Muslims and Liberals

The Daily Star – Lebanon
June 8, 2004

US President George W. Bush gets excited when he says Iraq’s newly installed interim government will finally create a “democratic” country. The new 33-member Cabinet is charged with arranging elections to a Parliament that will draw up a democratic constitution. The United Nations is expected to soon bless the plan through a resolution.

Would somebody please tell Bush and the United Nations that their democratic recipe could kill Iraq?

As an Iraqi friend of mine put it, it was a shame that the Iraqis had to put up with dictators for so long. Yet, expressing a widely held worry, he said he feared that a rush to democracy could also do damage to Iraq – indeed he compared it to what it had done to my country, Pakistan.

Decades ago I had joined a movement in Pakistan for the democratization of the constitution through an elected Parliament (and at one point was kidnapped at dagger-point by hirelings of a rival group). Pakistan, like Iraq, was created artificially, and each of its regions had its own political parties. In 1970, when we finally had our coveted elections, the main political party in East Pakistan, the Awami League, won all but one seat in that province and none in West Pakistan. The party had gone into the elections calling for “provincial autonomy” and in the heat of the campaign escalated that demand to “full autonomy,” without explaining what it meant. After the vote it claimed that its sweeping victory in East Pakistan was a popular “mandate” for the secession of the province. An Awami League insurgency triggered an army crackdown, which alienated most East Pakistanis from Pakistan, helped lead to a war and gave birth to an independent Bangladesh.

Like the old Pakistan, Iraq is a quilt of unintegrated ethnic communities. In 1896, the British Empire engineered the secession of Kuwait from Basra, then an Ottoman province, to use Kuwait’s excellent harbor for British shipping. After World War I the British first colonized the Arab-inhabited Basra and Baghdad provinces of the dismembered Ottoman Empire and then annexed the oil-rich Mosul Province, with its mostly Kurdish population.

As a result, three separate feuds have been stalking postcolonial Iraq. First, the Iraqis have twice tried unsuccessfully to reconquer Kuwait – the last time in 1990 under Saddam Hussein. Second, the Kurds have carried on an autonomy movement that many Arabs suspect is aimed at secession. Third, the Shiite majority has been struggling to end Sunni Arab domination of Iraq, established under British patronage and pursued by successive Sunni-led regimes.

The Iraqis may try again to “bring Kuwait back home,” but that is unlikely to happen anytime soon. A Parliament might also well work out a formula for intra-Arab (Shiite-Sunni) power sharing.

Far more intractable is the Kurdish issue. Britain once dragged unwilling Kurds into Iraq, but after the 1991 Gulf War, America and Britain pulled them away from Iraqi control and protected them for 12 years under a so-called “no-fly zone.” During two research trips in the 1990s, I found Kurds savoring their de facto independence. A majority of those I interviewed said they might reunify with Iraq if guaranteed “autonomy,” which meant different things to different people. A minority wanted an independent “Kurdistan.”

The leaders of the two Iraqi Kurdish political parties, the Kurdish Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, say they want an autonomous Kurdish territory within Iraq. The problem is that the followers of both parties (like those of the Awami League in former East Pakistan) are confined to their ethnic enclave and Kurdish autonomy will be a key issue in the elections expected in January 2005. So even though most Iraqi Kurds today aren’t keen about secession, the more militant Kurdish candidates, once on the campaign trail, may expand the definition of Kurdish autonomy, making it look like a bid for secession. Emotions could flair up on both the Kurdish and Arab sides. This may lead to deadlock on a new constitution, triggering civil war.

Democracy enthusiasts in Washington don’t seem to realize that elections aren’t the panacea for all the problems of all peoples (anymore than some Islamic fundamentalists realize that Islam can’t solve all problems for all Muslims). America’s founding fathers knew better and allowed 55 unelected men to draw up the American Constitution.

A good format to seek a resolution of the Iraqi Kurdish issue could be a conclave of key Kurdish and Arab leaders, and a good time to hold one is now. The United Nations could host such a forum to see if an understanding can be reached. The new Iraqi Parliament could incorporate such an understanding into the country’s constitution next year.

Mustafa Malik, a columnist with the Nexus Syndicate in Washington, has researched US policy options in the Middle East in the 1990s with fellowships from the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the University of Chicago’s Middle East Center. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR