.Unity Elusive as Iraq Grasps Trappings of Democracy
BAGHDAD — Glumly, Qais Sharaa peered through his barbershop at the collage of posters in Firdos Square, where a statue of Saddam Hussein once presided and the vocabulary of democracy now prevails. Nationalists applauded unity and former insurgents swore their fight was behind them. One poster sported the unlikely portrait of an unveiled woman, in gold jewelry and lipstick, running as a candidate for the country’s most ardently religious party.
“It’s true we have freedom,” Mr. Sharaa said, “but what do we have beyond it?”
“Where’s the law, where’s the state, where’s the sense of citizenship?”
Mr. Sharaa’s question resonates as Iraq heads toward elections on Sunday, perhaps its most decisive moment since Mr. Hussein’s statue was toppled in Firdos Square in 2003. Under American charge, an indisputable political culture has risen along the banks of the Tigris River, unparalleled in the rest of the Arab world.
But elections often exacerbate rather than bridge divisions. And as the United States military withdraws this year, Iraqis have begun to ask whether their state — divided, feeble and corrupt — can navigate the vote’s results in a country still plagued by the miseries of war, the legacy of Mr. Hussein’s rule and a calculus that celebrates the victor’s claiming the spoils of the vanquished.
In that, the elections may be a cautionary lesson, as politicians struggle to cobble together a coalition to rule. Iraq’s politics are more vibrant than the institutions meant to gird them, threatening the support of the people they have enfranchised and a nascent, if flawed democratic experiment that has yet to take root.
“We have failed to build a state of institutions, of law and order,” said Wael Abdel-Latif, a lawmaker and opposition candidate. “Our institutions are based on ideological, sectarian and ethnic foundations. They are dangerous, they are shaky and they could collapse at any moment, especially if it takes a long time to form a new government.”
Since that day in Firdos Square, Iraq has often served as a contest of competing narratives. Elections, with their visuals of ink-stained fingers, have emerged as a centerpiece. But their legacy has proved more equivocal. One vote helped unleash a civil war; another approved a Constitution deemed flawed by nearly everyone. In the prelude to this vote, politicians have recklessly deployed the state — the law, courts and military — to settle scores and further their sometimes demagogic ambitions.
Rarely will anyone defend what has been built. Even Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki calls the system unworkable, though he blames his opponents for making it so.
For many, the problem rests in the very notion of how to organize those fledgling institutions in a country ruled by a succession of kings, strongmen, dictatorial parties and, finally, the Americans. To hold the state together, the government operates by consensus in a country that lacks one, forcing politicians to postpone decisions into an uncertain future on the most pressing issues — from a national census to disputed territories.
“Iraq has proven under U.S. tutelage that it can organize elections and develop this political culture, and that is encouraging,” said Joost Hilterman of the International Crisis Group. “But I’ve still seen no evidence that any government can govern.”
Abdullah Jabbar thought about that judgment as he sat at his clothing store in Kahramana Square, festooned with posters for some of the nearly 6,200 candidates vying for Parliament’s 325 seats. Like many these days, he expressed a mix of optimistic pride and savvy cynicism at a campaign that has flourished in the past month. No one can avoid it, he said, neither the text messages on cellphones nor the candidates’ debates on television.
“It’s like a soccer match and this is the roar of the crowd,” he said.
Iraq’s sectarianism still shapes the election. A Sunni vice president appeals to “our people,” and Shiite candidates speak of guarding “our rights.” Three judges in Mr. Hussein’s trial are candidates, one boasting he “carried out the judgment of God and the people.” But the most chauvinistic language is often tempered by ambiguity, a far cry from the last election in 2005, and in Kahramana and elsewhere, politics have matured.
“We are coming!” followers of Moktada al-Sadr, a cleric, shouted in 2004, when they fought the Americans twice. Candidates loyal to him deploy the same slogan now, with a twist. “We are coming ... to build,” their posters read. In Anbar Province, where just 3,775 people voted in 2005, candidates have turned out for town hall meetings.
“Even the simplest Iraqi citizen has a say in politics, much more than in any other country around us,” said Mr. Jabbar, thumbing marble-size worry beads. “There’s no power in Iraq, no force, that can dominate the people anymore.”
Yet these days, a current of disenchantment flows as long as Iraq’s two rivers at how little the state has achieved in the issue that matters most: livelihood.
At Seven Palaces Intersection in the neighborhood of Karada, a three-story building destroyed by a car bomb in 2007 remains a pile of rubble. Across its shattered facade are a potpourri of campaign posters, including one that reads, “Let’s move ahead.”
Down the street, another candidate promises to surrender his salary in office, give up his security detail, forgo diplomatic immunity and turn in his diplomatic passport. “It’s a good idea,” laughed Taleb Abu Sarraj, drinking tea with a friend on a brisk winter morning. “They’re spending $100 million on the campaign and for what? They’re spending that much so they can make hundreds of millions more once they’re in office.”
