July that year when he claimed that “the strike among the oil workers has political aims, notably to reduce the power of the central government and to achieve far-reaching prerogatives for the local administration as well as a fair share of the oil revenue.”33 The same theme was invoked in December 2005 when the three southern governorates refused to implement a hike in oil prices – a measure which had been decided centrally, and was immediately heeded in other parts of Iraq.34

     The novelty of this new southern approach to energy ownership is perhaps best appreciated when contrasted with attitudes in areas further north. After the three petro-governorates of the far south, Wasit is the Shiite area with the greatest concentration of energy resources. But here, local politicians were much less assertive than their southern counterparts during an interview in July 2006: “A delegation from the governorate was received by the prime minister in the presence of the oil minister concerning the possibilities to exploit the al-Ahdab oil field and the prime minister signaled his good intentions in this matter and the oil minister assured us that he had been in contact with the Chinese concerning contracts they had signed with the old regime.”35 Similarly, in Karbala (which has no oil of its own) in December 2005, the local governor patiently explained the central government’s change of the price of petrol by asserting that “the central government is the custodian and the manager (al-ra‘iy wa-al-mudabbir) which is not susceptible to the short-sighted whims of popular opinion”, adding that the step was part of a larger package to reduce Iraq’s external debt.36 This pliant attitude is what has now changed in the far south. Whereas Iraqis throughout the ages have demanded their “rights” (huquqna) – often a somewhat intangible and elusive concept – southern Iraqis are now asking to be taken seriously in claiming specific rights relating to their energy wealth. Importantly, from this perspective, what was celebrated by the Bush administration in September 2007 as “Iraqi sharing of oil revenue in the absence of oil legislation”, simply represented the cordial apportioning by Shiites from central Iraq and by the Kurds of booty taken from the oil wells of the far south.

     However, by no means is this conversion to new attitudes towards energy resources universal in the far south. For one thing, there are politicians who advocate a federal status for Basra but nevertheless maintain that the central government should have a leading role in managing oil resources – that is, a more leading role than that foreshadowed in the 2005 constitution (where Baghdad’s role in many aspects is circumscribed to the management of “existing” – i.e. already developed or explored – oil fields). One proponent of this kind of approach is Wail Abd al-Latif, the federalist pioneer, who in a constitutional amendment proposal suggested the following arrangement:

Oil, gas and all minerals and metals are the property of the Iraqi people in all the regions and governorates. The federal government will administer this property, existing and unexploited and undiscovered fields alike, and is responsible for its distribution to the Iraqi people in the regions and the governorates in accordance with population figures, with particular attention to those governorates that were hurt by the policies of the former regime and need special development aid to reach the level of the rest of the country.37

Yet other Basrawis concerned about oil do not even foresee any federal status for their area at all, preferring instead to work to improve the status of the “producing governorates” in the proposed oil legislation for Iraq.38

Southern regionalism and the ideal of coexistence

Perhaps the most complicated aspect of southern regionalism concerns identity issues. Clearly, the Region of the South is an attempt to define a kind of identity that is non-sectarian and instead rooted in shared historical experience. But the relationship to existing ideologies like Iraqi and Arab nationalism still remains somewhat ambiguous.

     Anti-sectarianism does play a certain role. Southerners deplore the system under which they are supposed to obtain their share of government spoils through Shiite quotas, which they see as continued dominance by Shiites from Baghdad and from the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala.39 They demand to be taken seriously when they argue against sectarian formulas for distributing government positions, and the elaborate ideological justification offered to back up this position suggests that the standard allegation of ulterior motives (“the Fadila party is merely protesting because they were not accorded a ministry”) is inadequate.40 And to a certain extent these lofty declarations have been followed up on the ground in Basra: for instance, Fadila has taken the lead in attempts to improve relations between the local government and the Sunni minority territorially concentrated in Zubayr and Abu al-Khasib.41

