On June 4, Carina Perelli, head of a UN advisory team outlining the electoral structure of Iraqi, announced the parameters of Iraq’s forthcoming elections to a National Assembly. The first elections will be the determinant of Iraq’s future since the National Assembly will draft Iraq’s permanent constitution.
Perelli announced that the Carlos Valenzuela would oversee the Iraqi election commission. Valenzuela comes to Iraq from a highly-paid stint overseeing non-existent elections in Palestine.
The formation of an Iraqi election commission caps a long march to elections against the initial resistance of Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) administrator, Ambassador L. Paul Bremer. Had Bremer had his way--and not been forced to alter path by an anxious White House--he would have remained as, in effect, dictator of Iraq for an additional year.
Following the November 15, 2003 policy reversal, when the U.S. agreed to hand over sovereignty to the Iraqis on June 30, 2004, the CPA continued to shy away from elections, favoring instead a series of regional caucuses. However, Bremer eventually buckled to pressure from Grand Ayatollah ‘Ali Sistani, Iraq’s leading Shi’a religious figure, who called anything short of direct elections, “illegitimate.” The Coalition’s hesitant embrace of direct elections was based in part on fear of the result: Islamist groups like the Da’wa Party--whose leader Ibrahim Jaafari regularly polls as Iraq’s most popular politician--and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) are well-funded and organized. Secular and liberal groups remain
fragmented. Advocates of an Iranian-style Islamic Republic are blunt. “The first article in a democracy is the rule of the majority over the minority,” Sayyid Hadi al-Modarresi, one of Karbala’s most influential clerics, said in a March 27 interview with the Arabic daily al-Hayah.
While I served as a roving political advisor for the CPA, I interacted not only with Iraqi politicians, but also with ordinary Iraqis. What I found was that not only extremists, but many Iraqi liberals--Sunnis, Shi’a, and Kurds--also favored direct elections. But the devil is in the details.
And the details are where Perelli’s recommendations go from helpful to dangerous. There are two ways to hold direct elections: Party-slate and single-member constituency. In a party-slate election, favored by Perelli and Iranian-backed Islamists, Iraqis go to the polls and select their favorite political party, which will then claim a proportional number of seats. Groups like Da’wa, SCIRI, Iraqi Hizbullah, and Modarresi’s Islamic Action Organization favor this model, which will ease the imposition of Islamic law and Iranian-style theocracy. By polling Iraqis on their favorite party or politician, American diplomats and media networks have unwittingly endorsed this model.
Liberal Iraqis favor the alternative of constituency-based elections. The Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), signed on March 8, calls for a 275-member National Assembly, which translates into an equal number of electoral districts, each representing 87,000 Iraqis. Contests would occur not between political parties, but rather between individuals, accountable not to their political party boss, but to their neighbors. Many of Iraq’s Governing Council members could easily win home districts: Raja al-Khuzai, an outspoken Shi’a advocate for women’s rights, is popular in her home town of Diwaniya. Residents of Khadimiya favor Iraqi National Congress head Ahmad Chalabi, whose nationalist credentials were bolstered by Bremer’s decision to send U.S. forces to vandalize Chalabi’s house. SCIRI leader Abdul Aziz Hakim is popular in Najaf. Less successful would be uncharismatic, corrupt, or abusive party hacks who hope to ride to power on the coattails of party bosses.
Older Iraqis and intellectuals also favor constituencies. Distrust of political parties is deeply rooted in Iraq. One recent poll indicated that political parties have only a three percent favorability rating in Iraq. Pensioners recount the late 1950s and 1960s as a time of pitched street battles between adherents of increasingly shrill leftist and nationalist parties. Younger generations view all parties through the lens of their Ba’ath Party experience. Distrust of parties is equally pronounced in Iraqi Kurdistan, where I spent a year teaching in academic year 2000-2001. With few exceptions, my former students and colleagues associate Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and Massoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party with corruption, abuse of power, and nepotism. Even Perelli acknowledged Iraqis’ ill-feelings toward political parties. “The anti-political party feeling of the population is extremely high,” she told the Washington Post.
On June 4, Perelli explained her rationale for abandoning the accountability of single member constituencies in order to pursue party-slate elections. “There are a lot of communities that have been broken and dispersed around Iraq. And these communities wanted to be able to accumulate their votes and to vote with like-minded people.” In a single sentence, Perelli eviscerated the Bush administration’s promise of democracy, replacing it instead with a Lebanese-style communal system. Rather than create a system where political candidates run on local bases, Perelli has encouraged the formation of ethnic and sectarian parties.
Ironically, while the party-slate system is more likely to encourage political strife, it may under-represent a number of communities who vote on the basis of political belief, rather than religion on ethnicity. Christians, for example, represent less than three percent of Iraq’s population. They remain concentrated in towns like Alqosh, Ainkawa, and Duhok. Many Christians do not support the Assyrian Democratic Movement. Without district-based elections, they may find themselves without representation. Likewise, minority religious communities like the Yezidi and the Mandaens may find themselves without political representation and protection in the important constitutional process.
When I taught in the Kurdish city of Sulaymaniyah, my University of Baghdad-trained translators repeatedly stumbled over words like tolerance and compromise; such concepts
did not exist in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Many of Iraq’s populist leaders equate democracy with elections, but fail to understand the importance of tolerance. As the liberating power, the United States should have played a crucial role in shaping the transition to a new Iraq. But rather than provide a template for democracy, the CPA has deferred responsibility to the United Nations, more concerned with the technical ease of a single election, than the creation of a vibrant democracy. A one-man, one-vote, one-time election based on communal identity may please tyranny-of-the-majority advocates like Sayyid Hadi al-Modarresi, but it will not bring democracy. Only accountability to constituencies brings democracy.
Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at AEI.