That disenchantment has given voice to a cliché that is nevertheless espoused: the desire for a strongman who can break through the government’s paralysis. It is often pronounced in equal measure with a deep-seated suspicion of what their leaders tell them, sometimes rendered as conspiracy, which once led the assassins of Iraq’s first president, Abdel-Karim Qassem, to display his bullet-riddled corpse on television in 1963 to prove he was dead.
To some of his opponents, Mr. Maliki lacks the strength of an opponent like Ayad Allawi, the secular standard-bearer in the election. To his supporters, he is shackled by the institutions around him, stymied at every turn by opponents bent on deadlock.
“Can one hand clap by itself?” asked Assaad Hassan, a street vendor. “Maliki is one hand and that means he can’t do anything, anywhere.”
To call Iraq a failed state is an exaggeration, though not unthinkable. The effectiveness of ministries often reaches little beyond the capital. Parliament has proved unable or unwilling to pass legislation on fundamental issues before the country, from overseeing Iraq’s oil reserves, the world’s third largest, to delineating the power of the caretaker government that will follow Sunday’s vote. Disputes between Arabs and Kurds over land — Kirkuk among them — are acknowledged as incendiary enough to incite a war. Before the election, candidates were barred with evidence that remained secret in a process that critics said interpreted the law as a means to a political end.
Some lament that the system itself remains stymied by a political culture that predates the invasion, a zero-sum notion of politics where only winners and losers emerge. The notion is coupled with a tendency toward intolerance.
By necessity, coalitions across Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic landscape are forged for the sake of stability, but by necessity, with everyone a kingmaker, those coalitions frustrate effective rule. When deadlock ensues, only the United States has proved capable of delivering a compromise.
Sunday’s vote, by most accounts, will change that equation, as the Americans withdraw and their influence here inevitably diminishes. “Poorly timed,” Mr. Hilterman called their departure. Qassem Daoud, a Shiite lawmaker, said he thought they should stay 25 more years. His fear, echoed by others, was that no one was sure whether everyone felt they had to follow the rules laid down the past seven years.
“The Americans just want to have the elections,” said another lawmaker, Mahmoud Othman. “They want to tell their people it went well, so they can have their withdrawal. They don’t really think that much about the institutions, and I don’t think they understand very well what will be the consequences, whether institutions will be stronger or weaker.”
He added, “As usual, they don’t study the Iraqi situation very well.”
NYT
I don't know what this "unity" thing is, or where it actually might exist, or why anyone would even want it.
One can only hope and pray that Iraq, or for that matter the US, would be spared from ever having to experience said "unity".
“It’s true we have freedom,” Mr. Sharaa said, “but what do we have beyond it?”
“Where’s the law, where’s the state, where’s the sense of citizenship?”
Mr. Sharaa’s question resonates as Iraq heads toward elections on Sunday, perhaps its most decisive moment since Mr. Hussein’s statue was toppled in Firdos Square in 2003. Under American charge, an indisputable political culture has risen along the banks of the Tigris River, unparalleled in the rest of the Arab world.
But elections often exacerbate rather than bridge divisions. And as the United States military withdraws this year, Iraqis have begun to ask whether their state — divided, feeble and corrupt — can navigate the vote’s results in a country still plagued by the miseries of war, the legacy of Mr. Hussein’s rule and a calculus that celebrates the victor’s claiming the spoils of the vanquished.
In that, the elections may be a cautionary lesson, as politicians struggle to cobble together a coalition to rule. Iraq’s politics are more vibrant than the institutions meant to gird them, threatening the support of the people they have enfranchised and a nascent, if flawed democratic experiment that has yet to take root.
“We have failed to build a state of institutions, of law and order,” said Wael Abdel-Latif, a lawmaker and opposition candidate. “Our institutions are based on ideological, sectarian and ethnic foundations. They are dangerous, they are shaky and they could collapse at any moment, especially if it takes a long time to form a new government.”
Since that day in Firdos Square, Iraq has often served as a contest of competing narratives. Elections, with their visuals of ink-stained fingers, have emerged as a centerpiece. But their legacy has proved more equivocal. One vote helped unleash a civil war; another approved a Constitution deemed flawed by nearly everyone. In the prelude to this vote, politicians have recklessly deployed the state — the law, courts and military — to settle scores and further their sometimes demagogic ambitions.
Rarely will anyone defend what has been built. Even Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki calls the system unworkable, though he blames his opponents for making it so.
For many, the problem rests in the very notion of how to organize those fledgling institutions in a country ruled by a succession of kings, strongmen, dictatorial parties and, finally, the Americans. To hold the state together, the government operates by consensus in a country that lacks one, forcing politicians to postpone decisions into an uncertain future on the most pressing issues — from a national census to disputed territories.