     There are, however, clear limits to this inter-sectarian, generally inclusive, aspect of the regionalist enterprise in the south. Instead of becoming the coalition partners of the Fadila, Sunni parties, Christian minorities as well as secularists of all confessional backgrounds have increasingly distanced themselves from the local federalists. The secular Manara newspaper, for example, now tends to feature articles critical to any kind of federalism, whereas the paper was pro-federal back in 2005.42 And in October 2007, it was left to the embattled Basra police chief – unpopular with many of the Shiite religious parties – to defend Basra’s cosmopolitan heritage. Deploring the deteriorating situation of the women of the Gulf city – they are increasingly being subjected to harassment and even murder in the name of religious piety – Abd al-Jalil Khalaf al-Shuwayli reminded journalists that Basra “is the home of numerous religious sects whose leaders do not impose any particular dress code or social practices.”43

      One factor that may have prevented the crystallization of a purely regional identity with a wide appeal is the survival of a considerable degree of Iraqi nationalism within regionalist circles. The Fadila party, for instance, clearly maintains substantial ambitions on the national Iraqi scene, and its religious leadership in Najaf frequently speaks the language of the unitary state.44 Several times, the Fadila governor has made a point of posing as an Iraqi nationalist (openly accusing SCIRI of being an Iranian stooge, and pointing to his own popularity among rulers in the Gulf as evidence of his Arab nationalist credentials)45 whereas another Basra regionalist, Muhammad Sa‘dun al-‘Abbadi, has reproached the Kurds for not flying the Iraqi flag in the Kurdish region. To some extent this attitude has also been reflected in the actions of the Basra governorate towards its Arab and Iranian neighbors, which must be described as more balanced than those seen in Shiite-majority governorates further north: whereas the Basra governorate has awarded contracts to Kuwaiti firms, Iran has played a far more fundamental role in the redevelopment of cities like Karbala and Najaf – the first major reconstruction meeting for Najaf took place in Tehran in May 2006,46 and a few months earlier the Karbala governor had even threatened to contact the Iranian consulate unless the agriculture department of the central government could offer immediate assistance with insecticides needed locally.47

     This dualism of national and regional identities is clearly evident in the writings of some new southern authors who have emerged after 2003. Among them is Mahdi al-Hasnawi, who in 2004 published the book The Marshes: the Sumerian Civilization.48 In it, there is considerable evidence of a distinctive southern identity. Hasnawi’s definition of the south is “the three southern governorates [of Basra, Maysan and Dhi Qar]”, and the author uses the marshes as a symbolic focus to tell the story of personalities and tribes from all over this region. Multi-sectarian coexistence in the south is central: he devotes no less than six pages to the history of the non-Muslim communities of the marshland region, emphasizing how the Jews and the Mandaeans “exercised their religion in complete freedom in southern Iraq and in the environment of the marshes in particular”. He even traces the history of the Jews into exile in Israel, detailing their settlement in Or Yehuda near Tel Aviv and their continued attachment to their former homeland. 49 Similarly, Hasnawi portrays Shiite–Sunni relations as particularly amicable in the marsh region, with mixed marriages, frequent inter-sectarian festivities during Ramadan, and Sunni participation on Shiite holidays and vice-versa. But none of this localism serves to eradicate or threaten the themes of Iraqi and Arab nationalism. True, the author pays some attention to the (non-Semitic) Sumerian forefathers of today’s southerners, but he nevertheless maintains that “the majority of the population in the south hails from tribes which had emigrated from the Arabian  peninsula”.50 Again, there is often the notion of the marshes as an environment particularly supportive of a multi-religious society, but equally there are references to “the valleys of Mesopotamia” (bilad wadi al-rafidayn) and indeed all of Iraq as areas of coexistence that form a contrast to places like Pakistan and Kashmir.51 Despite the book’s title, there is no attempt to construct any exclusive non-Iraqi or non-Arab prehistory for the southern marshlands.

