SPEAKING
FREELY Basra and the threat of
disintegration By Reidar
Visser
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When the modern
state of Iraq had just been established in the
1920s, a group of notables in Basra made a bid to
establish the Gulf city as a separate merchant
republic. They envisaged a pro-British enclave
that could become an emporium for the entire Gulf
region. Their second-best option
was federation with Baghdad. In the end, all
failed and Iraqi nationalism triumphed, sealing
the fate of the Gulf city for the rest of the
century. After 2003, localist movements have once
more emerged in Basra. Much of the political
thinking bears a striking resemblance to that of
the Basra notables in the 1920s, but the goals are
different. Today, the threat to Iraq's territorial
integrity comes from elsewhere.
The maxim
of the early Basra separatists was that their area
should not suffer by becoming embroiled in
unpredictable Baghdad politics. To them commerce
was more important than politics, and they feared
that distant demagogues would exploit their wealth
for grandiose nationalist projects. Substitute
"oil" for trade, add the suffering of the south
during the wars with Iran and Kuwait, and a clear
picture emerges of bleak prophecies that have come
true.
What would those separatists have
made of the new Iraqi constitution? No doubt, they
would have preferred it to the British-sponsored
unitary state model of the 1920s. Its provisions
for regional control of oil and security would
have pleased them. Its protection of regional
rights from constitutional amendment would have
allayed their fears of a dominant Baghdad.
But freedom from Baghdad was not the
separatists' sole concern. They also cherished
stability. And so they would have wondered: Isn't
the decentralization almost overdone? With so many
regional checks on the federal government, there
is the unavoidable impression of the center of
politics in Iraq having been all but evacuated.
Then more caveats would have emerged. Just
how are new federal entities to be established? By
combining provinces into regions - but without any
ceilings on the number of provinces, and without
unequivocal mechanisms for holding referenda. And
those Basra notables (a multi-sect coalition not
particularly concerned with religious issues)
would have started asking tough questions. Who is
to be amalgamated with whom? Will Basra join with
its immediate neighbors or get swallowed up into a
larger Shi'ite principality? Calling a referendum
requires only the support of a tenth of the
electorate in the "affected" provinces, so the
prospect of competing federal schemes is very
real. Najaf may want to unite with Basra, but
Basra may have other preferences.
This is
where the old Basra separatists meet with today's
situation. For the past two years, local movements
in Basra have tailored a scheme for a federal
"region of the south". This is a non-sectarian
project, involving only the three southernmost
Iraqi provinces and professing overall commitment
to the idea of a unified Iraq. Many envision it as
a resurrection of Basra's Gulf identity, with the
United Arab Emirates as a kind of model. This
regionalism does not operate in tandem with the
rest of Shi'ite-dominated Iraq. In Basra, even
some of the Shi'ite Islamists complain over being
sidelined in the national Shi'ite parties, and
many are skeptical to a single Shi'ite canton as
marketed by politicians from areas further north.
Outside sponsorship, whether Western or Iranian,
is not a priority either.
The new
constitution is a challenge to the Basra
regionalists. Two specific problems stand out: the
lack of size limits for new federal entities and,
ironically, the heavy bias toward securing
regional rights - so intense that the overall
stability of the new political system is
threatened. Non-sectarian regionalist projects may
face hard challenges from large-scale sectarian
competitors, and the multicultural hub of Baghdad
may become divested of real power. The
constitution may lead to unbridgeable fissures in
the Iraqi polity along sectarian fault lines,
instead of controlled small-scale devolution.
After much soul-searching, the Basra
separatists of the 1920s might well have voted
"yes" to the new Iraqi constitution. Their goal,
after all, was an orderly, if not overly intimate,
relationship with Baghdad, and they would have
preferred dialogue to armed hostilities. But they
would have stayed alert in the case of a "yes"
victory. To prevent their patria from once more
becoming reduced to the playground of outside
forces they would have jealously guarded the
post-referendum proceedings for creating new
regions. In negotiations over the blank spaces in
the constitution they would have appealed to other
Iraqis with similar views of stability as being
more important than ideology. In that spirit, they
would have worked to create a new Iraq based on a
middle course: between the excessive centralism of
the old regime and the boundless sectarian
fragmentation latent in today's proposed
constitution.
Reidar Visser
is a research fellow at the Norwegian
Institute of International Affairs in Oslo. His
book, Basra, the Failed Gulf State: Separatism
and Nationalism in Southern Iraq, has recently
been published. For further information, please see his website at http://historiae.org.
(Copyright 2005 Reidar
Visser)
Speaking Freely is an Asia
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