“Iraq has proven under U.S. tutelage that it can organize elections and develop this political culture, and that is encouraging,” said Joost Hilterman of the International Crisis Group. “But I’ve still seen no evidence that any government can govern.”
Abdullah Jabbar thought about that judgment as he sat at his clothing store in Kahramana Square, festooned with posters for some of the nearly 6,200 candidates vying for Parliament’s 325 seats. Like many these days, he expressed a mix of optimistic pride and savvy cynicism at a campaign that has flourished in the past month. No one can avoid it, he said, neither the text messages on cellphones nor the candidates’ debates on television.
“It’s like a soccer match and this is the roar of the crowd,” he said.
Iraq’s sectarianism still shapes the election. A Sunni vice president appeals to “our people,” and Shiite candidates speak of guarding “our rights.” Three judges in Mr. Hussein’s trial are candidates, one boasting he “carried out the judgment of God and the people.” But the most chauvinistic language is often tempered by ambiguity, a far cry from the last election in 2005, and in Kahramana and elsewhere, politics have matured.
“We are coming!” followers of Moktada al-Sadr, a cleric, shouted in 2004, when they fought the Americans twice. Candidates loyal to him deploy the same slogan now, with a twist. “We are coming ... to build,” their posters read. In Anbar Province, where just 3,775 people voted in 2005, candidates have turned out for town hall meetings.
“Even the simplest Iraqi citizen has a say in politics, much more than in any other country around us,” said Mr. Jabbar, thumbing marble-size worry beads. “There’s no power in Iraq, no force, that can dominate the people anymore.”
Yet these days, a current of disenchantment flows as long as Iraq’s two rivers at how little the state has achieved in the issue that matters most: livelihood.
At Seven Palaces Intersection in the neighborhood of Karada, a three-story building destroyed by a car bomb in 2007 remains a pile of rubble. Across its shattered facade are a potpourri of campaign posters, including one that reads, “Let’s move ahead.”
Down the street, another candidate promises to surrender his salary in office, give up his security detail, forgo diplomatic immunity and turn in his diplomatic passport. “It’s a good idea,” laughed Taleb Abu Sarraj, drinking tea with a friend on a brisk winter morning. “They’re spending $100 million on the campaign and for what? They’re spending that much so they can make hundreds of millions more once they’re in office.”
That disenchantment has given voice to a cliché that is nevertheless espoused: the desire for a strongman who can break through the government’s paralysis. It is often pronounced in equal measure with a deep-seated suspicion of what their leaders tell them, sometimes rendered as conspiracy, which once led the assassins of Iraq’s first president, Abdel-Karim Qassem, to display his bullet-riddled corpse on television in 1963 to prove he was dead.
To some of his opponents, Mr. Maliki lacks the strength of an opponent like Ayad Allawi, the secular standard-bearer in the election. To his supporters, he is shackled by the institutions around him, stymied at every turn by opponents bent on deadlock.
“Can one hand clap by itself?” asked Assaad Hassan, a street vendor. “Maliki is one hand and that means he can’t do anything, anywhere.”
To call Iraq a failed state is an exaggeration, though not unthinkable. The effectiveness of ministries often reaches little beyond the capital. Parliament has proved unable or unwilling to pass legislation on fundamental issues before the country, from overseeing Iraq’s oil reserves, the world’s third largest, to delineating the power of the caretaker government that will follow Sunday’s vote. Disputes between Arabs and Kurds over land — Kirkuk among them — are acknowledged as incendiary enough to incite a war. Before the election, candidates were barred with evidence that remained secret in a process that critics said interpreted the law as a means to a political end.
Some lament that the system itself remains stymied by a political culture that predates the invasion, a zero-sum notion of politics where only winners and losers emerge. The notion is coupled with a tendency toward intolerance.
By necessity, coalitions across Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic landscape are forged for the sake of stability, but by necessity, with everyone a kingmaker, those coalitions frustrate effective rule. When deadlock ensues, only the United States has proved capable of delivering a compromise.
Sunday’s vote, by most accounts, will change that equation, as the Americans withdraw and their influence here inevitably diminishes. “Poorly timed,” Mr. Hilterman called their departure. Qassem Daoud, a Shiite lawmaker, said he thought they should stay 25 more years. His fear, echoed by others, was that no one was sure whether everyone felt they had to follow the rules laid down the past seven years.
“The Americans just want to have the elections,” said another lawmaker, Mahmoud Othman. “They want to tell their people it went well, so they can have their withdrawal. They don’t really think that much about the institutions, and I don’t think they understand very well what will be the consequences, whether institutions will be stronger or weaker.”
He added, “As usual, they don’t study the Iraqi situation very well.”
NYT
I don't know what this "unity" thing is, or where it actually might exist, or why anyone would even want it.
One can only hope and pray that Iraq, or for that matter the US, would be spared from ever having to experience said "unity".
posted by madtom at 11:08 PM
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