     Clearly these kinds of Iraqi and Arab loyalties have remained important to proponents of federalism in the far south, and may serve as distractions that prevent southerners from producing a more fully-fledged regionalist identity project. Forming cross-cutting cleavages that work against any form of one-dimensional separatism (whether “Shiite” or “Basra”) they serve as glue for those who subscribe to the wider Iraqi nationalist project.  If anything, in the south today it is anti-federal Iraqi nationalism that still has the upper hand with regard to mastery of the anti-sectarian theme. According to one Basrawi, “Federalism was a problem since the writing of the constitution began, and it remains a problem today… We should unify from south to north… united in love and support for Iraq, that is what we need today, to build a foundation for the future of our dear fatherland and create something unshakeable that will withstand the hurricanes and tornadoes.”52 And in the words of another, “The Iraqi people is not something that the British created in 1920 or 1930. It has existed for six thousand years and has taught humanity civilization, agriculture, irrigation and husbandry. Today, there are forces that wish to divide Iraq into regions, such as the Region of the North and the Region of the South. The Iraqi flag is not flown in the north. This is an American–Zionist plot which will fail, God willing.”53

Conclusion: non-sectarian federalism under pressure

Non-sectarian federalism in southern Iraq persists, but it is no longer as vibrant as it was during the first half of 2005.

     To some extent, the southern federalists have themselves to blame for this. On top of the problem of reconciling their regionalism with their Iraqi nationalism, they have also had major difficulties in organizing their political movement. They have been unable to transform a widely felt perception of southern marginalization into an integrated political movement – as painfully evident during the parliamentary elections in 2005, where pro-federal Baqir Yasin’s list (331) performed dismally in the January 2005 poll, and where Yasin as well as Khayrallah al-Basri both registered parties with an openly regionalist profile for the December elections, only to later become subsumed in greater coalitions with more nationalist agendas. Also, southern grievances are often framed in a way that fails to communicate with the established legal framework of the “new Iraq”: Basrawis have demanded a straightforward share of the oil they produce instead of entering the detailed discussion on oil legislation (where they could have pressed their case as a “producing governorate); and one of the 2007 incarnations of the “Region of the South” project simply declared that it had established a provisional government in the south, instead of crafting a strategy that would be compatible with the law for implementing federalism adopted in October 2006.54

     But it is also clear that the non-sectarian federal vision of Iraq’s southerners is under immense pressure from the outside, and that it is this factor, more than anything else, that threatens to extinguish it. First and foremost, the southerners represent a severe problem for the Shiite establishment of Iraq. Basra’s demand for a share of the oil revenue is not a demand for a “Shiite share”, and Basra’s vision of a small-scale, non-sectarian south is antithetical to SCIRI’s vision of a Shiite super-region from Baghdad to Basra. Shiites from central Iraq respond by treating the southerners with extreme condescension, using terms such as the “wild south” and accusing them of being “uneducated Marsh Arabs”.55 But they also take concrete action on the ground in the south. SCIRI in particular, but also to some extent the Maliki government, have worked systematically to remove Fadila and their noisy regionalism from the local scene in Basra. After a long period of challenges to Fadila in the provincial council in Basra, Nuri al-Maliki imposed a state of emergency in Basra in May 2006, and in the summer of 2007 came out in support of SCIRI’s attempt to remove the Fadila governor – as yet unsuccessfully.

     Lastly, the international community, and the United Kingdom, the United States and Iran in particular, have become parties to the suppression of non-sectarian southern federalism in Iraq. For a long time, Britain acted quite neutrally in the south, standing back from local struggles and thereby allowing some kind of balance of power to emerge – with Fadila in power in Basra, Sadrists in control in Amara and SCIRI’s grip on power limited to Nasiriyya and Samawa. However, London now apparently wants to leave quickly, and it seems clear that the British government is going to turn a blind eye to Fadila’s misgivings about the true political loyalties of the “national” Iraqi security apparatus to which power will be handed over. The United States, for its part, has pursued an even simpler Shiite strategy in Iraq, consistently choosing to do business with a few selected personalities of SCIRI only, probably in the hope that they may be able to maintain some kind of superficial calm in what is uncritically lumped together as “the Shiite south” of Iraq. It seems likely that US involvement in what was formerly British-held territories in the far south will only strengthen the tendency towards SCIRI domination. And finally, from the point of view of Iran, the Fadila party remains an obvious enemy. Even if the Sadrists as a whole share an often-overlooked historical legacy of intense enmity against Iran, it is above all the Fadila party that has dared to persist loudly with this up until today. Their removal from the Basra governorate and the Southern Oil Company clearly seems to be in Tehran’s best interest – although with the absence of support to Fadila from other major players, some kind of forced cooptation should not be ruled out either. Ironically, then, Washington, London and Tehran all seem to share the view that non-sectarian variants of federalism in Iraq’s south are more of a problem then an asset, and that SCIRI dominance in a sectarian framework is preferable. Sheer logic would indicate that at least one of them is miscalculating.

