DAMASCUS - In 1990, the late Indian
premier Rajiv Gandhi went to Iran to discuss
problems in the Middle East with Iranian president
Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Gandhi asked the
president who would, should or could replace
Saddam Hussein as president of Iraq.
After
thinking for a moment, Rafsanjani replied, "Saddam
Hussein". Only someone as strong (and ruthless) as
Saddam could rule a country as divided, diverse
and complicated as Iraq. Until very recently, such
an idea was unacceptable to the millions of people
who had celebrated the downfall of the Iraqi
dictator in March 2003. Iraq was free of
dictatorship, these people argued, and would now
embark on a new path of democracy and prosperity.
That's what the Americans promised. Today,
however, many have begun to say that the only type
of government suitable for a country like Iraq
sadly, is dictatorship. Perhaps not a perfect
dictatorship as Saddam had
been, but a dictatorship
nonetheless.
Former prime minister Iyad
Allawi, a strong man by all accounts, was
considered by many as the man who would create
this semi-dictatorship when he came to office in
2004. People called him "Saddam Light". He has
been voted out of office since then, however, and
the new rulers of Iraq are trying hard to impose a
perfect democracy on Iraqi society, acceptable
maybe, for a country like Switzerland.
Iraqis, however, have other things on
their minds and other priorities on their agendas.
Civilized life has collapsed in Iraq. Electricity
gets cut for most of the day. Water is short.
Security is totally absent, and kidnapping and
terror attacks are on the rise. To date, 26,773
people have died since the US invasion in March
2003, excluding the approximately 1,000 Shi'ite
pilgrims who died in a stampede on Wednesday.
To top all of their problems, the Iraqis
are now faced with a constitution draft that might
truncate their nation, dividing it into zones for
Shi'ites and Kurds. On August 28, the Iraqi
parliament accepted the draft constitution, which
called for, as everybody anticipated, a federal
republic. The Sunnis, who reject federalism, have
already begun preparing themselves for voting
against it in the referendum scheduled for October
15.
The Kurds have enjoyed autonomy in the
north, under US protection, since the Gulf War of
1991. They have long struggled for what they claim
is independence from the countries where they are
currently strong (Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria).
When independence became clearly something that no
regional power would allow, the Kurds began to
demand autonomy. They got it after the Gulf War
and have maintained it ever since.
The
Kurds feel that they are a different nationality
than the Arabs. A decreasing number of them in
Iraq speak Arabic. They got to keep that in the
draft constitution, and the Shi'ites, jealous of
Kurdish autonomy, got their own zones in the
south. Their autonomy does not include Baghdad,
however, which alone has about 6 million Shi'ites.
Effectively, this divides the oil wealth
among Kurds and Shi'ites, leaving the Sunnis, who
had enjoyed power for centuries until 2003,
practically with nothing. The Sunnis are demanding
that Iraq's Arab identity be maintained and that a
ban on the Ba'ath Party (and punishment of its
members) be abrogated. This is because under
Saddam, most members of the ruling party were from
the Sunni community. Most did not join out of
conviction, but just to get employed in the civil
or military service, where they got better wages.
This demand has been rejected by the Kurds
and Shi'ites, who suffered most under Saddam and
insist on punishing all those who worked with,
benefited from or endorsed his regime during the
years 1979-2003. Another Sunni objection is to
making Kurdish an official language in Iraq, in
addition to Arabic. They want Kurdish to remain
confined to Iraqi Kurdistan. This, too, has been
turned down by the Kurds. The 15 members of the
Sunni community who had been dragged into the
constitutional assembly after boycotting the
January 2005 elections absented themselves and
rejected the draft.
The Sunnis see
themselves as Iraqis more so than Sunnis, claiming
that the Kurds are sub-national, seeing themselves
as Kurds, and the Shi'ites view themselves as
Shi'ites, rather than Iraqis. The Sunnis are the
only ones with a truly national consciousness at
this stage. The Sunnis clearly refuse federalism,
demanding a united Iraq. Had they been unwise, or
ambitious, like the Kurds and Shi'ites, they could
have demanded autonomy in central Iraq.
The Sunnis have found many people eager to
share in their grievances over federalism in Iraq.
In addition to Iraq's frightened neighbors (Syria,
Iran and Turkey) federalism has angered a lot of
mainstream Iraqi nationalists who are still
committed to the nationalism of the 1950s and
1960s.
One of those to come out in favor
of the Sunni veto of the constitution is the famed
Shi'ite resistance leader Muqtada al-Sadr. A young
revolutionary who has gone to war twice against
the Americans since 2003, Muqtada called on his
followers, who are very powerful, to say no to
federalism in Iraq, even if it meant giving
autonomy to the Shi'ites in the south.
Both he and the Sunnis agree that the
constitution was penned to suite US interests in
Iraq in particular, and the Middle East in
general. Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador to
Iraq, did not make things better by boasting that
this constitution was the finest in the entire
Muslim World.
Fatah al-Sheikh, a
pro-Muqtada member of parliament, said, "Our basic
line [of agreement with the Sunnis] will be the
unity of Iraq." Both Muqtada and the Sunnis have
already collided with the Supreme Council for
Islamic Revolution in Iraq, headed by the popular
cleric Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim. The council leaders
are the authors of the new constitution.