NOTES

1 More recently, this project has apparently been renamed iqlim janub baghdad or the Region of South of Baghdad.

2 For similar tendencies in the Middle Euphrates area, see Reidar Visser, “The Two Regions of Southern Iraq”, in Reidar Visser & Gareth Stansfield (eds.), An Iraq of Its Regions: Cornerstones of a Federal Democracy? London: Hurst, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007

3 Reidar Visser, “Shiite Perspectives on a Federal Iraq: Territory, Community and Ideology in Conceptions of a New Polity”, in Daniel Heradstveit & Helge Hveem (eds.), Oil in the Gulf: Obstacles to Democracy and Development, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004, pp. 140–44.

4 Al-Da‘wa, February 10, 2004.

5 Al-Mashriq, February 24, 2004.

6 For Shiite support for this idea, see article by Amir Naji Hasan in al-Da‘wa, January 7, 2004.

7 Reidar Visser, “Federalism From Below in Iraq: Some Historical Reflections”, paper presented to an international workshop on “Iraq after the New Government”, Como, Italy, November 2006, www.historiae.org/federalism-from-below.asp

8 Often overlooked is the fact that it was only the constitutional revision clause inserted at the twelfth hour, ostensibly to placate Sunnis, that persuaded Sistani to give the green light to a “Yes” vote. The divergence between Sistani’s rhetoric and that of the pro-sectarian SCIRI is particularly pronounced on the federalism issue, see Reidar Visser, “Sistani, The United States and Politics in Iraq: From Quietism to Machiavellianism?” NUPI Paper no. 700, March 2006, www.historiae.org/sistani.asp

9 Aswat al-Iraq, October 5, 2006.

10 In BBC/ABC polls conducted in spring and autumn of 2007, the percentages of Shiites who favored a unitary state model with no federalism of any description, whether sectarian or non-sectarian (effectively this would mean a dramatic revision of the 2005 constitution) were 41 and 56 respectively.

11 Al-Adala, September 28, 2006.

12 Reidar Visser, Basra, the Failed Gulf State: Separatism and Nationalism in Southern Iraq, Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2005, pp. 171–72.

13 “In the South, a Bid to Loosen Baghdad’s Grip”, Christian Science Monitor, June 28, 2005.

14 Press release from the governor’s office, Basra, August 1, 2007.

15 Aswat al-Iraq, September 10, 2007.

16 Undated letter from Baqir Yasin al-Tamimi to Hajim al-Hasani, circa spring 2005.

17 Al-Manara, October 3, 2004.

18 Al-Manara, March 28, 2006.

19 Posting on http://www.southiraq.org, July 1, 2005.

20 Letter from Ali Husayn Faraj to the leadership of the United Iraqi Alliance, May 15, 2006.

21 Al-Sharq al-Awsat, July 29, 2007, press release of the Fadila party in Basra dated July 28, 2007.

22 Undated letter from Baqir Yasin al-Tamimi to Hajim al-Hasani, circa spring 2005.

23 Al-Manara, March 11, 2006.

24 Interview with Falak al-Din Kaka’i, Al-Jazeera Television, January 23, 2004.

25 Interview in al-Manara, September 1, 2004.

26 Al-Manara, August 22, 2004.

27 Al-Manara, April 13, 2005.

28 Fadila press release, March 1, 2006.

29 Fadila press release, May 31, 2006. Also, “Basra Seeks More Autonomy, Oil Revenue”, NPR, August 5, 2005.

30 Letter from Ali Husayn Faraj to the leadership of the United Iraqi Alliance, May 15, 2006.

31 Press release of an entity calling itself the “Autonomous government of southern Iraq”, July 24, 2007.

32 Al-Manara, March 27, 2005.

33 Al-Mu’tamar, July 19, 2005.

34 Reidar Visser, “Basra Crude: The Great Game of Iraq’s ‘Southern’ Oil”, NUPI Paper no. 723, 2007, www.historiae.org/oil.asp

35 Al-Manara, July 11, 2006.

36 Government of Iraq, Office of the Prime Minister, Reports on the Activities of the Governors, Karbala Report dated December 27, 2005.

37 From a document on constitutional reform by Abd al-Latif probably dating from early 2006.

38 Article by Abd al-Jabbar al-Hilfi in al-Manara, March 2007. It should be pointed out that the latest draft of the Iraqi oil law in some contexts introduced discriminatory measures against oil-producing governorates (as opposed to those with a federal status), whereas in previous drafts all oil-producing entities had been on an equal footing.

39 Posting dated December 24, 2005 at http://www.southiraq.org, accessed on February 18, 2006. The link is now defunct.

40 Fadila press release, September 11, 2006.

41 Fadila press release, October 21, 2006.

42 Al-Manara, October 21 and October 28, 2006 and July 26, 2007.

43 Aswat al-Iraq, October 3, 2007.

44 Report from Fadila party meeting in Basra, December 20, 2006.

45 Washington Post, August 19, 2006; “Parties Battle in Basra”, Washington Times, August 16, 2007.

46 Al-Manara, May 9, 2006.

47 Al-Manara, February 23, 2006.

48 Mahdi al-Hasnawi, Al-ahwar: hadarat sumir, Baghdad: Dar al-Shu’un al-Thaqafiyya al-‘Amma, 2004.

49 Al-Hasnawi, al-Ahwar, p. 93.

50 Ibid., p. 18.

51 Ibid., p. 100.

52 Al-Manara, October 21, 2006.

53 Riyad al-Asadi, remarks at a federalism conference in Basra, April 2005.

54 Press release by the “Autonomous government of southern Iraq”, July 24, 2007.

55 Conversations with Shiite politicians from Baghdad, June 2007.

The Supreme Council Marks Fourth Anniversary of Baqir al-Hakim’s Assassination: No Mention of Federalism

Every year since 2004, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (hereafter the Supreme Council*) has marked the anniversary of the 29 August 2003 assassination of its former leader, Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, in accordance with the Islamic calendar. This year, the 2 Rajab commemoration fell on 17 July.

In 2005 and 2006 these celebrations were turned into propaganda events for the novel idea of a single federal Shiite entity extending from Baghdad to Basra. In 2005, Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim used the occasion to officially launch the project of the Region of the Centre and the South; in 2006 it kicked off a public campaign that culminated in October with the adoption of the law for implementing federalism in Iraq – a legal framework which does not explicitly embrace the idea of a Shiite federal entity, but does not prevent it from becoming established either.

It is therefore noteworthy that this year’s principal commemoration** passed off almost without any mention of federalism. In contrast to earlier years, the main event was dominated by speeches by government representatives rather than by partisan Shiite figures. The meeting concluded with a message from Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim (presently in Tehran for cancer treatment) delivered by his son Ammar. In it, the main focus was on the idea of Iraqi unity and the need to combat extra-constitutional or terrorist challenges to the Iraqi system of government. The word “federalism” did not occur once. Even the standard phrase “A pluralistic, democratic and federal Iraq” had been replaced by “the characteristics of a pluralist democratic system”; only the Kurdish representative focused on a “democratic federal Iraq”.

One obvious explanation for the comparatively low-key celebration could be Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim’s absence in Tehran. Nevertheless, his son Ammar is known to be even more of a pro-federal figure, and even he seems to somewhat modify his rhetoric on federalism these days. There is for instance an interesting contrast between the way his recent interview with Newsweek is recounted in the US magazine and on the Supreme Council website respectively. In the version published in the US, the relevant section goes as follows:

“Q: In the past you have said that you would support a strong autonomous region in the south of Iraq. Some have labelled this Shiastan. Do you still support this idea?
A: Yes, we still believe that the provincial and regional law can give each province or region its power, its capability to develop. At the same time, having a powerful central government that will help Iraq. It is similar to the system that exists in the U.S.