Muqtada has always been in favor of
maintaining Iraqi unity, combining Iraqi
nationalism with religion and Shi'ite nationalism.
His posters all over Iraq show Shi'ite religious
notables with the Iraqi flag. Being
anti-federalist, to many, is a strong dimension of
Iraqi nationalism.
Hakim, however, along
with his Badr Brigades, think in a different
manner. His party and militia were based in Iran,
after being persecuted by Saddam in the 1980s, and
during Saddam's war with Iran in 1980-1988, it
sided with the mullahs of Tehran against the Sunni
leaders of Baghdad.
The fact that 80% of
the Iraqi army was composed of Shi'ites did not
change Hakim's conviction that he must fight the
Iraqi army - seeing it only as Saddam's army. On
August 26, about 100,000 supporters of Muqtada
demonstrated in Kufa, Najaf, Baghdad, Nasriyyah,
Amara and Basra against the new constitution.
Meanwhile, in Sunni cities all over Iraq,
demonstrators were also in the streets, in
thousands, carrying posters of the ex-Iraqi
president and calling for the downfall of the
"American-authored constitution".
Violence
in Iraq, just like anywhere else, means that
something is going seriously wrong. People who are
happy and satisfied do not riot or become violent.
Some people, or groups, are so angry that they are
willing to break the law, get arrested - and in
some cases get killed, to express themselves and
object to certain issues, such as the new
constitution.
These people are motivated
to come out on the streets either through
conviction, or desperation. The government, in
times like these, usually accuses "radicals and
troublemakers" for the violence, and responds by
force.
That is what Saddam would have
done. That is what the US and Prime Minister
Ibrahim Jaafari are clumsily doing today. But the
truth is: people are angry and coming out in the
streets, in thousands, risking their lives and
jeopardizing their security, to defend an idea and
protest an idea.
This is a high warning to
the government that something is wrong and must be
changed immediately to bring calm, and avoid the
outbreak of an all-out civil war, which many see
in the long-term horizon if federalism is
implemented in Iraq.
Five-fold
violence The political scientist Fred R von
der Mehden, a former professor at the University
of Wisconsin, says that there are five kinds of
violence that apply to different countries, during
different times. If allowed to get out of hand,
all of them lead to revolution. In Iraq, every
single one of the five forms of violence applies
today.
The first violence, called
primordial, is that which erupts due to conflict
among different people living in the same
community. This conflict is born from differences
in ethnicity and religion. These people carry the
same national identity, but are competing over
power and privileges in their country. This is
what the Kurds, Shi'ites, and Sunnis have been
doing, thanks to the Americans, since 2003.
The second violence is separatist
violence. Most of the time, this results from
primordial violence. This violence has one
objective: a separation movement that demands
independence for specific territory. This is what
the Kurds will be doing if their status is not
maintained in Iraqi Kurdistan.
The third
violence is revolutionary violence. This violence
aims at overthrowing, or toppling, an existing
regime and replacing it with a new one. This is
something that the Sunnis would love to achieve at
this stage.
The fourth kind of violence is
coup violence, which results after a military
takeover. This, too, is very likely to happen in
Iraq, given the high number of disgruntled
officers in the Iraqi army. The new army is
created mainly from Shi'ites, who are combating
the Sunni insurgency, further dividing the
fractured communities.
The fifth violence
is "violence over issues". Historically, this
violence can be over unemployment, war, security,
corruption or simply objection to clauses in a
constitutional draft.
On the other hand,
history shows that societies that are traditional
in everything they do will not face a revolution.
In these traditional societies, people live as
their ancestors lived and do not expect much from
politics or the society around them. They have no
hopes for a better future, do not dream of
participating in political life, do not aspire for
great wealth and do not think of objecting to
anything related to government. In more than way,
this was the case under Saddam.
Also,
societies that are very modern, very advanced and
very rational in their activity, and prosperous in
their economy, will not face revolution. Why
revolt when everything is so good? The society
that will face revolution is the society that is
moving from a traditional society to a modern one.
This is where Iraq stands today. Modernizing
societies are the ones that face revolution, when
they are in transition. They leave one world,
where there is traditional stability, but have not
yet arrived in the new world where there is modern
stability. While these societies are changing,
everything changes with them: the economy, morals,
religious actions, lifestyle, dreams and the
political system. This leaves the people worried,
confused and ripe for violent action.
When
people are always poor, and permanently miserable,
they have no hope for a better future and they get
used to their bad life and conditions. This was
Iraq under Saddam. Usually, they were too busy
with work and with finding food for their children
to think about politics or revolution. When things
improved, somewhat after 2003, the Iraqis started
imagining a better world - their aspirations
awakened.
Partly this was because of a
slight improvement in standards, which crashed a
short while later, but mainly because everyone
around them, from their Arab neighbors, to George
W Bush and Iyad Allawi, were telling them that a
brighter future was coming their way. That did not
happen. But the magic spell had already been cast.
They are no longer satisfied with what
they have, and have started to demand fast
improvement - faster even than what advanced
countries can offer. The very poor seldom revolt.
The very rich do not revolt. The ones in between
are the ones who revolt. They have tasted the
sweetness of better life, but have been unable to
keep it or experience it to the maximum. This will
make them angry and lead them to violence and
revolution. Sadly, this is where Iraq stands
today.
Sami Moubayed is a Syrian
political analyst.
(Copyright 2005
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