Q: Don’t you think that this could lay the groundwork for the break-up of the country?
A: We believe that this step will unite Iraq, not divide it. It will put an end to the Iraqi Shiites’ historic feeling of being marginalized.”

On the Supreme Council website, on the other hand, the account of the interview is a little different:

“With regard to the subject of federalism, His Highness pointed to the fact that federalism is one of the administrative systems that have become established in the world and it gives the people the possibility to assume responsibility of their affairs, whereas at the same time there is a central government which unites the people like in the administrative system of the United States and other countries in the world. We believe that a system of regions would unite the country and that the people would feel that they participate and would praise the country which had given it the possibility to participate. The Middle Eastern mentality is that of the single strongman; accordingly, without any regions, all power would be in the hands of the central government in Baghdad and the people would become prevented from playing their role in the administration of the country. Similarly, federalism would put an end to the feeling of marginalisation which historically has affected the majority of Iraqis in most parts of the country.”

In other words, here all connotations of sectarianism have been removed, and the message is far more in tune with the ideas of the Iraqi constitution in which popular initiatives – not elite politicians, and certainly not outsiders – are to decide whether their governorates should stay as part of the unitary state, become federal units in their own right, or try join together with other governorates to larger federal entities.

There are two possible explanations as to why the Supreme Council apparently has toned down its federalism rhetoric in 2007. One recurrent argument is that they do so for purely utilitarian reasons: they recognise that many Arab states are highly critical of the concept of a single Shiite region (and therefore the Supreme Council do not wish to isolate themselves), or they may be trying to pose as “moderates” for a US audience. This is a way of reasoning which is broadly similar to “rational” explanations offered for the federal attitudes of other players in Iraqi politics as well: the Sadrists are “against” a Shiite federal entity because their core electorate supposedly is in Baghdad and therefore outside the projected region; similarly the Sunnis are “against” any federalism because “their” federal region would have no oil. The underlying assumption in this sort of argument is that there is a “natural” craving for sectarian federalism among all Iraqis, and that exceptions to this tendency require ad hoc explanations.

An alternative explanation is that the Supreme Council is beginning to understand the limits to the popular appeal of the idea of a single Shiite entity. This kind of interpretation focuses on widespread ideological resistance to federalism among Iraqis, as a far more profound force than calculations about oil and money. Interestingly, for the first time, there is now greater harmony between the message of the Supreme Council and the tone of the leading ulama of Najaf, with focus on “unity” and even condemnation of armed groups outside the governmental system. Still, the link to the grand ayatollahs remains tentative, Hakim on this occasion “renewing his praise for the religious leadership and, in their vanguard, Imam Sistani”. If the Supreme Council were to aspire to a role as a true force of reconciliation in Iraq, it would have to go even further: it would need to openly declare a break with its long-time sponsor, the Iranian leader Ali Khamenei, and it would have to translate its new-found, apparently more flexible position on federalism into formal concessions in the ongoing constitutional revision process. That could bring Sunnis and many non-sectarian Shiites fully back into the political process in Iraq, and only then would the party deserve the label “moderate” which is so often designated to it by US commentators.

*After the name change from the old SCIRI in April 2007, a heated debate has ensued in Western circles about the most appropriate replacement acronym. A consensus on “SIIC” seems to have gained ground, if not universally so. However, a better approach would be to follow the Arabic literally, in which the abbreviation was and remains “the Supreme Council” (al-majlis al-a‘la) – perhaps indicative of the fact that the real changes to the party’s ideology remain highly tentative.

**Postscript: this analysis pertains to the main celebration on the day of the anniversary, 17 July. During lesser events on the subsequent days (specifically 19 and 21 July) the pro-federal Ammar al-Hakim did indeed deliver remarks in support of a single Shiite federal entity. Nevertheless, the failure of his father to touch on the federalism issue in the main address remains conspicuous and significant. On the whole, developments in 2007 clearly show that there is now more than one view on the question of federalism within the Supreme Council.